Dave’s Photo Blog

I had the great fortune to combine many of my favorite things today into one big slice of the afternoon. Music, acoustic guitar and a little photography to boot. Those of you that play acoustic music in the Boston area have no doubt heard of The Music Emporium. It’s an area institution that sells all manner of stringed acoustic instruments, and especially guitars. From time to time, The Music Emporium will run workshops with talented musicians from around the country. I attended today’s workshop on fingerstyle guitar playing given by Pete Huttlinger.

Pete Huttlinger is an award-winning fingerstyle guitarist and graduate of the Berklee College of Music. He’s a respected studio player, but has also played with the likes of John Denver and LeAnn Rimes. In 2000, he won the National Fingerstyle championship at the Walnut Valley Festival and I can tell you personally it was well deserved. This guy is amazing. He taught the workshop today at The Music Emporium store in Lexington, Massachusetts. The store is closed on Sunday – this was a registration-only event that cost $25 and sold out. Pete had played the night before at the Regent Theatre, an Arlington venue I recently wrote about.

I had not been to a workshop at The Music Emporium before, so I had no idea what to expect. But I’ve been to the store many times – I bought my Larrivée there. I also had my Larrivée repaired there as well, but I haven’t had time to tell that story. Before I go through the workshop, check out this video of Pete playing Brown Bomber.

With Pete’s credentials firmly in place, let me now tell you a little about the workshop. The audience was limited to 25 or 30 people. Each person had a chair and enough space for a guitar. Stupidly, I hadn’t realized I should bring my guitar and I arrived without one. But I noticed a lot of people were playing instruments from the store with price tags still on them. So I asked longtime employee Tim Mann if I could use a store guitar as well. He calmly handed me a $1,500 Taylor and I sat down and started playing. Thanks Tim!

And what a blast it was. Pete had two songs to teach today. A 12-bar blues tune in G with a walking bass line and a Scottish folk song, The Flowers of Edinburgh played in DADGAD tuning. (For those of you who aren’t guitarists, the standard guitar tuning is EADGBE. DADGAD involves dropping the pitch on three of the strings to get those notes: D to E, B to A and E to D from the bottom to top string, respectively. DADGAD is common in Celtic music as well as folk and even new age. It was a treat to learn a song in an alternate tuning.

Pete had sheet music with tablature for both songs and the level of talent in the audience seemed pretty good. A number of us were able to play substantial portions of both songs by the end of the workshop.  But Pete worked us on the blues tune quite deliberately. The song involved a walking bass line with a couple of chords thrown into each measure. He started by drilling the chords for quite awhile, and for a good reason. Because there is a walking bass line under the chords, you can’t finger them the same way each time you play them. I mean, we’re talking the blues here – there were only three chords. But the G7 in particular (The blues is I-IV-V and it was in G, so G7 was the I) had at least three different fingerings in order to easily accommodate the walking bass line.

The other interesting thing about the blues song was that you really had to use the left hand’s pinkie. A lot of guitarists don’t use the pinkie because, frankly, it’s a pain. It’s not very strong and accurate and it’s easy to get away with songs using the ring finger it its place. Luckily, I do practice and play with my pinkie and some parts of the song were a lot easier, particularly using the pinkie to play part of the bass line. That’s really hard to do if you haven’t practiced with your little finger. But even with that technique thrown in the mix, the song was a good choice because even people with relatively little experience could get parts of it to sound good pretty quickly and that’s highly motivating.

Once we had the chords down, he threw in the bass line and we started playing more and more sections of the song. Towards the end, he showed some alternative techniques for changing up the bass line, soloing and even walking chords down to the end of the song. And late in that session on the first song, he stopped us all. He didn’t want people playing the same exercise for too long because your brain starts to fry. So he paused everything and just played a couple of songs.

If you’ve never been in The Music Emporium, it’s hard to describe just how amazing the selection of instruments is, so I had to illustrate what kind of place this is. There are beautiful guitars everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

Towards the end of the workshop, he started to just take more questions as people worked through the Scottish song. Someone asked the question I was going to ask – how does he keep up his fingernails? I don’t play true fingerstyle, you see, because I tend to use a pick and then my third and fourth fingers in alternation. A true fingerstyle player uses a thumb pick and the second, third and fourth fingers in alternation. Pete told us about how he’d had problems with the thumb pick dropping off while he was playing. So he now glues a small bit of 800 grit sandpaper to the inside of the thumb-pick and that creates enough tension to keep it on without ripping up his skin. But as for his nails, he goes to the salon and gets acrylic nails put on every three weeks or so.

He also talking about the dangers of playing more for, let’s say, ambiance than melody. When he had his guitar in DADGAD, he showed how you can create a rich sound while not doing all that much on the guitar, but playing for effect. You see, when you are tuned in DADGAD, just strumming the open strings makes a really bold and beautiful chord. So with just a few other fingers, and maybe hitting the strings on the neck of the guitar and popping a few harmonics, you can sound really cool. But his point is that there is no melody in such playing and thus no lasting memory of what the song actually was. That doesn’t mean there isn’t any merit in that style of playing, it is just not something that he is particularly interested in, and judging from the reaction of the attendees, we all agreed with him. It was funny but also instructive and I fully agree with the point he was making.

The value of a workshop like this is not only that you learn how to play a couple of new songs. That part is great. But more importantly, you are exposed to many, many different techniques some of which you practice right there at the time. And you are challenged as well, since you have an instrument and you can play and ask questions. If you are an avid guitarist as I am, you put each new technique and trick immediately into circulation in other music that you play (as appropriate, of course) and thus your level of playing increases across the board. It was well worth the money and time and Pete Huttlinger turned out to be talented, funny, engaging and just an all around great teacher.