The Todd Snyder Rules
Published: Fri, 08/18/23
I've been hearing about this workshop for ages, and knew it would be a chance to reconnect with two of my oldest pals from the late National Guitar Workshop, John Knowles and Pat Bergeson, neither of whom I've seen since before the pandemic. I had also hung out at the Truefire studios one afternoon several years ago with Brooks Robertson, but the other two instructors, Richard Smith and Jim Nichols, were unknown to me, except by reputation.
Of course, about the first thing we had to do was sit down on stage and do a combination soundcheck/rehearsal for the first evening's concert. No pressure, right? All these guys can play the snot out of the guitar, but apparently Jim had engineered it to wind up next to me onstage, hoping we would get to play some blues together. Once he said that, I calmed down, and ironically, within minutes we were figuring out a couple of standards to play together. To my immense relief, the keys I picked were cool with Jim, though as I came to realize over the course of the week, very few things are not cool with Jim – his level of interest in vibing anyone out seems to be directly inverse to his remarkable musical capacities as a bebop improvisor and purveyor of the Chet Atkins repertoire.
Richard Smith also turned out to be a creatively generous and entertaining cat, but he plays so much guitar I spent most of my time around him thinking "eh, I think I know this tune, but...I'll just let Richard play it, thanks very much." Not because he has any attitude whatsoever – he spent all kinds of time jamming with students and instructors alike, including myself, and in a most inclusive way. But whether he was playing an immaculate rendition of "Snowy Morning Blues" or burning through the changes with Pat and Jim, it felt most sensible to enjoy the whirlwind from a healthy distance.
Brooks and John, while generally more self-contained and less improvisatory than Pat, Richard or Jim, both bring an immense depth and thoughtfulness to the matter of composing for the guitar, and one of the highlights of my week was the hour and half we spent giving a joint workshop on arranging. As befitting the subject, Brooks did a stylish and generous job of keeping the conversation flowing, leading the charge from behind while carefully tagging in John and myself on a regular basis. Later, I collared Brooks and asked him to play me his Jerry Reed-inspired instrumental "I Hate The Boy" again, just because I'd enjoyed his concert performance of it so much.
So by the end of the week, I had spent time discussing touring and fashion with Richard, trading old war stories with Pat about Brooklyn and the National Guitar Workshop, and swapping musician jokes with Jim – in between Jim's jaw-dropping asides about doing sessions with everyone from Art Pepper to Quincy Jones. But as delightful as that was, I also finally got to meet several members of my (ahem) constituency in real life: of the thirty or so students at the camp this year, five of them were also online participants in my Fingerstyle Five membership.
One of them, a Fingerstyle Five member since October 2019, had come all the way from Germany, and turned in a stellar student-concert performance of Reed's classic "Jiffy Jam." Another got up and played a fingerstyle blues instrumental onstage after taking up the guitar just nine months ago. The other three all wound up in my student ensemble, and when they named our band "The St. James Gang," I don't if I've had a prouder pedagogical moment. But besides meeting these online students in real life myself, the most fun thing was watching them get thick as thieves with each other over the course of the camp. The Todd Snyder rules, it turns out, apply equally to working musicians and passionate hobbyists alike, and if I'm not mistaken, these five guitar players left Colorado with as many new friends as I did.
I talked a lot – big surprise – about arranging, improvisation and chord substitutions in Colorado. In today's Youtube lesson, I explain some ways to take your chord voicings up the neck, specifically for the IV chord on an A blues. You can check it out at the link below:
Chord Voicings Up The Neck!
More soon,
David
P.S. This month in the Fingerstyle Five, we're learning a contemporary twelve-bar blues in E built out of Freddie Green chord voicings and swing-scale blues licks. To learn more about the membership and sign up, go to www.fretboardconfidential.com.