My old friend Paul dropped me a line this past week to ask about books on fingerstyle blues guitar. It seems he's got a student who's worked her way through all of my Fingerstyle Guitar Method book and is looking for what to do next. I wrote back...

It being the first post of the new year, I suppose I ought to be talking about practicing resolutions, or guitar playing goals, or something like that. In theory, I'm certainly a fan of the reboot, the dramatic plan, the epic self-styled makeover,...

Jazz Odyssey

On some level, last week's post about saxophone giants Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane represented the antithesis of everything I imagine Fretboard Confidential to stand for. That is, it's been a long journey from baffled and insecure...

Having presented a chorus of the blues in A recently (The Ninth Degree), I thought I'd offer up a chorus with some of my favorite fingerstyle blues moves for dropped-D tuning. "D-Mocracy" is a twelve-bar alternating-thumb blues combining basic...

It's raining like crazy in Austin today, and rumor was they intended to open the floodgates at Mansfield Dam, above Town Lake, which is what everyone here calls the not-really-a-lake formed by damming the Colorado River as it winds through town....

I've quoted this Mike Bloomfield bit before, but it captures so much about learning to play guitar it's worth repeating. Bloomfield, recounting his early days, said, "I was learning to play, you know, for a few years, and then suddenly, when I was...

You can hear Grant Green play something like this on "Blues For Juanita" from his 1962 Blue Note LP The Latin Bit. As far as I can tell, as the one non-Latin groove from the day's recording, "Blues For Juanita" was left off the original release...

When I was in school, my friend Victoria had a theory that everyone's sense of humor could be traced back to a single essential influence. In her case, it was Monty Python, and specifically, I think, John Cleese's shambling, not-really-apologetic...

At some point about a year ago, I got really annoyed that I knew almost nothing about Coleman Hawkins except how large he loomed in the history of jazz and how important he was to the development of the tenor saxophone. So I went off hunting down...

What fingerstyle blues sensibilities I possess are more than somewhat the result of two formative sources from my teenage years, Richard Saslow's book The Art of Ragtime Guitar and Stefan Grossman and John Renbourn's second duet record, Under The...