The “Solo Guitar” Project
The Jazz Standards by Ted Gioia
Solo Guitar is a magical style of playing where the guitarist brings melody, chords, bass, and rhythm together all at once. To start to wrap your ear around the style, listen to tunes like “Deep River Blues” - Doc Watson, or take a look at Tommy Emmanuel’s energetic demonstration of the style in his TEDx talk.
In 2023 I came across a master of this style named Ted Greene who blew me away with his beautiful music and really challenged me with his dexterity, his understanding of the fretboard, and his immense harmonic vocabulary.
Over the last couple years I’ve been growing my ability to play in this style and make my own arrangements of tunes and I thought it would be fun to start to share them!
The Goals:
I’m going to consistently learn or create my own solo guitar arrangements and share them here in an effort to develop this skill and my ear. I’m hoping that those who follow along will either enjoy the music, be encouraged in their own learning, or some combination of the two! I know some say that goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound but I’m going to keep that mentality for my job and allow myself to enjoy something a little less concrete during the late evenings and weekends!
That being said, through this project I hope to:
Learn new music.
Grow as a solo guitarist (dexterity, knowledge of the instrument, harmonic vocabulary, feel and musicality, efficient creation of beautiful arrangements).
Grow as a performer. While I am not planning any live performances, I do hope I can dramatically cut down the time it takes me to record a solid take on video! It’s funny how the red recording light makes it so hard to nail a take!
Grow in community with other musicians and lovers of music. I hope I get to have some fun conversations with people who are following along. I love to talk about the guitar and would appreciate getting to do that with others.
The Rules:
I am going to be using Ted Gioia’s book The Jazz Standards - A Guide to the Repertoire as a guide (go figure!). His book is a handy reference of significant tunes. For each tune he has written a few pages of historical context and provided a detailed listening list of various performances. I’m using this book because jazz has been an area of focus for me over the last couple of years and it is also a vast and well explored territory for solo guitarists.
I am going to work alphabetically through The Jazz Standards. I am not going to skip any tune, though I may allow myself to modify some tunes to adapt to my skill level as I learn.
I will create an original arrangement of each standard or a transcription of another guitarist’s solo guitar performance of the standard. This will be written as sheet music and guitar tab.
I will record a video of me performing the piece!
I will create a blog post where I’ll share the video performance, write about what I learned while working on the tune, and post a link to download a PDF of my transcription.
For now I’m not going to put a time constraint on this project. Lately I’ve been able to practice for an hour or two each night but it’s getting harder to find quiet time to record. I can reassess this later on as needed.
I will tag relevant posts with “SGP” (Solo Guitar Project) in the title so it’s easy to follow along. Thanks for following along!