It's February Album Writing Month – my fourteenth FAWM, in fact, and I'll admit I'm having kind of a slow time of it, having only completed seven of my fourteen songs so far, and here it is with only one week left to go.
Still, at least one of those seven feels like a total keeper, and one or two others might get there with some further revisions, so I'm trying to just keep moving
forward.
Generally, my practice is to write and record each song within a couple of hours, otherwise I'll get hopelessly bogged down in perfectionism. Plus, whole mornings or afternoons could go by, and I have other stuff to do besides write songs, so I've had to learn to be efficient.
Also, there is something fun about having a "get in, get out" policy. FAWM is, at the end of the day, a game, and games are supposed to be fun.
That said,
sometimes you just get sucky results, and whatever you made is best discarded ASAP, or at most set aside for future reconsideration. Such was the case with the original version of today's Youtube lesson. Back at the beginning of January, I came up with a bunch of ideas for upcoming videos, a pretty considered bunch of ideas, really.
But when I shot the first version of today's topic, it sucked. And if I don't get it in a couple of takes, the vibe plummets pretty quickly. So
this one got set aside for a good few weeks.
Then, a few days ago, I was already shooting a bunch of short videos for April's Fingerstyle Five song, so I thought I'd give it another go as long as I was already rolling. Shazam! Twenty minutes later, I had everything I needed.
Right hand coordination may be the biggest stumbling block to playing confident, persuasive fingerstyle blues, so I really want to get this lesson right. The exercises in today's video
are the best way I know to get your thumb and fingers doing what you want them to, which itself is the key to everything from fixing your groove and playing complete songs to starting to improvise. (It doesn't cure receding hair, but I'm working on that.)
You can find it at the link below:
Do This Fingerstyle Exercise
First
Starting next week in the Fingerstyle Five, we'll be working on arranging – how to use intros, outros, stop time licks and more to put together complete versions of songs like "St. James Infirmary" and my twelve-bar blues "Zoozoo Bingo."
Join us now and get access to all of that, plus the tab, video lessons and live streams for the complete archive of every song we've ever covered in the membership:
Join the Fingerstyle Five
More soon,
David