Quigley!!!
Published: Fri, 01/06/23
For some reason, in addition to finding the name Quigley pure comedy gold, we found the notion of quarterly numbers hilarious in the extreme. In our current incarnation, quarterly statistics were strictly the province of bloated corporate executives, not lowly day laborers like ourselves, and in our future status as platinum recording stars, the only numbers we would be calculating, on a quarterly basis or any other, were how many millions of units we'd moved at Tower Records, and possibly the cocaine bill.
So it is with great surprise and no little bemusement that I now find myself, decades later, thinking in quarterly terms after all, though not about LP sales on the Upper West Side. Initially, it began as a kind of brainstorm about self-improvement: if I thought about my various practices and projects in quarters, I could have four fresh starts to the year, rather than just the one on January first. That didn't turn out to be quite as ingenious (or successful) as I thought, but it still helped give some shape to the year. Also, it was a good excuse to buy more fancy notebooks than before.
More recently, however, the quarterly idea has led to some significant changes in the way I organize my teaching. Initially, I designed my Fingerstyle Five membership around the idea of a monthly song, thinking four weeks would be plenty of time in which to A) introduce the song itself, B) show how to improvise on it and C) present ways to assemble a complete arrangement of the song before moving on. Despite the fact that simply typing this out makes me realize how absurd a pace that often turned out to be, I persisted in this approach for the better part of the first three years of the membership. During that time, I would occasionally change gears for a month to focus on a specific topic – accompaniment, say, or chord substitutions – rather than introduce a new song. But I did so with a sense that I was somehow pulling a fast one, that the songs were really the thing, not noticing that just about everybody seemed grateful for the change-up and the extra time it allowed to catch up on previous material.
So sometime last summer, I started thinking about organizing the monthly lessons around a quarterly theme. At the time, there had been a lot of questions about the basics of improvisation – where to begin, and how to get started. And I realized I had spent a lot of time on improvisation inside the membership, and on my Youtube channel, without ever breaking things down into the most basic steps. With a broader time frame, I could spend a whole month just on the fundamentals, and create a pathway for anyone new to the whole idea of improvising. And if we stuck to improvising on just one chord, we could really focus on the right-hand coordination it takes to keep the thumb solid while playing different licks on top, then apply that to other tunes with a similar groove in the following months. So the theme for this quarter has been "steady bass blues in E:" in November, we focused entirely on improvisation; in December, we applied all those skills to the one-chord tune "Catfish Blues" and now in January, we're doing a contemporary blues built around the riff from organist Jimmy Smith's "Back At The Chicken Shack."
My own pedagogical machinations aside, the point is: we're poised on the brink of the New Year, and lots of us are thinking about all the awesomeness we hope to accomplish, musically and otherwise, over the next twelve months. If that's you, consider divvying up the year up into quarterly projects instead of making one grand annual resolution. What do you think you could get done over the next three months? What could your theme be for the quarter, and what could that lead to in the quarter after that? Thinking in terms of three months is a lot less intimidating and fraught than thinking in terms of a whole year, and besides, having your own personal theme is fun. Also, three months is enough time to get something done, but low enough stakes you can afford to shift gears if, come April, you realize you need to narrow your focus further, or explore something entirely different instead.
"Quigley! Get me Mance Lipscomb!"
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Whether you're improvising blues licks or working out the melody to a song, picking hand coordination is key: how do you get your fingers to do what they need to do, without the thumb going AWOL the minute you start focusing on the fingers? And vice versa, for that matter? That's what today's Youtube lesson is all about – and in drop D tuning, no less. You can find it at the link below:
The Three Exercises That Will Solve Your Right-Hand Coordination
More soon,
David
P.S. I'll be live streaming a one-hour workshop on Saturday, January 14th, all about the alternating-thumb tools, exercises and licks you need to get started with improvisation in drop D tuning. Soloing From Scratch, Volume II will include detailed, specific exercises and essential alternating-thumb blues licks in an interactive format, as well as downloadable notation and tab of all the material covered. It's free to current members of the Fingerstyle Five, or available for a one-time payment that includes two weeks of unlimited access to the replay and a free two-week trial of the entire membership, too.
You can learn more and sign up at the link below:
Soloing From Scratch, Volume II