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  #16  
Old 02-06-2020, 07:46 AM
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dnf777 dnf777 is offline
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Love him? He is to fingerpicking what BDylan is to folk! Have every one of his new and old recordings. Even with the primitive recording quality, his genius breaks through!
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  #17  
Old 02-06-2020, 08:15 AM
reeve21 reeve21 is offline
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Originally Posted by davidbeinct View Post
Thanks for posting this. He does a great job teaching. The tab is very helpful with a couple things I couldn’t quite pick up. For anyone else looking for the whole series it’s actually from Vintage Guitar magazine. Might save you a nanosecond of googling time.
I'm glad you like Tom Feldmann's videos, David.

He has a bunch of MJH lessons on his webpage.

I've recently gotten into another source that appears very promising. It is a book and double CD of MJH playing the tunes with transcriptions from the original source recordings by Stefan Grossman. The recordings on the discs alone are worth the price of the book (many of which I don't hear on the streaming services). https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/07...?ie=UTF8&psc=1


I've been futzing around with the easier MJH tunes for the 3 years I've been fingerpicking, never really getting the groove and certainly not getting anywhere near his tempos. I've just started in on this book with my teacher, who I record playing at a tempo I can usually get to in a day or two of practice. I use a metronome and increase about 3 bpm per step, not going any faster until I can nail it repeatedly. This is paying dividends. It also helps me to count the beats out loud, as a lot of his riffs seem to "cross the bar" and not fall where I expect them. This should keep me busy for many months
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  #18  
Old 02-06-2020, 11:35 AM
gfirob gfirob is offline
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I actually used to know John Hurt when I was a teenager. My older brother worked for a blues record company (he was Skip James road manager) at the time the blues revival was going on, and so we had the chance to hang around with these guys (John Hurt, Skip James, Bukka White, Rev. Robert Wilkins) and listen to them play. White suburban kids listening to old black men.

John Hurt was by far the most accessible of them, very generous, kind and patient. Hurt has a kind of swing in his picking that is kind of hard to replicate. A lot of players end up sounding kind of mechanical when they learn
Hurt's tunes because they get the notes right, but not that swing. I think Scott Ainslie gets it closest to right.

Skip James always resented Hurt's greater success because he (James) thought he was a better player, and he was. But James was much more of a blues guy and less of a songster like Hurt, so Hurt ended up being the second most popular traditional performer (in terms of record sales) after Doc Watson. Bukka White was a fabulous player and more careful about his copyright ownership and the business end of things. Robert Wilkins really was a minister and transposed all his blues songs into Gospel songs (the Rolling Stones covered his "Prodigal Son") and he was a very sweet man too.

In the end, I really think John Hurt's wide popularity had to do with his accessible style (songs rather than blues) that made him so popular with white audiences at the time. Not meaning to demean his playing, which was great, but I think he was much more of an easy-listening guitar player compared to somebody whose music was much darker, like Skip James or even Bukka White.
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  #19  
Old 02-06-2020, 03:23 PM
davidbeinct davidbeinct is offline
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Originally Posted by reeve21 View Post
I'm glad you like Tom Feldmann's videos, David.

He has a bunch of MJH lessons on his webpage.

I've recently gotten into another source that appears very promising. It is a book and double CD of MJH playing the tunes with transcriptions from the original source recordings by Stefan Grossman. The recordings on the discs alone are worth the price of the book (many of which I don't hear on the streaming services). https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/07...?ie=UTF8&psc=1


I've been futzing around with the easier MJH tunes for the 3 years I've been fingerpicking, never really getting the groove and certainly not getting anywhere near his tempos. I've just started in on this book with my teacher, who I record playing at a tempo I can usually get to in a day or two of practice. I use a metronome and increase about 3 bpm per step, not going any faster until I can nail it repeatedly. This is paying dividends. It also helps me to count the beats out loud, as a lot of his riffs seem to "cross the bar" and not fall where I expect them. This should keep me busy for many months
I have a real problem using a metronome when picking stuff with syncopation. Any tips?
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  #20  
Old 02-06-2020, 04:12 PM
reeve21 reeve21 is offline
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Originally Posted by davidbeinct View Post
I have a real problem using a metronome when picking stuff with syncopation. Any tips?
I'm no expert, but the one thing that has helped my timing with tricky rhythms more than anything else is counting the beats, out loud at first and then in my head until I have internalized it. The down beats with numbers and the up beats with "and" --modify as necessary for triplets and sixteenth notes. It forces you to pay attention to where the beat falls, as opposed to just listening to it from the metronome.

I learned to do this playing a horn as a kid, where you would sometimes have to lay out for whole sections at a time, and needed to keep track of where you were in pieces that weren't as predictable/repetitive as some popular music.

I heard Billy Joel say that he had to do this in order to learn Take 5.

You might also experiment with slowing the metronome down so it only clicks on 1 and 3. And then try it on 2 and 4. Eric Skye says he does this all the time. There is a guy with an internal clock!
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