As a kid, I knew how much I loved music. And I knew how much I sucked at math. And yet, inevitably, some bright soul would pipe up at some point, "well, music and math, they're totally connected, right?" 

"Wrong, boy-o," I would think. "Those wires don't even come close to each other in my brain."

My MIT-educated dad remained a devoted amateur pianist for his entire adult life, but the science-y side of his gene pool seemed to have left me high and dry. Fortunately, when the time came, he was cool enough to pack me off to the liberal arts school of my choosing with only one stipulation: graduate with computer literacy.

Fair enough. In 1957, MIT offered one computer science class, which my dad took his senior year. He learned one of those machines that took up the whole room, ran on punch cards, and had lots of blinking lights. He managed to parlay that one semester into a fifty-year career, so I supposed the least I could do was blow a fraction of his digitally-gained largesse on "Introduction To Pascal" my freshman year.

Fortunately, that turned out to be offered the same semester as "Tonal Counterpoint," a class I actually had been waiting to take since I heard John Renbourn's The Black Balloon in high school. So yes, oh best beloved, I took them at the same time and – son of a bitch! – the parallels were uncanny.

Programming has a lot of rules. No surprise there. A computer is by definition a very literal machine; you tell it what to do, and you have to do so within the very specific confines of what it will understand. Well and good.

Counterpoint, it turns out, has a lot of rules as well. In fact, you could sort of say it is a music of rules. If you don't grok the rules, you don't get good counterpoint. But here's the thing. You can follow all the rules, and still get a crappy piece of music. I know – I did it week after week for a whole semester. 

In computer science, they call this compiling and executing. You can follow all the rules, and get a program that compiles – that is, it is technically acceptable – but doesn't execute, meaning the computer just sits there not doing anything.

(This, I'm guessing, is why some people don't trust music theory. "Why should I learn a bunch of rules," the thinking goes, "just to write a crappy song that doesn't execute?" Or a solo, for that matter.)

Programming also has this concept of "elegance." Yes, you have to write code in the precise manner the machine is able to receive it, but there are choices to be made every line of the way as far as what order you do things in and how the smaller bits are arranged inside the larger ones. 

Which means as you code, you have the choice to write "Louie Louie" or "A Day In The Life," and people will be able to tell the difference, even if at the end of the day, they both get the job done, ("deliver iconic pop song").

Despite my failure to execute a competent fugue my freshman year, I retained my love of counterpoint, and soon turned my attention instead to executing blues guitar licks over walking bass lines played with my thumb. To this day, I still consider that one of the greatest sounds you can make on the guitar.

You can think of walking bass as the graduate-level version of what people variously call steady bass, monotonic bass or dead-thumb bass. You're still maintaining a steady four-to-the-bar pulse with your thumb, but now you're moving through a series of different bass notes instead of laying down a repeating open E or open A note on every beat.

You still have some open notes in the bass, which means there are times when you can get fancier with the licks on top. But much of the time, you need to have some kind of plan for coordinating the interaction between your various fretting-hand fingers.

In today's Youtube lesson, I show you how to do that, using an excerpt from an original 16-bar blues of mine called "Big Surly." More on that in a moment:

Introduction To Walking Bass Lines In E

In the Fingerstyle Five membership, I try and balance the traditional song material with original tunes designed to explore more contemporary aspects of playing fingerstyle blues guitar. So this week, we're kicking off a three-month exploration of walking bass blues, using my original tune "Big Surly" to work on playing, improvising on and arranging a complete fingerstyle blues in E.

If you follow the Youtube channel, and have been thinking "yeah, maybe I'll do the membership eventually," this is a great time to finally make the leap, as we are all about to begin this dive into a new tune and topic together.

Learning a song with a walking bass line may sound challenging, but it's material you can absorb regardless of your current level. There is, as always, a beginning version of the tune to tackle, as well as a more intermediate-to-advanced version, and there are plenty of exercises along the way to help isolate and clarify just what it is your hands need to do to take the next step in the tune.

Finally, here's what one longtime member recently had to say in the community forum about the upcoming material:

"For those of you who are fairly new here and have only seen David present traditional tunes from the public domain, get ready to enjoy the next few months. When David teaches a contemporary tune that he has written, that is some of the most interesting teaching and tunes in the program." 

You can find out more, and sign up, at the link below:

The Fingerstyle Five Registration

More soon,

David