I don't know how much these sorts of milestones matter, but the ol' Youtube channel has just past one of them, and is about to pass another. I wouldn't even get into it, but it's July, and it feels a little like one of those scenes from a 1930s newsroom where our hero is sitting around with his battered wingtips up on the desk, chucking pencils at the ceiling and wishing something, anything, worth reporting would happen.

In which case, rather than write this newsletter, I should be putting on my snap-brim fedora, grabbing an already-knotted necktie off my rolltop desk, and heading uptown, across town or downtown to an afternoon ballgame, the racetrack, or some below-street-level saloon, respectively, to while away the hours drinking Manhattans, eating peanuts and/or trading snappy comebacks with a fellow news hack, retired pugilist or heiress-slumming-as-career-girl, depending on the locale.

However, unlike Depression-era New York, the internet does not slow to a crawl in the summer. More's the pity, if you ask me. But as a solid, upstanding citizen of this benighted digital world, I hereby abandon the above Chandler-esque daydream in order to resume the matter at hand, viz., elaborating on those two milestones I mentioned.

Milestone #1: the Fretboard Confidential Youtube channel recently topped 30,000 subscribers. Woohoo! As the Dauphin has made me more than well aware, this is bupkis in the grand scheme of things, which is to say, in a world where 30,000 members is a rounding error for the likes of Mr. Beast.

But so what? My bebop skills amount to a rounding error when I put on a Joe Pass album, and I don't let that keep me up at night. Or keep me from practicing, for that matter. You can only operate in the sphere in which you find yourself, at least for the time being, so, given that at one point there were zero subscribers, 30,000 seems like a mighty cohort. And I have nothing but appreciation for the fact that 30,000 people find what I have to say about guitar playing to be remotely valuable. Since you are evidently one of those people – thank you for being here.

Milestone #2 is not unrelated: this Monday, July 15, it will be exactly eight years since I posted the first Fretboard Confidential Youtube video, "Buddy Guy IV Chord Blues Guitar Lick." Despite the fact that Buddy Guy was, and remains, one of my favorite Chicago blues guitarists, I don't think I've mentioned him on the channel since.

So today, in anticipation of Monday's eight-year anniversary, I've taken one of my other favorite Buddy Guy moves, put it in open position, and explained how to play it over a walking bass line. All the things we like, in one four-bar exercise! You can find it at the link below:

Buddy Guy Licks Over Walking Basslines

Speaking of which – this month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, I'm teaching all the techniques, exercises and tools you need to add walking bass lines to your blues in E. Along the way, you'll learn to play "Big Surly," an original 16-bar blues I've written specifically for this month's lessons. 

And if you're a fan of my Truefire material, you'll find over a dozen original blues tunes of a similar ilk inside the Fingerstyle Five, which you can work on at your own pace, and at whatever level you're ready for. What better way to pass the dog days of summer?

Learn more about the membership, and sign up, at the link below:

https://www.fretboardconfidential.com/

More soon,

David