Rolly Brown teaches an organized approach to exploring and combining rhythm, melody, and harmony to create fingerstyle guitar arrangements. This lesson includes numerous tips, tools and techniques, a look at approaching different musical styles and just enough theoretical knowledge to get you started at arranging your own versions of whatever sort of music you want to create on the guitar. Numerous examples are shown and discussed.
Topics include:

• Arpeggiated rolling rhythm

• Arranging for constant alternate bass

• Chord choice and substitution

• The essential tones concept

* Arranging with a walking bass lines

• Bossa Nova rhythm

• Ragtime

• Fingerstyle blues

97 minutes • Level 2 • Tab/Music material is on the DVD as a PDF file

Review: Being able to sign your signature on music - be that reconstruction of others' works or your own original composition - comes with the magic powers of arranging. Molding melody with supportive harmony chords and an underlying rhythm of choice turns tunes into putty in your hands. For 97 minutes, you apprentice with string whiz Rolly Brown, who walks you through the inventive process, ever mindful of newcomers to the art. Here, "Shenandoah," "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band" become illustrative springboards into the open waters of personalized creativity. For extra spice, "Gentle Rain" serves as a model for oh-so-cool bossa nova, just as "Sportin' Life" stands in for salt-of-the-earth blues. The chiming instrumental "Salvo Y Pepe" is wholly homemade, offering insight into songcraft completely from scratch. From initially deciding which key to use, the lesson builds methods to enrich any project's color and texture through bass movement, counter-melody fills, chord progression and substitution, relative minor chords, and syncopation. Brown's ongoing "Nuts & Bolts" DVD series is all about empowering guitarists by applying foundational concepts through practical need-to-know skills which promote confidence and foster artistic independence: Chords, Melody, Fingerpicking. Even maximizing your reward from Practice time. But Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar is really quite the jailhouse key needed to spring you free on your escape from copier to creator. – Dennis Rozanski/Blues Rag