Here, Do This
Published: Fri, 12/02/22
And honestly, it wasn't so bad, except for the part where my first draft came back covered in red ink, and I figured, "what the hell, maybe instead of editing it I should just write it again from scratch." This was right around the time I came down with the chicken pox, and I couldn't go anywhere for six weeks anyway. So I sat at my kitchen table, wrote a new first draft, and turned it in. "Great," my editor said a few weeks later, "looks like we're good to go." "Wait, what?" I said. "That's just a first draft; there's still a lot I gotta fix!" "No," he said," it's your second draft, and we need to get this out. Maybe you can fix a couple of small things..." "A couple of small things!?" I yelped. And this was before I learned I would be laying out the entire 96 page manuscript by hand, but that's a whole other story.
Somehow or another, the book came out, and while it didn't exactly go on my resume, I finished teaching one afternoon, went to check my messages, and heard the voice of one Andy Ellis, then the lessons editor at Guitar Player magazine, saying my book had come across his desk and asking if I might possibly be interested in writing a lesson for the new "Sessions" department at the back of the magazine. A ridiculous question; I'd been reading the columns in Guitar Player since I was twelve, and wasted no time getting back to A. Ellis in the affirmative.
Which is how I came to receive one of the clearest pieces of editorial direction ever: "Listen," Andy said, "you get about two hundred words and maybe a dozen measures of music for this lesson. I want someone to look at your column and think, 'yeah, if I spent a half hour or an hour on this now, I could have something new and cool to play when I get together and jam with my friends tonight."
It's actually pretty fantastic advice, and something I've kept in mind for close to twenty-five years. Because I want so badly to make sure everything is completely clear, I tend to err on the side of over-explaining. Context is great, but too much information can be overwhelming, and sometimes you just need to say "here, do this; we'll talk later about how it fits into the big picture."
Obviously it's a balancing act, and one I've been thinking about a lot lately as my Youtube channel passes the five-year mark and the Fingerstyle Five membership heads into its fourth year. One of my main missions – maybe the mission – is to help fingerstyle guitar players learn to improvise. In the past, my desire to present as complete a picture as possible of how to do this has, I think, led to putting so much material in front of people that for all but the most determined, it's felt insurmountable – "well, maybe someday, but first, I'd like to be able to get through a few tunes without stumbling, thanks very much."
So lately I've been rethinking my approach. Sure, if you can already play tunes, you can learn to improvise on them. But what if you're just starting to learn tunes? It takes the same skills – the same technique, the same open-position moves, the same grooves – to play a basic pentatonic solo as it does to play a traditional blues melody. Instead of presenting licks full of slippery rhythms and tricky articulations, over super-sophisticated and challenging chord voicings, why not strip things down and teach improvisation in the most basic context – as simple phrases that sound good over just one or two chords? By simplifying the material, you can focus on the right ideas – building a basic vocabulary, developing a strong sense of groove, learning how assemble a solo out of just a few licks at a time.
Last month in the Fingerstyle Five we did just that, looking at the rhythmic rudiments behind a handful of essential open-position licks and learning how to group them into call-and-response statements, all over a one-chord steady-bass vamp in E. The payoff? This month, we're diving into the classic blues "Catfish Blues" – a one-chord song if ever there was one – which will provide ample opportunity to exercise our new soloing vocabularly, now in the context of an actual song.
This week's Youtube lesson is based on the same ideas I've been presenting in the membership. In today's video, the focus is on creating cool call-and-response statements by switching between simple eighth-note licks and some busier triplet-eighth-note moves, all while using nothing more complicated that an open-position E minor pentatonic scale over a steady bass played on the open E string. You can find the lesson here:
The Fix For Pentatonic Scales
More soon,
David
P.S. Registration or the Fingerstyle Five membership is always open. To start working on this month's tune, check out last month's beginner's guide to fingerstyle blues soloing, and get access to an archive of more than thirty traditional and contemporary blues tunes, plus live streams, workshops and other members-only content, go to https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/ to learn more and sign up.