January 6, 2023

Starting the year off, I had some suggestions for students at recent lessons that inspired the beginning of this week’s Update. Generally, play the hardest parts of songs a lot more times than the easier parts. The few beats I focus on to open are from John Renbourn’s tune Faro’s Rag, which I play through completely later. It also put some of his very early, and very challenging pieces back on my radar. There are excerpts from Another Monday and My Dear Boy later as well.

This thread really started this week with a student who was working on the introduction to Desperado, which led to messing around with an instrumental attempt near the end.

The tip is basically this – isolate difficult parts or transitions and play them over and over, and over!

Neil