Want to play Chet Atkins/Tommy Emmanuel

[shawmutt]

I've been taking lessons and playing guitar for nearly three years now. For the last two years I've played classical. I can play a couple simple songs (currently working on Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring). The five-year plan was to get good enough to play my two "holy grail" songs, Asturias and Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and then switch to jazz guitar a la Joe Pass/Charlie Byrd.

However, life always has a way of changing plans. Due to a changing work schedule and starting school again, I need to drop lessons and learn on my own for a bit. I really am getting bored of the classical stuff and really like listening to Chet Atkins and Tommy Emmanuel. I'd like to try my hand at it, and have looked up a bunch of opinions, one of which is to start with Windy and Warm.

I'm nervous about being without a teacher, but I have a pretty solid foundation and I still have time to practice every day .Anyone have any advice for books, youtube vids, anything that will help me along?

[GregEL]

No worries. Having played classical for a while you are probably pretty fluent with arpeggios. Also, there's lots of YuoTube videos to watch. The music and TAB are readily available.

Good luck!

[stanron]

You say you have a good foundation. Now might be a good time to start developing you listening skills. There are two distinct ways of getting music to your fingers. One is by reading, either tab or notation, and as you have already had lessons I'm assuming you've done some of this. The other way is by listening to music and figuring out how to play it yourself. This is a valuable skill to have and worth the effort involved.

[callouses]

what stanron said. also, there are many how to dvd's on fingerstyle, some of those might be a help. try songs like freight train, waltzing matilde, bye bye blackbird, even the beatles blackbird is good fingerstyle. if you can handle jesu, you wont have any trouble with those, including windy and warm...

[David M123]

Hi Shawmutt,

For Windy and Warm, I would recommend Will Fly's version. I found it to be far and away the most accessible at my skill level (OK, but not great). Once you have that under your belt, if you want to jazz it up, you can look at Chet's and Tommy's versions to see what you want to incorporate.

In the meantime, I DON'T recommend listening to Tommy, unless you make a vow NOT to let yourself get discouraged. The man may not have sold his soul to the devil like Robert Johnson is said to have done, but I'm pretty sure he sold his fingers!

Dave

[drguitar001]

Originally Posted by shawmutt

...The five-year plan was to get good enough to play my two "holy grail" songs, Asturias and Recuerdos de la Alhambra, and then switch to jazz guitar a la Joe Pass....

Yikes, we must be twin brothers of different mothers. In college, I spent some real practice time getting Asturias and Recuerdos clean and musical. In fact, Recuerdos was on my senior recital. I think I spent 3 months getting the tremolo dead even, smooth and fast. At the same time, I played in a jazz quintet (vibes, flugelhorn, upright bass, guitar and set drums), a large big band and a funk horn band (a' la Tower of Power or Earth Wind and Fire). Joe Pass was a real hero of mine and I probably owned all of his albums at the time (and there were a lot of them!). I worked hard at learning his technique for smoothly running a bass line and popping out chords at the same time (which served me well for many years to come).

The best thing you can do is listen to folks whose playing style you love and emulate their phrasing and technique. When you start to sound like them, find another amazing guitarist and study their sound, phrasing and technique for a while. And when you start to sound like them, move on to another great guitarist and so on. After a while, you will sound like a combination of all the guitarists you love (which will now be your sound).

You can find practically any tune you want on the internet for free. Do a little research, but really do a lot of listening and playing.

Have fun! They call it playing the guitar for a reason!