Guitarbench.com recently revamped its content into an online magazine format, and I am happy to say I have an article in the first issue. It covers some right hand fingerstyle techniques, melodic playing in Orkney tuning, and includes an arrangement of O’Carolan’s Receipt. I am happy to be writing for these guys and looking forward to doing more in the future. Its free to view and subscribe, so be sure and check it out.
Acoustic Guitar Magazine has one of my favorite guitarists, John Doyle, on the cover of the current issue. I don’t know if its on the newsstands yet, but issue is featured on their website and I am sure subscribers have gotten it by now. The online content is great because you can download the TAB and also view video content, which is a big help. I use the Download Helper Plug In for Mozilla Firefox to download the individual flash videos for later viewing. If you buy the physical issue it should come with a password to access the online content at a later date, which is cool.
I have been lucky enough to see John Doyle on concert a few times and took a weeks work of classes from him at the Swannanoa Gathering Guitar Week last year. Those classes covered flatpicking, chordal backup, and accompanying singers. John’s strumming backup style has been pretty well covered on his DVD and other places, but I really liked that the most recent article notated out some of techniques he uses to backup songs. He does this using a flatpick and his middle finger, and gets a sound that is closer to fingerpicking. Its cool because he go from a fingestyle kind of accompaniment to flatpicking lead lines to faster rhythmic strumming in the space of the same tune. He went over the hybrid picking technique in the class I took, but it was hard to really grasp it just by watching him. Being able to work on some of these notated examples will be handy.