Shortly before the Dauphin was born, I had a solo residency at a much-loved and now defunct Austin venue called Flipnotics. With a gig to play every week, I began rummaging through my files for additional repertoire, and came across a song I had written several years earlier but had never performed live.
One night, Ms. Fretboard came to the show, and while I was still on the fence about whether this "new"
song was any good, I played it anyway. Her remark afterwards was, "Cool song in the second set. Who wrote that one?"
Really, you just never know. When I began the Fingerstyle Five membership five years ago, I included a community forum because, you know, that's something a web site has, right? Mostly, I thought there should be a place for people to post a video when they'd learned a song; maybe someone would ask a question about technique every once in a
while.
Come to find over the last couple of years that the forum is one of people's favorite things about the entire membership. Not everyone uses it, and not everyone who does posts any videos, but it has become one of the single best resources on the site, a combination of human search engine, TA office hours and font of encouragement.
There are members who remember everything we've covered and where to find it, members who make and post their own Guitar
Pro transcriptions, members happy to explain how the schedule works, and members ready to provide a little hard-won empathy when you're wondering if your hands will ever feel comfortable playing that tricky E7 chord shape (they will).
The popularity of the forum seems to be rivaled only by that of the weekly live streams, the closest thing in the membership to in-person classes and one of my favorite parts of the process. Seeing the questions that pop up in real time via the
chat window is really fun, and the best moments for me are when someone asks about something I hadn't thought of explaining but totally should.
That's led to all kinds of impromptu lessons, from how to come up with your own intros and endings to why certain chord substitutions work to the kind of oddball techniques that make fingerpicking come alive, like rakes and snaps and ghost notes. Many of those ideas have wound up in subsequent lessons, tabbed out and integrated into a
new arrangement for everyone to work on.
I'm constantly surprised and delighted to by the degree of interaction this digital medium allows for. Every week as the live chat gets underway, I find out what the weather is like in Melbourne, who's got the new parlor guitar of their dreams, or who's planning a meetup to swap tunes in upstate New York. Then we get down to work. And if you can't be there live, a replay is always available.
Best of all, there's
always room for one more guitar player. This winter we'll have new lessons on "St. James Infirmary" and "Freight Train," right hand technique, improvisation and more, all starting this Thursday, January 9th. Use the link below to sign up:
The Fingerstyle Five
More soon,
David