The Fingerstyle Five membership's winter quarter starts this Thursday. As I discussed in Saturday's YouTube master class (5 Ways To Get Better In 2025) we'll be working on "St. James Infirmary" and "Freight Train" as well as my instrumental "Zoozoo Bingo."

Now, usually I introduce one new tune every three months. We spend the first month on learning the tune itself, the second month on improvising on the tune, and the third month on coming up with intros, turnarounds, and a complete arrangement of the song.

For beginners, that first month includes a total breakdown of how to isolate the bass, isolate the melody and then put them back together.

For intermediates, it also includes the kind of embellishments that make a good arrangement sound great: syncopation, double stops, hammer-ons and pull-offs, chord substitutions and bass runs.

You could easily spend the entire three months just getting good at the basic tune, and some people do just that. Others like to move through as much of the material as possible. 

But for some folks, three months seems like a long time to spend on a single song, no matter how worthwhile. And so, while the membership includes access to a complete archive of all the songs we've ever covered, this month I'm introducing a couple of important new features.

We will still have a brand-new song to learn, my original twelve-bar blues "Zoozoo Bingo." You can find a complete performance of it here:

"Zoozoo Bingo"

In addition, we'll revisit "St. James Infirmary," one of the earliest membership songs and one I've spent a lot of time with over the years. You can hear my version of it at the links below:

Live at the New World Deli (vocal)

On a Waterloo at the Collings factory (instrumental)

In "Chord Substitutions on 'St. James Infirmary'"

Finally, I've taken one of my most popular Youtube videos, "Fix Your Travis Picking In Six Steps," tabbed out all the examples, including my improvised solo, and broken it up into six shorter, easy-to-follow lessons. 

This lesson is based on "Freight Train," so if you go through the newly-organized material inside the membership, you'll not only learn a pretty bulletproof method for getting your thumb and fingers coordinated, you'll get another classic fingerstyle piece under your belt at the same time. 

For more advanced players, I'll also break down the solo I play at the top of the lesson and explain as many of the moves as possible:

Fix Your Travis Picking In Six Steps

Sig up now to take part in this Thursday's opening lessons and get access to the entire Fingerstyle Five library:

Join the Fingerstyle Five

More soon,

David