Subject: RE: Any serious 12 strings players left?
From:
Ross Campbell
Date: 19 Feb 08 - 05:14 PM
I've always (it seems) finger-picked instruments, starting on six-string guitar, five-string banjo (I blame Billy Connolly and Pete Seeger). Never figured out flat-picking on guitar to my satisfaction, so I don't do it. For a while I played tunes on a Portuguese mandolin (or Thueringer waldzither) - four double courses and a single bass fifth - with a plectrum, but went back to finger-picking that for song accompaniments. When I finally arrived at a twelve-string I liked (and now my instrument of choice after concertinas), it never occurred to me that there could be problems with finger-picking - so I never found any!?
When I'm not fingerpicking concertinas I fingerpick a Fylde Falstaff 12-string. I use a dropped-D tuning, but tune the whole thing a tone flat ie C Bb C F A D and capo at the 2nd fret to get back to D A D G B E. This capo (a Jim Dunlop) stays in place more or less permanently, and I use a Shubb capo to move around the fretboard. This seems to keep the intonation fairly well in line, and only occasional corrections to one or two strings are ever required. So I can't see where the hard work comes in. Or maybe I've just been lucky with the guitars I've found - having Roger Bucknall of Fylde Guitars just round the corner when he started off may have helped - I have always found his instruments a joy to play.
When I started getting interested in guitars (around 1965) there was a late-night programme on one of our two UK TV channels called "Hold Down a Chord", presented by John Pearse. He took a half-dozen beginners through the basics of song-accompaniment, and introduced them and audiences to the likes of Leadbelly, Reverend Gary Davis, Big Bill Broonzy and others. The series was followed by another on finger-style guitar which I think introduced the idea of guitar tablature to help figure out fingering. That's what got me started, and I've just kept going from there - if you stop learning, you might as well just stop!
Today, even with umpteen digital channels, you couldn't find such a programme in the listings. How do you learn these days?
I guess some things like guitar tabs are more readily available with the Internet, and a few YouTube videos I have seen could give you pointers to how to play stuff, but seeing people playing live was always the best for me - in the '70s you could go to a folk-club every night in a twenty-mile radius from here (and I occasionally tried!), but now there's only one club in the North-West booking guests on a weekly basis (the Clarence, Blackpool). And twelve-string players are pretty rare in the line-up - but that wouldn't decide for me whether to go to a gig, anyway. A good player of whatever instrument is always worth hearing/seeing. You can always take some little thing away to try - I'm still trying to figure out some of John James' ragtime guitar pieces for Anglo concertina!
Ross
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