Options = Happiness.

12/07/20 - week 5 Tune Darn That Dream is one of the more sophisticated Great American Songbook tunes. Modulating down a major 3rd for the bridge and a tritone 2-5 before you even reach bar 2 makes it a tricky progression. Searching for versions of this standard, I…

The fingers and (the awkward) thumb.

05/07/20 - week 4 Tune The late Spanish maestro, Fernando Sor, composed a plethora of beautiful classical guitar pieces in the early 1800s. Study No. 8, Op. 6 is a lesson in the art of diatonic lyricism - it's obvious why Sor is frequently dubbed '…

Nelson Faria's YouTube empire.

28/06/20 - week 3 Tune In my quest for beautiful nylon string tones, I stumbled across Nelson Faria [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC8sjLWfha4fPIgQXIT5tcQ]'s extensive body of collaborative material. Faria is a giant of Brazilian guitar and interviews Hermeto Pascoal [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=…

Mike Walker time.

21/06/20 - week 2 Tune Discovering Julian Argüelles' album Home Truths [https://music.apple.com/gb/album/home-truths/1471347847] has been an enormous amount of inspiration. Mike Walker's playing on this lesser known session is magic, and I was lucky enough to ask him a…

Johnny Smith's close voicings.

14/06/20 - week 1 Tune Toninho Horta's 'Litoral' has kept my nylon string practice in check. This was a brilliant next step after studying some of Giuliani's right hand studies (from Pumping Nylon [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pumping-Nylon-Classical-Guitarists-Technique/dp/1470631385/ref=…