On Wednesday, I sat down and shot three new Youtube lessons without stopping for second takes. Well, except for two false starts where I garbled a word in the very first sentence.

Granted, one of them was a performance of a complete song, not an actual lesson per se. But that was one take, too; I just hit "record" and played through five choruses of a new blues in E called "Ides Of March." And even though there was one moment near the end when I didn't play exactly what I meant to for one chord, I decided that, given how the rest of the take had gone, I was ok with that.

In the liner notes to Kind Of Blue, Bill Evans talks about Japanese brush painting and how a central aspect of that discipline is that you make these gestures that are the art, and there's no going back over what you did, no erasing or editing of those gestures.

I'm no Bill Evans, and these lessons are hardly "Blue In Green," but the idea of just sitting down and doing the thing without a whole lot of second guessing is something worth thinking about.

It depends, of course, on a degree of having done the thing before, or something like it, enough times that you more or less know what you're doing. But at a certain point, there is possibly more to be gained from just saying, "right, this is it," and living with the results, than getting into a ten-take lather about doing the thing just so.

So for today's Youtube video, here's the first of those three moments. If you've ever wondered what you could do with the basic alternating-thumb coordination to make things sound funkier, today's lesson explores a five-step process for doing so. You can find it at the link below:

Travis Picking: Make It Groove!

This summer in the Fingerstyle Five membership, I'll be teaching how to add new chord changes, bass lines and more to your steady bass blues in E. To learn more and sign up, go to:

The Fingerstyle Five

More soon,

David