Show Gerbils
Published: Wed, 04/27/22
I have discovered, having a kid that age on hand, that there are at least four stations on my car radio that play current pop music. As such, I am more aware of what people are actually listening to right now than I have ever been at any other point in my life. So much so that I have come to realize that what I do and what these modern artists do are two virtually unrelated art forms. It's all very well and good to mutter darkly about what kids today can or cannot do with a guitar or a drum kit; the fact is, I could no more do what people on the radio are currently doing than I could leap over the Eiffel tower with a sixteen-track two-inch Studer tape deck strapped to my back and a pain au chocolat in each hand.
All of which is really neither here nor there, but from time to time I do find myself pondering just what it is we're all doing obsessing over an art form like fingerstyle blues when the last time anyone viewed this music as a viable commercial proposition was roughly a century ago, unless you count the folk revival, in which case, ok, half a century. But that's not really the point; there are all kinds of nooks and crannies in the culture that someone's obsessing over this very moment, many of them with a similarly narrow cultural currency, like – to pull two rabbits out of a somewhat similar lid – opera and poetry. (That's probably overstating it a bit – you can study poetry at any university in the country, and find a major concert venue devoted to classical music in nearly every major American city, two things you certainly can't say about folk music or fingerstyle guitar.)
Of course, ubiquity is not the only measure of what's worth pursuing, and while I like to think I've shed my most adolescent reasons for liking what I like – e.g., a very particular if not very numerous type of girl might find might the very obscurity of my interests glancingly intriguing – I certainly don't find the relative invisibility of what I do any reason not to pursue it. Besides, get up close enough to anything and you find the room packed with people who love it as much as you do, which pretty much goes for anything from (I assume) raising show gerbils to having an opinion about Adirondack spruce.
One of the best things about writing this newsletter, making Youtube videos or running my membership is that each is an opportunity to find myself in a room full of people who love fingerstyle guitar as much as I do. For as long as I can remember, I've been intrigued by the relationship between fingerstyle blues and improvisation, and it turns out there are a lot of other people who are equally intrigued. Improvising can sound daunting, but it doesn't have to be. In today's lesson, part three in my series on How To Get Good At Fingerstyle Blues, I show you how get started with improvisation – how to use just three scales and three kinds of phrases to start adding your own licks to three specific spots in the tune "You Got To Move."
You can find the lesson here:
How To Get Good, Part III: Start To Improvise
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More soon,
David