Cripple Creek is often one of the first tunes introduced in a banjo lesson, and a standard in repertoire. The melody is well defined, and has likely been around much longer than the sometimes added lyrics. Cripple Creek is played on many instruments; on the banjo, Scrugg’s and melodic styles as well as clawhammer versions are common
Elizabeth Cotten wrote ‘Freight Train in 1904 when she only 11 years old. It became a staple of the finger-style guitar repertoire over the intervening years. It is a perfect piece of music to learn finger-style guitar as it has a catchy well defined melody. The free guitar tab below shows the has a 16 bar blues structure of the song. With Freight Train you can learn to play a melody against a bassline. Then learn to syncopate the melody against the bassline. You can play the melody in the bass, and lastly learn some chord substitutions.
So you’ve been playing guitar for a little while and found yourself playing more with the right hand fingers than a plectrum. You’re probably wondering where to go with this now, and there are a load of options. To describe all the possibilities of fingerstyle guitar music is out-with the scope of this blog; this is just an idea of some pieces to listen to and have a go at.
Very, very broadly, fingerstyle guitar music can be divided into a few different camps: alternating bass style, arpeggios, percussive, chord melody. Multiple styles can of course be combined into one piece, and there is a significant amount of overlap
So, what to expect from your first guitar lesson? If you play already, we’ll have discussed you’re playing and what you’re looking to get out of the lesson in advance. It’s not necessary in any way to have a firm, determined goal, but it’s just to give me an idea of where you might be and to have a rough lesson plan. If you’re comfortable playing, we’ll play a bit together at the start, then analyse a piece of music, working through the techniques and construction. Involved.
Exactly the same idea applies too if you’re a complete beginner, or very new to playing.
Music Theory can seem like a minefield of jargon and concepts to just about everybody at one time or another, but behind it all lie the fundamentals that underpin everything. Here’s a beginner’s guide to music theory
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Every now and again a website or magazine asks me to write an article. Last month, Dutch Website Onder Invloed celebrated it’s 5th birthday with a PDF magazine and asked me to write about a musical influence; I chose skiffle music. You can download the PDF of the magazine from the Onder Invloed website:
Here’s a slightly longer version of the article than appeared in the magazine:
Following on from the 12 bar blues post earlier this week, Here’s some blues backing tracks in 3 different keys to practise your chops against:
12 Bar Blues in E backing track
12 Bar Blues in A backing track
12 Bar Blues in G backing track
Chord Sequences – All tracks have a 2 bar intro
E: E/E/E/E A: A/A/A/A G: G/G/G/G
A/ A/ E/E D/ D/ A/A C/ C/ G/G
B7/A/E/B7 E7/D/A/E7 D7/C/G/D7
This is a beginners guide to blues guitar. There are many forms of blues including the 8 bar (Key to the Hughway, Trouble in Mind), and 16 bar formats (Summertime, I’m your Hoochie Coochie Man), and the 12 bar blues. The 12 bar blues is almost certainly the most common form of blues, a music form that can be traced back to the late 19th century. Blues has its roots in Africa, although it is a quinticensually American music form which has many regional variations including, but not limited to Chicago blues, piedmont blues and mississippi delta blues. Musicians best known for piedmont blues include blind boy fuller, blind willie mctell, and possibly the best known sonny terry and brownie McGhee, with the style characterised by syncopated (meaning the emphasis is moved to between the beats) melody produced by playing the melody with the right and fingers while the right hand thumb keeps the beat.
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See and downlaod tablature of the music as a PDF
Bluegrass music, and more specifically bluegrass guitar can be thought of as an offspring of country music. Like all country it has it’s roots in European folk music brought by settlers into the U.S. in the 19th century and combined there with an African influence including the use of the banjo. The main instruments in early country music were fiddle, taken from the Scots and Irish traditions, the Spanish guitar and the banjo from Africa, with the music characterised by driving rhythms and songs singing of everyday experiences such as ranching, mining, logging as well as bank robberies, train crashes and desperados on the run.
As well as guitar, I also play mandolin and 5 string banjo, and, from guitarists, these often inspire a question along the lines of….how easy / hard is it to play the banjo / mandolin compared to the guitar. This isn’t actually that easy to answer as there are a couple of different things involved, but the bottom line is that if you can play the guitar a bit, then the finger movements needed to play banjo or mandolin shouldn’t be too difficult. What might be more tricky is to try not to play them like a guitar.
