Pickin' the blues

Another of my favorite avocations is playing the guitar. I first started playing when I was in high school, but didn't keep at it much past college. A bit more than a year ago I got the urge again, and after getting a new guitar, I've been fully hooked ever since. I try to play some almost every day, and have definitely been improving over the last year, although I've still got a long way to go!

My favorite style of guitar playing is acoustic country blues finger picking. I always had a soft spot for blues, and the great thing about the style is that you can almost get a fully "orchestrated" sound. You pick out a bass line and rhythm with your thumb on the bass strings, while simultaneously playing a melody line with your other fingers on the top strings. When done well it produces a really full and complex sound, and the possibilities are endless. I pick with four fingers on my right hand; thumb, index, middle and ring fingers. Amazingly, most of the true masters only used their thumb and index fingers! Of course, while your right hand is working, your left hand has to simultaneously get the right chord positions and changes. It takes a lot of coordination between your two hands, but like anything, if you have patience and just keep at it you slowly become more proficient. It's also a great style for vocal accompaniment, but combining singing with the guitar playing I find to be quite a challenge. It's hard enough doing one at a time, combining them takes A LOT of practice.

Some of the great blues masters of the genre include Mississippi John Hurt; Big Bill Broonzy; Reverend Gary Davis; Lightning Hopkins; Doc Watson; Furry Lewis; etc. In my opinion, one of the most amazing players of more recent times is Stefan Grossman. Check out his guitarvideos.com website if your curious about finger-picking guitar styles. It's also a great site to get guitar music and even dvd/video lessons.

A few months ago I acquired some simple recording gear; basically just a decent microphone and pre-amp. With that and a lap-top one can start recording with any number of free-ware packages. I've used Audacity with some success, and it's very simple to use, can let you lay down multiple tracks, and even has some basic signal processing tools. At some point I'll try to put in some links to a few sample tracks, and you can critique my playing, or not!