Challenged
 

It took me about 2 months to learn John Knowles arrangement of "My Funny Valentine" from his Finger-style Quarterly Magazine. I'm not quite performance level ready, but it's very close.

So, I decided that it's time to work on something new and started work on another arrangement of John's that I really like. The tune is "The Nearness of You". John makes it look so easy in his video's.

Hopefully, this link below will work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXfl...KEcS-k&index=2

Holy Moley, this one is tough!!. It's essentially filled with nothing but partial barre's and left hand finger stretches.

They say that if you aren't frustrated or challenged on a regular basis, you might not be improving your guitar playing.

Well, I'll be challenged for quite some time on this tune!

:)

Nice recording. Barre wise at least it's a classical guitar.

When the topic of tunes with lots of barre chords came up some years back I wrote a tune ("Pinky Bee") with lots and lots of barres and stretches.

A little demo clip and the PDF

http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Mu...nkyBeeDemo.mp3
http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Mu...s/PinkyBee.pdf

It's amazing how easily challenged I am. I'm just a few months in to learning blues finger picking. The first 2-3 months I was just learning individual licks from a David Hamburger TrueFire course. That worked really well because I was playing stuff that sounded like blues to me within a week or two of starting. The bite sized pieces really helped. And even some of those took me several days to really nail down.

Now I'm still doing his courses, but I've moved into more extended pieces with a number of challenging (to me!) sections stitched together. I'm working on a 24 bar piece right now and I've been trying to nail down the first four for about a week now. I'm getting there, but I'm not there yet. They repeat later in the piece, so it's not as depressing as it sounds, but this fingerpicking stuff really requires some rewiring of my brain and my right hand. My left hand is pretty conversant with blues technique, so that part has helped a lot. But my right hand feels like it's learning a new language, and it's dragging my brain along with it.

This stuff would probably be really easy stuff for most finger style players around here - a lot of folks could probably look at the music for what I'm playing now and have it down in ten minutes - but for me, its supremely challenging. But it's fun stuff and an amazing feeling of accomplishment to nail something down, because I couldn't do ANY of this a few months back.

-Ray

Nice Stuff, Derek!!

Ordinarily, I don't have issues with Barres. This arrangement calls for a majority of partial barres with open notes on the 5th or 6th string, so I can't cheat and fully barre them... LOL :D

I'll figure it out eventually, it's just a matter of training my left hand to do new things..

Dave:)