Slow Burn
Published: Fri, 02/04/22
The thing is, I was terrible at all of it at first. Those poor guys who took my "Rock III" class that first summer? I spent three days putting all my examples on the board in standard notation, until one of them finally piped up and said "well, you know, none of us can read any of that." The first draft of my first book manuscript came back covered in so much red ink I just pitched it and started writing again from scratch. And Brad Wendkos of Truefire can tell you horror stories of how agonizing those first shoots were for me (and consequently for everyone else in the room).
So really I should say, what I know about teaching guitar I learned by doing it over and over again: twenty summers at the National Guitar Workshop, ten years writing books and articles, and at least that long making instructional videos. In the entrepreneurial scene they call that "iterating," which is why, for better or worse, we've all been through half a dozen smartphones or more since we started buying them. Writing that first instructional book was bonkers; the twelfth one was still work but it was familiar work; more a matter of going through a series of known steps than struggling to work out what those steps were in the first place. Those first Truefire videos took four days to shoot; the last ones were shot in about four hours.
So learning takes time, and the opportunity to go through the same paces more than once. You're not just learning "what," you're also learning "how," and so, with each "what" you learn, you add a bit to your understanding of "how," too. The first time you learn a song in a new style, you're not only learning the song, you're learning the style, too – what are the rules, the conventions? So you're learning the chords and the groove to that song, but that's also introducing you to how a how a whole genre of musicians thinks about chords and grooves. By the tenth song, you'll be thinking "oh, yeah, they're doing that thing again," but the first time? That's a lot to take in.
So learning is a slow burn. And fingerstyle guitar, with its added challenge of doing two things at once, can be a particularly slow burn. It takes iteration – going through the moves over and over, so that by the fifth or sixth song, you start to realize "oh, it's that thing again." The tunes are the "what," the technique is the "how." If you've been going through the past week's Youtube lessons on "Trouble In Mind," you may have reached a point where you thought "well, that's it for this brain; I'm taking my gray cells and going home." That's because we've been covering about four weeks' worth of material – or more – in about four days.
When I taught summer workshops, I tried to pack in as much material as possible, knowing people would be working on it for the next several months back home. Which meant by about three days in everyone's eyes were starting to glaze over – there'd been so much new information, there was no way anyone's hands (or brains) could assimilate more than a fraction of it. Not a good match for the slow burn that is learning fingerstyle guitar.
The Fingerstyle Five, on the other hand, was expressly designed with the slow burn in mind. One song a month. One song! And the time to take it through a series of steps to get it under your fingers. Then, the next month – a chance to iterate. Take a new song, put it through the same series of steps to get that song under your fingers. And so on, month after month. Each time you move from song to song, you get better at taking a song apart and putting it back together. As each month goes by, you build your coordination, your capacity to groove, your confidence and musicality.
Tonight, the live streams for "Trouble In Mind" will be removed from Youtube and archived inside the Fingerstyle Five membership. If you'd like to keep working on "Trouble In Mind" on your own, be sure and download the PDF with all the lesson materials. If you'd like to iterate – to build your technique, repertoire and musicality over the coming weeks and months – consider registering for the Fingerstyle Five. Whether you're interested in learning the tunes themselves, in turning them into complete arrangements, or you're somewhere in between, the membership offers the lessons, structure and community to make real, tangible progress. Sign up now to start your own slow burn.
Register Now For The Fingerstyle Five
More soon,
David