I spent last week teaching at the Rocky Mountain Guitar Camp in Colorado. This year, my second time at Rocky Mountain, my ensemble class consisted entirely of Fingerstyle Five students who had come to the camp, so I'm here to tell you, if you've never heard – or taken part in – a five-fingerstyle-guitar arrangement of "Trouble In Mind" before, you don't know what you're missing.

I'm so accustomed to thinking of fingerstyle guitar as a way to create complete-sounding music on your own that it hadn't really occurred to me how helpful it could be to play through a solo guitar arrangement with other guitarists. But it turns out to be a great practice tool: like any other kind of ensemble playing, it helps you stick to the form and the chord progression, and to clarify and dial in various syncopated or otherwise rhythmically challenging single-note licks.

It's a small camp, as these things go – this year there were just under thirty students in total – so I saw everyone in class at least once, never in a group of more than five people at a time. So I pretty much treated each meeting as a kind of Q&A, taking questions at the start of class about particular things people wanted to work on, then spending some time on maybe three or four topics over the next hour and a half.

Along the way, I found myself talking about some of my favorite things: intros and turnarounds, getting started with improvisation, arranging traditional blues repertoire, and groove. So I'm pretty sure I spent some time showing how to play ghost notes on a blues shuffle, and if I didn't, I should have.

Ghost notes, or damped notes played on the offbeats, are basically the "missing notes" in a fingerstyle shuffle groove – the percussive sound that completes the rhythmic message of the shuffle feel. As ever, it's more easily explained with guitar in hand, so that's what I present in today's Youtube lesson:

Blues Shuffle: Find The Missing Notes

Ghost notes are just one of four essential tools for creating a shuffle groove, and a good shuffle groove is indispensable to beginning to improvise on the blues.

So this month's lessons in The Fingerstyle Five membership are all about creating that groove and using it to improvise blues licks over a walking bass line in E. To sign up and get started, visit:

https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/

More soon,

David