Bluesier Travis Picking Up The Neck

Blues In C, Blues In E, Blues In The Back Of An Odyssey

Happy 2018! Personally, I decided to celebrate the new year by moving Studio Fretboard to new premises. Well, perhaps "decided" is not exactly the mot juste. The building I'd been working out of for the past 18 months finally changed hands, and my charmingly hip little corner of that piece of real estate was deemed particularly desirable by some nepotistic connection or other of the new owners, and so it was ho for the wide open spaces as far as I was concerned.

Fortunately, things are always glacial, workwise, at this time of year, and so, after convincing Ms. Fretboard that this was, in fact, a superlative way to spend some of my valuable family downtime, I spent a couple of days disentangling speaker cables, bubble-wrapping preamps and digging guitar cases out of the garage in order to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible. The movers came, I packed everything else into the back two-thirds of the family minivan – it is amazing what you can fit into one of those suckers, especially if you yank the seats out – and now, a week later, here I am, settling my post-move, post-holiday nerves with Kenny Burrell's "Blues For Skeeter" and looking around my new space, wondering if I couldn't possibly do my work with a mere 60% of the instruments I seem to insist in hauling around with me wherever I go.

But that, as Arlo Guthrie once pointed out, is not what I came to talk about. ("I came to talk about the draaaft...")

I've got a new Youtube lesson up, on how to improvise up the neck over a Travis-picking groove in C. You can check it out above.

Also, I know – what's the word for rhyming a sound with itself, like I did in the title? It could have been "Blues in D," or "Blues in G," or even "Blues in B" (hello, Charlie) but I shoot the videos before I write the emails, and I have a deep-seated aversion to misleading my public.