"All I Do Is Keep The Beat"

Published: Fri, 03/15/24

My first year of college, when I wasn't struggling with modal counterpoint or poaching on my upstairs neighbor's enlightening stash of T-Bone Walker, Junior Wells and Magic Slim LPs, I was listening to Dire Straits. It wasn't until much later that I tumbled to how much Mark Knopfler owed his whole guitar/vocal highwire act to those earlier blues singer/guitarists I was simultaneously ingesting, but at this point it seems both obvious and super-cool, whether Knopfler himself was thinking about it that way himself or not.

A big part of Dire Straits' appeal was the lyrics, though I only realized later that during the breakdown in "Romeo And Juliet" Knopfler was not, in fact, singing "all I do is keep the beat, the band accompanying me," but the slightly more plausible "all I do is keep the beat, and bad company." My friends and I dug the idea of a singer being so confident in the kick-assery of his own band that he would break the fourth wall to talk about it in the middle of an aching ballad, but the "bad company" line is actually more in accord with Knopfler's whole bohemian London-by-night stance ("No money in our jackets and our jeans are torn / Your hands are cold but your lips are warm").

Good accompaniment is, of course, nothing to sneeze at. I spend a lot of my time explaining how to play instrumental fingerstyle blues – teaching solo arrangements of everything from "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and "Catfish Blues" to "Matchbox Blues" and "You Got To Move." But it turns out plenty of people interested in that sort of thing also want to know how to accompany themselves singing some of those same songs.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me to teach accompaniment from the outset – left to my own devices, I will pretty much play songs with words when I perform, which means I have thought a lot about accompaniment over the years, even if I didn't always realize I was doing so at the time. So now when I teach how to arrange a traditional tune, I always include some ideas about what to play while you're singing the words.

There are really two simple ways to get started with accompaniment. One is to come up with a basic groove and stick to it throughout the verses, the other is to work out some basic fills to play in between the lyrics. In today's Youtube lesson, I go over both of those approaches – which you can ultimately mix and match to come up with a third approach, one that combines a solid groove with improvised licks that complement the words. You can find the lesson here:

Accompaniment Secrets

This month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, we're working on arranging "How Long Blues," a steady-bass eight-bar blues in the key of A. You can join now and get access to all of the material, including detailed tab for every exercise and example and all the membership-only live streams and videos, by going to https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/.

More soon,

David
 
david@davidhamburger.com

P.O. Box 302151
Austin TX 78703
USA


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