Combustible Coif

I am going to send you some emails. Just not ones where I'm yelling. Or where I sound like my hair's on fire. Fiery hair would mess up my lid, and I'm very attached to my millinery. If you've already signed up, or you know you're not going to, you can just ignore me for the rest of the day. Because in this email, I'm going to include a little iambic tetrameter and provide a head's up about the day's activities. This afternoon, I'll be posting a link to the replay of yesterday's Zoom session, in which I demonstrate how to take simple blues tunes like "Sweet Home Chicago" and "St. James Infirmary" and develop them into full-blown arrangements. And then tonight, I'll send out a final reminder when there's just an hour left before registration closes.

Because the membership is closing, and you won't be able to join again until after the new year. (Dang. That had a bit of that hair-on-fire vibe after all. I'll dial it back.)

I actually don't know if The Fingerstyle Five is for you or not. It's probably not for everybody. There's no back catalogue of bazillions of songs, and I don't teach note-for-note arrangements of the prewar classics. There are already a lot of places to get that, and since I'm not interested enough in doing so myself to get good at it, that's not what my membership is about.

However, if you're on my mailing list already, that's probably not so much what you're into either. Here's who it is for:

Fingerstyle guitarists, who are into the blues, who want to do one or more of these things: build a repertoire, strengthen their groove, create more complete arrangements, learn to improvise, and/or understand more about what they're doing and play more musically.

To help you do that, I'll provide simple and advanced versions of one new tune each month, followed by weekly ideas about how to develop the technique, chord vocabulary, arranging skills and improvisation tools to make the most of that tune. As you build your repertoire, you'll acquire a process for developing tunes on your own, with the ultimate goal of creating a more personal approach to playing the guitar.

I learned during yesterday's Zoom session that I often forget to provide some of the most important details. So here they are: The membership costs $20 a month, and includes the weekly content, a members-only forum, a monthly live-online lesson/Q&A and a special bonus course on music theory for guitarists.

(Ok, so my hair's a little singed, but that wasn't too bad.) If you want to register, here's the link:

The Fingerstyle Five – Registration

And now, as promised, a little iambic tetrameter:
 
P.S. If, somehow, you missed my earlier lesson laying out five essential elements to playing fingerstyle blues, you can find it here:

What To Work On