"Killing the Blues" - (Roly Salley)

It's been seven months since I started studying fingerstyle blues. "Killing the Blues" isn't one of my allocated pieces - it's more of a side hustle. 

I'm practising it because I like it, influenced as I am by the Plant-Krauss version on Raising Sand. It should be faster than this achingly slow performance.

Clare took the video and contributes her own unique vocal style, while I'm trying to keep time and get my Travis-style picking slick. This is indeed killing the blues. And yes, it was really hot when this video was taken yesterday, around 34 degrees.

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My guitar progress at seven weeks or so

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My Cordoba C1M acoustic guitar arrived on Thursday November 27th 2025 - and I had my first lesson with Stewart three weeks later, on December 17th. He assessed me at Grade 3 preparation and gave me some assignments.

Since then I've been practicing hard: one month has gone by and I've had two subsequent lessons where I'm working through this book.

Amazon

I've upped my practice to around 25 minutes per day; the fingers of my left hand are become numb, thick and calloused, and the pain is beginning to diminish. I'm at the point where I can stagger through a simple exercise - thumb working a little independently from the fingers - but I soon get tangled up - and the chord changes derail me.

At the end of twenty five minutes my brain has turned to porridge and I can't make any sense of where I am: the fingers of my right hand are like an octopus on LSD.

When I think I have something not totally embarrassing I'll post it here as a benchmark. A few weeks. Soon.

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I think I do need a guitar tutor

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I’m seeing one potential guitar tutor for a trial lesson on Monday and another on Wednesday, which means there is - inevitably - at least one mildly-difficult phone call in my near future.

My underlying problem: playing the guitar is saturated with intangibles. Hand and wrist angles. Finger placement on the fretboard. Optimal chord shapes. Moving the left hand up and down the fretboard while the right hand tries to just get on with it.

None of this is easy to infer from books or videos: no feedback.

Being self-taught in my youth has left me functional but clumsy. Everything feels improvised, provisional, unstable. I’ve found myself explaining to prospective tutors that this awkwardness is precisely why I’m knocking on their door. What I need is not so much inspiration as correction - and, just as importantly, a contextually-structured plan of advance that gives shape to practice and motivates me.

I’m open to the idea that classical guitar might be the best road to technique. I like classical music well enough, and if disciplined right-hand work and clean left-hand mechanics are the price of admission, that's the plus. My real motivation remains modern blues: more informal, more visceral.

Perhaps the longer way round is the way to get there?

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My visit to the luthier today

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Tuesday, 2 December 2025

This afternoon I drove the five minutes across town to visit our local luthier, Tim — the sort of quietly competent guitar technician whose workshop, tucked into the back of his garden, is crammed full of the esoteric tools of his trade, together with a collection of instruments. I took two guitars: my ancient, bargain-basement classical, now warped by decades of tension and neglect, and the new Córdoba C1M, whose bottom two strings (E and A) had snapped almost immediately after I bought it.

The failure of those wound strings had made me suspect a manufacturing fault in the nut at the headstock, some roughness. Hence the visit. Tim put the Córdoba on his bench, peered at the nut slots, the wraps, the break points. His verdict was brisk and reassuring: the wound bass strings were visibly corroded. That alone explained the sudden unravelling. The D string (string 4) was half-gone as well. The guitar itself, though, was in excellent condition.

He then examined the aged relic. Years of string tension had bowed the body; the bridge now sat too high; the frets were uneven; the strings themselves stiff and unyielding. The repairs, he reckoned, would run to about £130. Given that the new Córdoba — a far superior instrument — cost £132, the economics were self-evidently absurd. We agreed the old guitar had had its day.

I’ll restring it anyway, keep it downstairs, and use it as a knockabout practice instrument when I can’t be bothered to trek upstairs. The new Córdoba will remain the guitar that delivers on sound quality and playability.

A useful half hour, and an unexpectedly pleasant one. Tim is exactly the sort of artisan you hope to find: expert, self-effacing, and equipped to handle anything from fretwork to electronics. Good to know he’s close by.

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New bucket list items

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This picture was taken last year, but it may as well have been taken yesterday: I’ve re-joined the gym at Wells Leisure Centre. Their pricing policy went sharply skyward back in January 2025, making practice effectively unaffordable. However, a few days ago I took it up with the manager and we struck a deal, so I’m back after eleven months in the idle wilderness.

