Learn to Play Guitar Online with Totally Guitars
Ragtime has always fascinated me,or at least since I first heard my grandmother play Maple Leaf Rag in the 1960s, and with the revival of the 1970s I started working on guitar arrangements of some Scott Joplin tunes. Most of what was out there were pretty heavily modified from the piano original to make them somewhat accessible on the guitar. As I started doing more of my own I could see why. They usually had parts that, while they may have been difficult on the piano, were downright impossible on the guitar. Or so I thought for many years.
Recently some questions came up on our Forum at TotallyGuitars about working through things that seem impossible, that sent me back to take another look at some things I had found particularly challenging. Heliotrope Bouquet was one that had quite a few parts that I was not happy with what seemed like the only possible way on the guitar. I decided to tackle rearranging the whole thing with the goal being to really capture everything I heard coming out of the piano version.
I then set to working on some very difficult parts, hoping I could get a handle on them with enough perseverance and practice. About 2 months ago I posted a Work-In-Progress video of where this was at the time and here is what it sounds like now.