What's on your stack of stuff that you are working on?
 

This past week I received Doug Young's "Hymns for Fingerstyle Guitar" This is an interesting book. The hymns are beautiful and the tabs are very easy to play. The fun of this book is to take the one page tab that Doug provides and expand on them. In the music files that accompany the book Doug does just that. First he plays the 1 page tab as written, then adds complexity and fullness to the arrangement. This should be interesting for me to work with.

As always I have Jim Tozier's "Celtic Guitar Solos" near the top. There are still a few tunes in it that I haven't played so I'm working on those.

El McMeen's "Celtic Guitar Treasures" is going to keep me busy for years yet and I found a couple of tabs by Clive Carroll that I want to learn.

I have a couple of tabs and a book by William Coulter and more than a few tunes by Stephen Wake to work on as well.

I'm playing now in standard as well as my usual DADGAD, CGDGAD & CGDGCD. As a result I've dusted off the ol' J-45 and put it on a stand along with my "Celtic" guitars. :)

I'm trying to work through Doug Young's Understanding Dadgad. Also started looking at Will Mcnicol's Casting Shadows and hoping for some of Stuart Ryan's books to follow them up. I just wish I had more time to practice.

I usually play acoustic guitar in our church praise band, and contemporary Christian and 70's-ish soft rock/ballads mostly when at home. The praise band was asked to play for an upcoming youth rally, so I'm working on some contemporary Christian rockers for that - Meant to Live (Switchfoot), Free (Building 429), Get Down (Audio Adrenaline), My Glorious (Newsong), among others. I played electric for decades, but for the past several years have played acoustic almost exclusively. I'm really enjoying the excursion back into electric land, and playing some high-energy music again!

I've been working through a Stefan Grossman book of John Hurt tunes with my teacher for about 5 months now, and will be at it for at least that much longer.

For variety I recently subscribed to Toby Walker's site, and am doing his "Acoustic Skill Builders" series in whatever key Grossman happens to be focusing on in his Hurt book at that time.

I like doing exercises, less pressure than trying to nail a whole song perfectly. Toby starts of each series with a bunch of technique building exercises, then runs through an instrumental he composed in that key at 3 different levels of difficulty. Some of the exercises match up nicely to the Hurt tunes I'm working on. Right now it is the key of C with Richlands Woman Blues and Louis Collins currently on my music stand.

Hornpipe! I can't believe an old blues player like me is working on playing a hornpipe. I had to look up what a hornpipe is. I found out I had been pronouncing it incorrectly as I thought it was spelled differently. I am doing a deep dive into playing songs using the cross picking and flatpicking style. I'm not new to this style by any means. I'm arranging instrumental songs using partial chords and double stops.

Elijah Wald's Guitar of Joesph Spence from Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop. I'm in a holdng pattern right now though. I'm brushing up some repertoire before starting anything new.

Hi Doug,

That sounds like a lot of fun, right up your alley.

Have you seen this? https://www.elijahwald.com/songblog/

I just bought Corey Harris' lesson "Blues Guitar from Mali to Memphis" available through Homespun. He focusses on the African roots of American Blues. I'm finding the lesson very interesting and fun. I particularly like his presententation of Special Rider. My wife said, "Oh, you're learning a new song!" All the traditional blues I play sounds the same to her, and she thinks I just play the same song for hours. So now I'll know two songs!

An instrumental flatpick/Carter style of "In the Sweet By and By".
It is not really too technical but I am having problems memorizing the whole thing.

And...

Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand"
It can be a real challenge to sound like uncle Neil.

Yes I've referred to his blog before. Great stuff!

I figured you knew about it. Any other country blues fans who aren't familiar with Elijah Wald or his "songobiography" blog should check it out! He was a protegee of Dave Van Ronk and a musical author and scholar as well.

Thanks for the that Elijah Wald link, I'd run across him a few times on YouTube when I was looking for a particular song. Had no idea the amount of songs he has posted. Nice, thanks

I’m in a shutdown-driven online collaboration with a dear friend of mine.

I’m in Minnesota, he’s in New York.

We’ve figured out a way to play together using Zoom, and are now casting our nets for material. One song that came up was Steve Winwood’s classic “Can’t Find My Way Home”.

Great, I thought. I can figure out some variation of the main guitar part, and the second guitar part. The wrinkle is that I primarily play in Open D (DADF#AD), but no matter, a triad’s a triad, and I’ve figured out some good variations - and the song is, as written, in D.

So, I report my progress to my buddy, and ask the pertinent question “can you sing this? Without any kind of surgical or medical assistance?”

To which his response was “yes, if I tune down a whole tone, and play it in C”

GRR. Back to the drawing board.

There are a few on my "list to learn"...

Randy Newman's "It's a Jungle Out There" (theme song from the tv show "Monk"); this one seems more appropriate for the times right now!

"Cousin Dupree", by Steely Dan... if I can cop a decent groove with it in a key that works for me to sing... oddly enough, I think the original is in B ?!!!

"Put a Little Love in Your Heart", the old Jackie DeShannon chestnut... it's a pretty simple tune, so I'm gonna have to find a way to make it interesting (the music part).

These, along with 5-10 original tunes that are in varying stages of being written...