Last updated 27 May 2025
I taught a workshop at the La Conner Guitar Festival May 16-18 2025. This is a great event every year (although 2026 will be skipped, alas). There are loads of incredible guitars and their builders, and many tremendous musicians. It’s really worth the trip.
I may repeat this workshop in the future, so I’ll leave this description here.
Workshop description and audience
Joe Pass told us:
“Guitarists should be able to pick up the guitar and play music on it for an hour, without a rhythm section or anything.”
“If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterward.”
Joe was a titan, and this was great advice. Playing alone is the core of guitar music. And when playing alone, you can wander far from the written score.
This workshop covers strategies for surviving and thriving as a solo guitar performer. It is drawn from my years of solo playing in different musical genres, and from my observations of how great players excel (and how some others struggle).
Solo performance is a huge topic. The challenges of an intermediate player, asked to perform at a party, are very different from those of a concert artist. Still, there are common threads that unite all solo guitarists – we are a family.
Workshop content is adjusted to suit the audience, paying more or less attention to technique, material, improvisation, dynamics, and other aspects of solo work.
Workshop goals
Workshop goals depend on the goals and experience of individual participants.
- Intermediate players should get ideas for how to plan solo performances:
- Selecting material
- Creating a good solo sound
- Simple improvisation
- Using the guitar’s strengths
- Practice and study strategies
- Advanced players should get some new insights into solo work:
- Chord selection and voicing
- Using polyphony and voice leading
- Dynamics
- Building blocks for extended improvisation
- All players will get some examples to help find new solo choices