This October marks the fifth anniversary of the Fingerstyle Five, my ongoing membership for fingerstyle blues guitarists.

Five seems like a big round number, and it feels both remarkable and gratifying that something that started as just one of those cool "what if" ideas has turned into something real that hundreds of people use every day to get better at something they're really into.

It is also a little hard to believe that the doors to the membership opened with basically one song: "Hi everyone! Here's what we're working on this month." You can still find and learn that first song ("House of the Rising Sun," if you were wondering) but there are now dozens of traditional and contemporary tunes to choose from the moment you step inside.

Regular new material is still a cornerstone of the membership, but the pace is more sane than it was at first. In the beginning, we started a new song every month, which basically only gave everyone a week to learn the tune itself, a week to work on improvising on it, and a week to spend on arranging it into a complete song. Madness!

Now that process is spread out over three months, enough time to really work on each step of learning and performing a song. It allows me to offer three hours a month of live-streamed instruction on each topic, not only presenting each week's material but also answering questions and going into more detail about technique, performance and other issues.

So the start of a new quarter is a really good time to join the membership, and right now is an especially good time, because in October we're going to start working on the most-requested song since the Fingerstyle Five began – the classic eight-bar blues "Key To The Highway."

Another good reason to join now: in October, I'll also be leading an interactive version of "Six Steps To Playing Fingerstyle Blues." This introduction to steady bass blues in E has long been one of my most popular set of lessons on Youtube. 

For the membership, all the videos have been re-mixed and edited into more concise, accessible reference lessons, with tab for each one. I'll be live streaming one new "step" every other week for six weeks, starting October 10th; you can ask questions via the chat during each lesson or submit them ahead of time and watch the streams later, on your own schedule.

Finally, I am delighted to announce a new companion program for every new Fingerstyle Five member who joins before October 2nd: Fingerstyle Orientation, a ten-week series to help you get the most out of your new membership.

As the library of tunes, live streams, tab and improvisation lessons has grown over the past five years, the number one question has become "where should I start?"

Fingerstyle Orientation will provide new members with an additional weekly online live stream where I'll review essential concepts and techniques, walk you through everything from how the songs are organized to where the latest tab is, and answer any questions you might have as you get under way with the material.

Learning songs is always at the core of the Fingerstyle Five, and if, like me, you like to get in at the beginning and not miss anything, now's the best time to join if you want to work on "Key To The Highway" with me this fall.

And while it's easy to get overwhelmed once you have access to a lot of new material, Six Steps Live and the Fingerstyle Orientation are designed to work together with the core song lessons, and that's why they're starting in October as well.

The Six Steps lessons, like "Key To The Highway," are all about playing steady bass in the key of E. So while you're working on "Key To The Highway," you can be honing your steady bass groove and building your vocabulary of E blues licks, too.

And with the Fingerstyle Orientation, you'll know where to find other songs in the same key, how to access an entire Practice Planner, and which volume of my Fundamentals of Improvisation course best complements the song you're working on.

I've posted a new video this morning on my site that goes over everything we cover in the Fingerstyle Five in more detail:

www.fretboardconfidential.com

It all starts in October, so if you've been through the recent Groove Master Class and want to go deeper, or have just been waiting for a good time to join the Fingerstyle Five, head over the link below to sign up:

Join The Fingerstyle Five

More soon,

David