Kinloch Nelson Workshops
KINLOCH NELSON WORKSHOPS
These workshops will be mostly discussion, and a certain amount of playing. Each workshop is only an hour long & there is a lot to pack in. guitars are welcome but not necessary. You probably will want a notebook. If there is time I’ll stick around afterwards and answer questions.
Players of any level are welcome.
Kinloch N.
Class #1 Friday, April 16th 3:oopm
MAPPING THE FINGERBOARD
Friday April 16th – Seminol Paradise Seminar Room
$35
1. seeing the six strings as one string & building from there.
2. Points of Reference: open strings, the diagonal of redundancy, fretboard markers and the octave grid.
3. Horizontal & Vertical: the linear aspects of melody and chord motion.
4. Chord components and their relationship to scales. Scale layouts both across and along the fingerboard.
5. Why standard tuning produce five primary chord shapes, seemingly named after the strings: E,A,D,G, & C. (Q: What happened to B?)
6. Using the primary shapes and the octave grid as framework for understanding and cataloguing everything else: scales, melodies, riffs, bass runs, other chords. You don’t need a huge book of 5000 chords, or for that matter even a little booklet. You only need two pages and a little bit of understanding. You can figure out the rest.
7. Tying this all together to play songs. A folk song and a jazz standard as examples.
8. Handouts
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ALTERNATE TUNINGS
Saturday April 17th 3:00pm
Seminole Paradise Seminar Room
$35
1. A brief discussion of why Standard Tuning is the norm.
2. Starting from Standard Tuning and developing alternate tunings from there.
3. Some common and some not so common alternate tunings.
4. Simple fingertings to create or imply full chords, complex chord fingerings, a few scales & arpegios.
5. Using things you know in Standard Tuning to inform the learning process in an alternate tuning.
6. Harmonic content: the “tuning’s voice”
7. Notation methods and keeping track of tunings using TAB, standard notation, and “chicken scratching”.
8. Handouts: tunings list; diagrams; picking patterns and other tricks, lists of songs, players and suggested books.
9. A song or two to take with you.
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IT’S ABOUT TONE DYNAMICS & EXPRESSION: WHAT TO LISTEN FOR AND HOW TO GET THERE.
$40 – limited to 12 participants
Sunday April 18th 3:00pm
Seminole Paradise Seminar Room
Your fingers may play the guitar but your ears make the choices. Close examination of playing technique and understanding how guitars behave is the key to coaxing as many sounds out of the guitar as it can make. Expression comes from these.
This workshop/lesson will be all about developing sensitivity to tone possibilities, getting control over them, and how to listen to what you are doing. You will need a guitar. We will examine through demonstration and exercises what happens when the pick or fingernail hits the string: how the tone blossoms and decays. Under consideration will be: nail or pick angle, direction and intensity of attack, location along the string, effect of nail or pick shape and thickness, downward vs sideways strokes, how the string gets the guitar’s top moving, how one string affects another, realitve volume of melody vs chord, the interplay of harmonics and fundamentals, vibrato and sustain, silence and the open space, the role of the player’s ear and the attention and expectations of the listener.
Maximum 10 people. Fingerstyle guitar will be emphasized but all the principals under discussion are also pertinent to the use of flat picks or fingerpicks.