Before I moved to Austin, I don't think I would have associated the Lone Star State with "going to to the beach." But one look at a map is all you need to realize Texas has as much coastline as it has anything else, and so, Texas being Texas, that is a lot of coastline. Depending on where you live, of course, there is also potentially a lot of Texas in between you and said coastline, too, so the whole "everything is bigger" routine cuts both ways, as it so often does.

According to the eminently quotable Austin Lounge Lizards, "our rattlesnakes [are] the coiliest, our beaches are the oiliest." But not always. I was recently in Port Aransas – not to be confused with Port Arthur, known far and wide as the ancestral homeland of Janis Joplin and, being much closer to the petrochemical action, likely indeed to be on the oily side. While there was plentiful cloud cover and intermittent seaweed, the beach at Port Aransas was both clean as a whistle and – thanks to it still being the off-season – almost entirely deserted. My kind of beach, for sure.

Out of habit, I bring a guitar on trips like this, but sometimes it never makes it out of the case. This is, I suppose, one of the ironies of professional creativity – you can definitely get to the point where the last thing you want to do is contemplate that grid of strings and frets, even recreationally. Better to loaf, possibly lounge, reread Terry Pratchett, and get in a few good long stares at the unending waves, all while maintaining a carefully calibrated antemeridian/postemeridian balance of black coffee and Stella Artois, respectively.

But the last morning, I pulled the ol' Collings out of the case and sat on the second-story deck, looking out at the clouds and the gulls, and did a little playing. As is often the case, what started out recreationally soon became vocational; while noodling around for my own amusement, I found myself playing a groove that I had been thinking of turning into a complete instrumental, and it was only a matter of time before I had the damn smartphone out to record a particularly tricky walking bass line that I would have been sad to find I had forgotten by the time I got home. Another idle moment co-opted by a restless brain.

I have a friend who is fond of pointing out that a brain that tricks you into thinking about walking bass lines on vacation (or in the middle of the night) is the same one that brings you ideas about bass lines in the first place, so you have to be somewhat philosophical about owning a brain like that. Or as the novelty coffee mug  at the crazy-ass sparkle-fest of a tourist boutique in downtown Port A reads, "Less F*ckin' Attitude, More F*ckin' Gratitude." Or something like that. The same boutique also has a substantial stuffed tiger in big sunglasses and a gold lamé captain's hat holding court in the beach attire area, which ought to complete the picture for you.

The other thing about a brain like that is that you don't always realize what it's been working on until much later. While in some ways I've been teaching for almost as long as I've been playing, I have in fact been playing fingerstyle guitar for a lot longer than I've been teaching it. And because I also taught myself how to do it more for fun than anything else, without much in the way of formal resources, I am now constantly bumping up against little fixes or workarounds I didn't even realize, until now, have become integral aspects of the way that I play.

Often, I also have no conscious recollection of working out some of those things in the first place. So now, as I try and explain what makes it possible to, say, improvise over an alternating bass line without necessarily holding down entire chord shape as you do so, I have to try and figure out, "well, what does make that possible?" And sometimes, immediately afterwards, "and is that in fact a cool way to do it, or have I been cheating all this time?"

A case in point: how do you improvise in C without just pulling out the most easily reached chord tones? That is the subject of today's Youtube lesson, which you can find at the link below:

Travis Picking Major Pentatonic Licks

It is also what we'll be working on all this month in the Fingerstyle Five membership. We've spent the past four weeks learning to play "Nobody's Dirty Business," best known as one of the songs Mississippi John Hurt recorded back in 1928. Now in May, we'll look at how to start improvising over the same tune.

Improvisation may be the most intimidating idea in the world of learning to play guitar. But it might also be the most misunderstood idea as well. It's not magic, although it can look that way from the outside. And it's not something you have to wait to address until you achieve a certain mystical level of intermediate-ness, either.

You can learn to improvise in small, manageable steps, just like anything else. When it comes to fingerstyle blues, improvisation is mostly about putting together a lot of little building blocks. And each of those little building blocks is put together the same way you'd put together a measure or two of a song you were learning – by working out the bass, working out the melody, then working out how to make those two things happen at the same time

The improvisation comes from having just enough of a vocabulary of such moves that you can swap them into a song, one at time, at the moments you want to. That's it. And you just need three things to do so: 1) the vocabulary itself, 2) a song to swap it into and 3) a way to practice doing that swapping.

This is all stuff that I talk about a lot already on the Youtube channel. But if you want to work through this process in a linear, organized way, with a group of other people who are as into this idea as you are, now is a great time to check out the membership, because we're just getting started this week with the fundamentals of improvising over an alternating-thumb bass in C.

To learn more and sign up, visit:

Fretboard Confidential

More soon,

David