My third and final Groove Master Class will take place 

Saturday, March 22 at 10:30am CDT:

Groove Master Class Part Three • How To Arrange A Tune

I used to teach these week-long workshops in the summer, and as much fun as they were, I remember coming away from them thinking, "This is no way to run a railroad." You can put a lot of information in someone's hands in a week, but with something like fingerstyle guitar, it simply takes time to assimilate the various skills involved. Just the basic coordination of combining one rhythm in your thumb with another rhythm in your fingers is potentially weeks if not months of work.

This past October marked the five year anniversary of my Fingerstyle Five membership, and one of the most significant conclusions I've reached over the past few years is how well-suited a long-term, ongoing program is for learning this genre and its techniques. Even though blues is not, on the surface, complicated music – you can cover a lot of ground with just a handful of open-position chords, a few 8- and 12-bar forms, and a couple of pentatonic scales – the prospect of playing two things at once every time you pick up the instrument is somewhat daunting.

So it's a style of music that rewards a certain minimal relentlessness: showing up on a regular basis to pay careful attention to a handful of small, simple things. In teaching my groove workshops this week, I've had to get truly tangible and specific about something as slippery, if not downright ephemeral, as "a good groove."

And here is where being in the explanation business for so long comes to bear, as I don't think I could have necessarily found a way to articulate the relationship between how you practice and how you groove much earlier in my teaching career.

But here's what I think, and what I've been saying this week in the workshops: Groove is a matter of balancing urgency and relaxation, even in the most charged, dynamic circumstances. In music, time is constantly moving forward, and one impulse of the groove is to maintain a consistent relationship with time – to express a consistent tempo through one's playing.

But the other great impulse of the groove is relaxation. The astonishing thing about, say, Charlie Parker playing "Ko-ko" at 300 beats per minute isn't exactly that he can simply do it, or even that he can concoct such remarkable melodic statements in the process. It's that he remain so relaxed while doing so. There is nothing but confidence in his sound; at no point do you ever wonder if he's going to make it through.

So for my money, there are two things that matter for grooving as a fingerstyle guitarist. The first is being able to trust your hands, and the second is knowing what's coming next before it actually happens.

Fortunately, these are both things you can work on. Seeing what's coming before it happens is about trading in rote memorization for musical understanding of what you're doing. Trusting your hands is a matter of anticipating – and practicing – the kind of thumb-and-fingers coordination solo blues guitar inevitably requires.

I covered how to improve your musical understanding of the tunes you play in Tuesday's live stream on the "Horizontal 3-Step," and how to develop your right-hand coordination in yesterday's workshop on rudiments and embellishments. You can find both of them on my Youtube channel:

Groove Master Class, Part One • How To Learn A Tune

Groove Master Class, Part Two • How To Learn A Tune

Tomorrow, I'll explain how to use that kind of musical outlook and trustworthy right hand to turn "Nobody's Dirty Business" into a complete-sounding arrangement.

The workshop takes place Saturday, March 22 at 10:30am CDT:

Groove Master Class, Part Three • How To Embellish A Tune

If you haven't downloaded the tab yet, you can get it here:

Groove Master Class PDF

See you then!

David