Freddie Green Voicings For Blues In E

chord substitutions chord voicings fingerstyle blues freddie green Aug 02, 2017
 
Surfing Makes You Hungry
 
I had a surfing lesson today. It was my first one ever, and I have to say, this teacher, Isaac, was really good. We started out with our boards on the shore, learning how to get from lying down to standing up. Which sounds really basic, and it is, but it's also really hard, unless you've been doing so many squat thrusts lately that you're cool with doing them in reverse, over and over, on a narrow, unsteady surface. I guess we only worked on that for five or ten minutes, to learn where to put our feet, and then it was time to head into the water. We hadn't talked yet about how to actually catch a wave, and I was pretty curious about that. But in the understatement of the day, Isaac said, "Don't worry, it's much easier for me to just show you once we're out there than to try and explain it here."

Turns out, learning to stand up was the day's lesson. (Well, that and: surfing makes you ravenous. Like, that being-at-the-beach-makes-you-hungry thing, times ten.) We spent an hour and a half getting hand-launched onto promising-looking waves, at which point it was up to us to get to our feet like we'd practiced on shore. And stay there for a while, ideally. But once I realized, "Oh, so I might not being doing this whole thing from start to finish myself this morning," I thought – "this guy is a good teacher, and this is a really good lesson." I hadn't ever considered it before, but it's clearly no use catching a wave if you can't stand up and ride it once you have. So we were working backwards, focusing on one important piece of the puzzle in isolation: how to stand up on a moving surfboard. Get that together, and maybe next time we could talk about how to actually catch the waves, too. It was cool. It made sense. And it made me really hungry.

Speaking of isolation (see how I did that?) this week's lesson is about applying Freddie Green chord voicings to fingerstyle blues. The first step to doing that involves isolating and learning the fingerings for those voicings, as well as the reasons they connect up the way they do. You can check out the lesson above.

Meanwhile, if anyone's looking for me, I'll be the guy with his muscles in a knot and his head in the refrigerator.