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Totally Guitars Podcast

Ragtime was the flavor of choice around TG Central this week, unfortunately almost to the detriment of getting any useful work done. Continuing to become re-obsessed with the style that dominated my life in the mid 1970s, I spent most of the weekend listening to (and transferring to digital format) piano players from the turn of the last century, along with guitar players who helped with the post-Sting revival, David Laibman, Eric Schoenberg, Leo Wijnkamp, and Ton Van Bergeyk to name a few. This inspired me to get started writing a few exercises for students to get some Ragtime chops down but the rest of that story is in the News.

I think I ran through the new releases for the week- Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran, Itchycoo Park by The Small Faces, Sandy’s continuing adventures with Guitar Geography, and the beginning of Phase II of the Ear Training Course where we start into chord progressions and harmony.

I also broke out about a dozen records that I would recommend to anybody getting interested in Ragtime, starting with some of the Ragtime Blues guys like Blind Blake, Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller and Big Bill Broonzy, then adding in some of the previously mentioned folks who were more in the Classic Ragtime mold. This means playing (or at least trying to play) piano arrangements as accurately as possible. Everybody knows Ragtime is not an easy piano style but not everybody can appreciate the order of magnitude difference that transcribing it to guitar requires.

In any case, there was a lot of tripping and stumbling through works in progress today so I now have a good idea of what I need to be working on in the immediate future. We may have a continuing shortage of new lessons as a result of this re-energized passion or obsession!

Neil

P.S. Here are a few links to some great albums available at Amazon–

Blind Blake

Rev. Gary Davis

Blind Willie McTell

Ton Van Bergeyk

Various Artists – Contemporary Ragtime Guitar

David Laibman