Making It Your Own
Published: Fri, 04/05/24
Which carried over to every other form of teaching I did. When I started making Youtube lessons, I would constantly hear myself say, "and so of course, once you can do that, you can..." It took me ages to realize the moment to wrap things up was right before I started saying "once you can do that..." And when I finally began the Fingerstyle Five membership, I thought it would be a good idea to do a song a month. Which it would have been, except I tried to teach not just the song itself, but how to arrange it and improvise on it too, all in the space of three to four weeks.
That, it turns out, was totally overwhelming to most people, who said they felt like they were just getting comfortable with the basic tune before it was time to start thinking about the next song. It took me a few years to get the message, but I finally started spreading out the material more, and nearly everyone seems a lot happier with the change. Now the material for a single song takes up three months: one month to learn the tune itself, one month to look at how to improvise on it, and one month on how to create a complete arrangement of the song.
With a full month to work on the song itself, there's time to look at things like: what rhythms should you practice playing over the bass notes? What makes the melody sound syncopated? What techniques show up a lot in this tune – hammer-ons, pull-offs, double stops? And how can you use them to take a more basic, fundamental version of the tune and create a more embellished variation on the melody?
The thing is, just taking the tab and memorizing a song arrangement doesn't get you much closer to actually making music of your own. Now that there's more breathing room in the membership, we can focus on understanding each song. The sooner you grasp the form of a song's chord progression, the phrasing of its melody, and how that melody syncs with the bass, the sooner you can internalize that song. And the sooner you can internalize it, the sooner you can play it without looking at a piece of paper. And the sooner you can do that, the sooner you can start to make it your own.
This week in the membership, we're embarking on a three month project to play Mississippi John Hurt's "Nobody's Dirty Business." We'll spend April learning to play the tune itself over an alternating bass. In May, we'll look at simple, specific strategies for starting to improvise over the chord progression, and in June we'll cover how to create the intros, endings and other details that let you turn a melody and a few licks into a complete song arrangement.
The Fingerstyle Five includes a deep archive of traditional and contemporary blues tunes, and you can join any time and get started with whichever songs grabs you first. But there's something nice about starting on a new tune at the same time as a bunch of other folks – you can compare notes, realize you're facing some of the same challenges, and ask questions without feeling like a dork.
To join us this month and get started with "Nobody's Dirty Business," sign up at the link below:
The Fingerstyle Five
Membership or no, let's talk about your picking hand for a minute. Some people feel the alternating thumb style is insufficiently bluesy, associating it exclusively with folk music. But in today's Youtube lesson, I go over three specific steps you can take to deepen your alternating thumb groove, and you can find that lesson here:
Three Steps To A Better Alternating Thumb Groove
More soon,
David