One of the first things I did when I moved to New York was unfold maps of the city and the subway system side by side on the floor of my sister's Williamsburg apartment and figure out how to get to We Buy Guitars on 48th street in Manhattan. Sometime soon after, I must have picked up my first copy of the Village Voice, because a few days later, I called Emily Remler about guitar lessons, having found her number in the classifieds.

I could just as easily have called Dave Van Ronk or Lee Konitz, and I'm not sure why I never did call Van Ronk. But being a newly-minted New Yorker with no income yet and few assets to speak of, my main question for Emily was, did I have to take a lesson every week?

"Well, I'm not a Nazi about it or anything," she replied. Duly noted: Emily Remler = not a Nazi.

As it turns out, I only took about a half-dozen lessons from Emily in total, but that was enough to provide me with a handful of techniques and concepts I use to this day. One of them was something she just showed me in passing, in that "oh, and here's a cool thing you can do, too," kind of way – a technique for making bass lines swing more by emulating the pulloffs an upright bassist might use.

I never realized how thoroughly I had absorbed this idea into my own playing till about a month ago, when I sat down to write out some groove exercises involving blues licks and walking bass lines in E. I hadn't ever consciously thought "Now I'm going to apply that bass line thing Emily did into my fingerstyle blues playing," but there it was, large as life and twice as natural, completely integral to something I'd been doing intuitively for ages.

So in today's Youtube lesson, I break down how to create a better blues groove using those bass line pull-offs. You can find it here:

The Emily Remler Walking Bass Groove

This is one of four essential groove elements I'm teaching this month in my membership, The Fingerstyle Five. To learn more and sign up, visit:

www.fretboardconfidential.com

More soon,

David