Labor Day weekend. Camp starts Thursday.

Which means I’ve been doing what I always do before camp – brushing up on the flashier tunes I haven’t touched in a while. The ones that require your fingers to actually remember what they’re doing.

This week that meant Pharaoh’s Rag by John Renbourn – from his 1976 album The Hermit, an album that genuinely changed my life when it came out. Renaissance pieces, blues tunes, a John Dowland duet. The kind of record that makes you want to be a better player.

Sometimes you get Pharaoh’s Rag. Sometimes you don’t.

This week I got it the first time and not the second. That’s kind of how it goes with pieces that have flashy licks in them. A crap shoot. But that’s why you keep coming back to them.

JOHN RENBOURN GUITAR LESSONS HERE

Two New Don Williams Lessons

Before I get into what I played this week, worth mentioning – Nesh put together two beautiful Don Williams lessons that just came through the pipeline.

Good Ole Boys Like Me and I Believe In You.

Seeing that second one cross my desk immediately made me think of the Neil Young song with the same title from After the Gold Rush. We have plenty from that album, but that particular one might need to find its way into the lesson library soon.

DON WILLIAMS GUITAR LESSONS HERE

NEIL YOUNG GUITAR LESSONS HERE

The Left Hand Position Question

A question came up on the Forum this week about fingering chords that just don’t feel comfortable – and it gave me a good opportunity to revisit something fundamental that makes an enormous difference.

Left hand position.

Here’s the thing. If you’re gripping the neck of the guitar like a baseball bat – thumb hanging over the top, wrist level with the neck – there are entire categories of chord shapes that simply become impossible. Not difficult. Impossible.

Three things that change everything:

Wrist down low. Your left hand wrist needs to be well below the neck. Not at the level of the neck. Below it.

Thumb on the back. Your thumb should sit on the back of the neck, roughly behind your first or second finger. You should barely be able to see it from the front.

Fingers close to the frets. Get your fingertips right behind the frets, not in the middle of the fret space. And keep them arched – there should be room to fit a cigar underneath your palm between your hand and the neck.

The specific chord we worked through was from David Crosby’s The Lee Shore – a beautiful but awkward shape that becomes completely manageable once your hand position is right. Start with your second and third fingers, get them positioned correctly, then add the first finger. Work with the position before you work on the chord.

TOP CHORD SOLO GUITAR LESSONS
GUITAR GEOGRAPHY LESSONS HERE

A Little Jolt – Resurrected

Like last week, putting the baby down to sleep with my own guitar albums playing in the background has been surfacing pieces I’d completely forgotten about. This week it was A Little Jolt – a composition in three distinct parts, each one in a different key.

The first part lives in E.

The second part takes the same theme into A.

The third part – which was actually the first section I ever wrote, originally conceived as a completely separate song – lands in C.

It’s one of those pieces where the sections are genuinely different from each other, but by the time you’ve heard them all, you realize they belong together. I hadn’t played it in at least a year, maybe two. There were some rough moments – a particularly nasty stretch in the second section that my brain just wouldn’t let my fingers navigate cleanly – but it’s coming back.

Also coming back: my strings. I put on a set someone gave me a while ago labeled medium tension. Didn’t check the gauges. Put them on and immediately felt something was wrong – lighter than what I’m used to, couldn’t dig in the way I like. They’re coming off before camp. Fresh strings for the campers.

Along the Way – Finally Getting There

I promised this one last week. A Bossanova piece called Along the Way that opens with two chords that have absolutely no business being near each other – G minor and D major 7. And yet somehow it works.

The piece has two sections – an A section and a longer, more involved B section. If you listen carefully to the B section, you’ll hear multiple things happening simultaneously:

A bass line moving by half steps.

A melody sitting above it.

Inner voices shifting underneath – a half step at a time, almost imperceptibly.

And occasional percussion woven through.

It’s been about twenty years in the making. Some days I get it right. This week was closer than it’s been.

No update next week – we’ll be at camp. Back in the middle of September.

Pick up your guitar this weekend.

— Neil