Conventional Wisdom
Published: Fri, 05/05/23
No matter – I'm off to a much cooler event this weekend. The Dauphin and I are attending a Magic The Gathering convention, and I for one am all about it. He's assembled a new deck for the occasion, and plans on getting in some tournament action in between watching Youtube celebrities hold forth from the main stage and getting some of his favorite artists to sign a few of his cards. No actual playing for me; while I've learned enough over the past four years to make me an enthusiastic and interested chaperone, I wouldn't waste anyone else's time getting creamed at this intricate fantasy card game; I simply don't play well enough yet to make it enough of a challenge for anyone fluent enough at "Magic" be at the convention as well.
Which is deeply well and good. Aside from the obvious pleasure of having something to go do with my kid, it's pretty great to have something I can go and spend a couple days being a sucky enthusiast about. If I actually played at the convention, part of my brain would start to whisper, "hey now, with a little more time and attention you could maybe get better at this..." And that's exactly what I don't need, for the same reason I never try to figure out who done it before the end of a mystery novel, any more than I try and solve a piece of chocolate cake while I'm eating it. Crossword puzzles, that's another story, but I could care less about solving a novel, and I'm not concerned about getting good at Magic, either. Maybe eventually, but not now.
On the other hand, if, after this egregious digression, you are still interested in getting good at playing fingerstyle blues, in this week's lesson I talk about how to add new and different chords, or chord substitutions, to the eight-bar blues "Trouble In Mind." This month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, we're using this chord progression as a way to work on right hand coordination and to develop a vocabulary of licks for soloing; next month we'll be getting into the song itself – how to take a simple version of the melody and turn it into a more elaborate, "embellished" version of the tune. If that's something you'd like to learn more about, you can find out more and sign up at https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/. In the meantime, this week's Youtube lesson is at the link below:
Add Chords To An Eight Bar Blues
More soon,
David