Guitar Lesson 17b: Dynamics in an acoustic band and soloing tips

In the second part of our lesson about playing acoustic guitar, Dan answers my question about how best to develop dynamics in an acoustic band.  Clearly much of this is down to good communication and familiarity with the people who you are playing with, but Dan comes up with some really interesting techniques and advice for being heard when soloing and having interesting dynamics for your audience.  The podcast can be listened to in full below and then I have also included a couple of relevant episodes from Jude Gold’s fantastic guitar podcast – NGIS or No Guitar is Safe – one on Tommy Emmanuel and one with Laurence Juber.

Episode 17b:

I edited and published this episode while travelling on holiday with my family (the podcasts are pre-recorded and I still have a couple of lessons already in the process of being edited into mini-lessons for you).  I edited episode 17b while on our flight and then, have had to be patient, because up to now I haven’t had the means of recording the intro.

I thought it might also be nice to include a little bit of information about our travels as part of this blog and attached to the relevant lessons for you.

Currently, we are in Monterey Bay having just left San Francisco.  San Francisco was a superb stay even though we did not have our luggage from the plane for the whole time we were staying in an AirBNB with the lovely Rosemarie in Millbrae.  The company we were flying with were an absolute joke (Westjet) and their communication with us was very poor indeed as obviously not having our luggage with a one year old (my daughter – Clara) was rather inconvenient to say the least.  Finally after spending time in San Francisco, enjoying meals, shopping in Chinatown, the cable cars and the Exploratorium (a great science museum!) we were set to get our hire car and start our road trip.  As our luggage still wasn’t with us we have had to hire a car seat (eventually at the expense of the airline we hope) and drove off to Monterey.

On the way we stopped and saw a whale blowing off out to sea and also some dolphins – which I managed to get a photo of.  When we arrived at Monterey we were reunited with our luggage and today have spent an amazing day looking round the outstanding Aquarium here.  We have seen sea otters out to sea and in the aquarium, seals, sea lions and a plethora of birds.

While delayed I put together a bit of playing from me and Dan into a little video which I share here:

Facebook video

Our set of lessons on the acoustic came at a good time, as Jude Gold has just published his podcast episode of an interview with Tommy Emmanuel from before one of his concerts.  It is brilliant and I really strongly recommend listening to that podcast; and also on the topic of acoustic guitar his interview with Laurence Juber.  Both are linked below:

Podcast episode 17a – in case you missed it:

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