After my gig with Roy Book Binder in October, we spent a few hours on "the bus," a.k.a. Roy's motor home, chatting about everything from now-obscure 1960s guitar players to the moment Roy decided to change his name from "Bookbinder" to "Book Binder" ("I told my then-wife, 'It sounds more Southern!'")

At some point I asked, "So, were you happy with how it went tonight?" "Of course," Roy replied. "I got to do my trick!"

Having been enamored with Roy's playing, singing and storytelling for almost as long as I've been playing guitar myself, I found that a pretty endearing understatement. But I also got the point – as tricks go, picking and singing the blues is a pretty good one, and anytime you get to do it for a crowd, it's a pretty rewarding experience.

Teaching often feels like a pretty good trick, too, especially when you see that lightbulb go on over someone's head. I'd say I have maybe two or three tricks altogether, and it's only recently I've realized I've been relying on the same set of tricks all along.

Which, I've concluded, is not a bad thing. Quite the opposite.

It's easy to get overwhelmed when you're learning something new. You can't work on everything; what you really need is for someone to say "ok, look. Let's start here, and if you can focus on just this, this, and that for now...we can go into more detail about the rest of it later."

So these things I'm always going on about – groove, phrasing, playing the form – for my money, they're the essentials, the things you'll get the most mileage out of over time.

The rest, as they say, is commentary – more tunes, more licks, more turnarounds, more chord shapes. Those things are important, and valuable, but they're really just additional levels of nuance and refinement, details you can hang from the same basic scaffolding you've already established.

That's my take, anyway.

To see how these tricks apply to learning a tune like John Hurt's "Nobody's Dirty Business," check out the live streams I did last week as part of my Groove Master Class:

Part One: How To Learn A Tune

Part Two: How To Embellish A Tune

Part Three: How To Arrange A Tune

You can still download the accompanying tab, too:

Download the free PDF

More soon,

David