It's playoff season here in the U.S., where after a lifetime of more or less baseball indifference, I have gotten sucked into the American league slugfest between the Houston Astros and the overreachingly-named Texas Rangers, who hail from the Dallas-Fort Worth area and by rights should be dubbed accordingly. Thanks to Ms. Fretboard's obsession with the 'Stros, as we insiders like to refer to them, I can now ankle into the room and make passable, if laughably uninformed, conversation about Kyle Tucker's batting stance or whether Framber Valdez ought to have been left in to pitch one more inning.

Baseball, it seems, suits my temperament for all the unsurprising reasons; it's the most retro of American major-league sports and as such is full of arcane details, fathomless rules and reflexive nostalgia. Plus, while I've read enough Peanuts cartoons to know what a shortstop is, knowing who's actually playing that position on a given night and why provides some of the same kind of satisfaction as knowing which Steely Dan solos are Skunk Baxter and which ones are Larry Carlton. It only took me two seasons of modest interest in the game to be as offended as any lifelong fan by this year's introduction of the new pitching clock, making me the moral punchline of that old festival joke: How many bluegrass fans does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Six – one to screw it in and five to complain that it's electric.

My Minor Blues & Bebop workshop is coming up tomorrow, Saturday, October 21st, which means it's also FAQ season here at Fretboard Confidential World Headquarters. Improvising can also feel full of arcane details and fathomless rules (and reflexive nostalgia) but it shouldn't, and tomorrow's workshop is designed to help clarify and simplify the idea of A) playing the changes on the blues and B) knowing how altered scales fit into that.

There is, however, one thing about the workshop that, as the Dauphin might say, clearly grills some peoples' cheese, so I want to take a moment and address it. I may not change anyone's mind on this, but I'd like to explain why, once the workshop is over, the replay is not downloadable, and access to it expires after a year.

These workshops are designed like a master class or in-store clinic: you sign up, you come downtown to the store or the school or, in this case, your own living room, and for a couple of hours, you learn some new things, you try them out yourself, you take some notes, and you have something new to go home and work on, for about the price of a good private lesson. Which, if you think about it, you also only get to take once – you don’t pay for a lesson and then expect to go back and take that lesson again and again for the one initial cost.

In other words, the workshop is meant to be an event, not an object – more like a concert or a live class than a book or a DVD. If you pay to go to a concert, you don’t expect to be able to walk back into the theater and watch it again for the foreseeable future. And if the promoter schedules a clinic with the artist the next morning and you sign up, you don’t expect her to be there giving that master class again the next weekend, and the weekend after that.

But unlike a clinic or a concert, when this event is over, the whole thing has been filmed in its entirety, with a clear view of the fingerboard, good lighting, and clear audio. So if you want to rewatch it, to pick up on anything that went by too fast, you can. For a whole year, you can review, revisit and rewatch any part of the workshop to fill in whatever you missed the morning of the class. You'll also have a clean, accurate PDF to refer to, almost thirty pages long, with all of the exercises and examples written out in notation and tab, along with any scales, chord progressions or theory concepts –  exactly what was taught in the class.

For anyone still interested in signing up before tomorrow, here's the link:

Bebop & Minor Blues

More soon,

David