"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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I'm making progress!

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So my next lesson will be the third week of April after the Easter break. I'm currently assigned the Paul Simon arrangement of Scarborough Fair - very pretty but the guitar counterpoint needs to be played very fast to keep up with the vocal tempo while the Baroque arpegios provide little melody guidance, with the difficulties augmented by those little filler notes Simon introduces to make it more 'interesting'. I think I should be trying to sing to it, rather than just stagger through the score.

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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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