Muscle-memory did its job. The Cheng Man-ching 24-step Tai Chi form and the first four Heian kata of Shotokan have survived more or less intact. The Tai Chi sword form, however, has dissolved into glittering fragments. That will take a few days of deliberate reconstruction.

Cordoba C1M classical guitar

I rarely consult my bucket list (drafted ironically, naturally), but I’ve decided to master blues fingerpicking. In my guitar-playing teens and early university years I mostly strummed chords or played electric lead on my beloved Fender Stratocaster. Fingerpicking was something I admired from a safe distance; it wasn’t the music that set my blood moving. I may have toyed with the Rolling Stones classic, Angie, but I never realised I had to systematically train the fingers - and the thumb.

ChatGPT explained that fingerpicking is essentially piano by other means: different parts of the hand doing fundamentally different things at the same time, all of it needing to be drilled to automaticity. Fair enough. Repetition.

Then came the advisory note that you also need a decent guitar. My current instrument has a ludicrously high action and nylon strings that feel like barbed wire; my tortured fingertips forced abandonment. But now I remembered the effortless pleasure of my old Strat compared with the cheap box I’d dragged to Warwick: argument over.

And finally, here's the book GPT5.1 recommended.

Amazon

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Diary: without inspiration, the guitar

The world trundles along and attempts to provoke me - but I don't rise to the bait. Nothing has impelled me to the keyboard. So in the absence of inspiration, let me tell you that I have persisted in the guitar (it must be all of three days now).

As I audit the cobwebby ruins of my youthful craft, I discover that my chord placement is now poor. All the usual neophyte errors: buzzing, clunking and muffling. So at the price of fingertip-pain and forearm soreness I am seeking good form above all.

Secondly I am paying attention to fingerpicking: initially choosing the correct chord-bass-string for the thumb while plucking the top three strings without looking at them .. consistently, and in the right order.

Amazon link

Finally, I'm focusing on Paul Simon's "America" (from the songbook above). This is, astonishingly, scored in E♭  - can you imagine anything worse for guitar? Why not score it in C and use a capo if we needed to raise the pitch? Anyway, I transposed all the chords to C in the interests of my own sanity.

"America" is a beautiful, plaintive, elegiac song and it achieves these effects by esoteric chords such as major sevenths and ninths. So my chord-vocabulary is receiving attention.

Little and often is my mantra: you may get a video in a few weeks, once I can get through it at all.

Diary: Guitar for Dummies

Recapturing those rock-n-roll years ..

My first stringed instrument was an old family mandolin, which I was given as a young teen. I would try to play the blues in my bedroom with John Peel on the radio. Later I saved up for a stylish acoustic guitar with pickup, which I could plug into the back of the valve radio (the 'ext mic.' socket). How my parents thrilled to Eric Clapton's solo from "Sunshine of Your Love" screaming through their house.

I wanted to be a lead guitarist, and at Warwick in my first term I acquired a strat from another student who was just terminating his own rock-god aspirations. I played in a student band and we once warmed up 'Free' at the student union. They were kind enough to allow us to use their amps after we blew up the union's Marshall - turned out it couldn't be turned up to eleven.

But I was not very good - my deficiencies not sufficiently obscured by generous use of the fuzz box and wah-wah pedal.

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Where did the guitar pictured above come from?

I forget, but it's been occupying the loft for many years now. Still, reading about Joni has awakened my inner music-artisan. My skills were always idiosyncratic, the bane of the autodidact. I can play a lead line and the usual chords, but fingerpicking I never learned: way too 'folky'.

Thankfully, the demeaning book also pictured above has a chapter on it, and I am instructed to spend half an hour a day in practice.

Maybe this afternoon.

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Down from the loft, I tuned the guitar and tried a few chords. My finger placement was very rusty and those callouses had long gone - I winced at the imprint of steel strings.

My plan for Monday is to encourage Clare to play three-chord, 12-bar background (A, D, E7) on piano so that I can do some (acoustic) lead. But really I should cast such indulgences aside and hunker down with a solo "House of the Rising Sun" - work away at that fingerpicking.

They say Eric Clapton's career bloomed once he discovered he could sing. Sadly, if that's what it takes, my second career is DoA .. a cat ran screaming from the garden.