Many moons ago, when Ms. Fretboard and I sent out Save The Date cards for our wedding, nobody took them seriously. The problem, we suspect, was that our wedding was scheduled for April Fool's Day. That, combined with fact that we had both dilly-dallied more than somewhat in the commitment department up until then, made for a pretty skeptical response overall.

Which is why, for this Save The Date announcement, I've picked the considerably more sober and trustworthy September 17th. How could you not take September 17th seriously? With its practical, unfunny prime number, lodged firmly in the back-to-school month, safely beyond summer's reach yet far from the impending frivolity of Halloween, much less New Year's Eve, September 17th is practically the stuffy Victorian uncle of dates.

So keep it circled on the calendar, because in just a couple of weeks, that's when I'll be kicking off a new three-part workshop on my Youtube channel.

Over the past year or more, I've talked a lot about groove on the channel, but always in shorter, single-exercise examples. For this week-long series of live streams, I'll go more in-depth to teach three of best ways to start playing your repertoire with more confidence and conviction.

If you struggle to keep a consistent bass going while playing melodies and licks on top, find yourself dropping beats while you reach for a tricky chord, or just want a more reliable way to pair up your fingers with your thumb, this series will give you specific, step-by-step routines for taking apart, cleaning up and reassembling whatever you're working on.

More details on all that in next week's newsletter; in the meantime, today's lesson is both a reliable way to come up with new licks of your own and a method for getting those licks memorized quickly. You can find it here:

3 Rules for Creating Pentatonic Licks

More soon (and save that date!)

David