Woof! I followed up five days of teaching at Rocky Mountain Guitar Camp with three shows in three nights – a house concert in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a show inaugurating the new Factory Stage at Henriksen Amps in Arvada, Colorado, and my monthly show back in Austin at the New World Deli.

Things I have learned from this experience: 

1. Talking all day for four straight days is not the best warmup for singing three nights in a row. I had to pull a Jimi and tune my Collings down to Eb (also known as "the negative capo") to make sure I could still hit a few of those higher notes.

2. "Ragtime Cowboy Joe," an old Western-themed tuned penned by a couple of Tin Pan Alley New Yorkers in the early 1900s and which I learned as a kid from my dad, turns out to also be the fight song for the University of Wyoming, a fact I only learned after I pulled it out on the fly near the end of my show in Cheyenne. I'm not sure who was more delighted, the audience or me.

3a. Getting to hang around with a few dozen guitar players in real life for nearly a week is a wicked good time, and plenty inspiring, too. I got to see old pals like Pat Bergeson and John Knowles, newer ones like Jim Nichols, Richard Smith and Brooks Robertson, and hang out for a night at Uncle Kit Simon's superlative guitar shop, the Old Town Pickin' Parlor, for the student open mic. Which made me realize:

3b. I'm not sure which is more fun, getting to meet and hang out with all the Fingerstyle Five members who come to camp, or seeing them all get up and perform at the open mics and in the student concert. Either way – also a wicked good time.

4. Sitting around in my friend Jan's spacious back yard the morning after camp, doing nothing but play guitar, reminded me that I should probably make more time to just sit around and play guitar generally. Well – I also threw frisbees for the dog to catch, but that was pretty restorative too.

One of the things I taught last week was how to embellish a tune – that is, what are the things you can do once you've learned the basic tune, to start making it sound more musical?

It's the kind of thing lots of musicians do intuitively, but there are ways to break it down into some small, specific steps you can apply to just about any tune.

So in today's Youtube video, I explain three ways to dress up the melody to the classic eight-bar tune "Nobody's Fault But Mine:" adding double stops, adding chord fills, and changing up the bass line. You can find the lesson here:

Double Stops, Fills & Bass Lines on Nobody's Fault But Mine

More soon,

David