Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Here's my arrangement of this lovely Christmas song. Enjoy!

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Merry Christmas, everyone! Click the link to here my little rendition of Winter Wonderland...

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Autumn tour

I've been on tour for a couple of weeks with the Jackie Oates band, which has been enormous fun. Jackie has a new album out, called Saturnine on ECC Records, and the current set contains the album in its entirety. I even get to play childrens' toy hand bells on stage, and bassist, James Budden has found new skills as a glockenspiel player!

We've played so far in Ivybridge, Bristol at the Colston Hall, Nottingham Glee Club, The Sage in Gateshead among other places, and we're off to Germany and the Isle of Man this weekend and next, respectively.

During a day off, we stayed at the incredible Brancepeth Castle in Durham, and took the opportunity to shoot a low budget music video for the album track, Young Johnson. We don't expect an Oscar, but it was a lot of fun making none the less. Here's the video:

Cheltenham Guitar Festival

I've just returned home from an exhausting but brilliant week teaching my acoustic guitar class at the annual Cheltenham Guitar Festival. I had 15 wonderful people in the group and we worked on various songs by The Beatles, Jack Johnson, Neil Young and the like, and then participated in the end-of-week 'Night of 1000 Guitars' concert, which was nerve wracking but brilliant fun. The picture shows my guys in full flow!

Week two (rock week) is just starting, so good luck and have fun to all those involved, but for me, I'm going to catch up with some sleep!

Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends

I recently undertook a studio session recording two tracks for the Fisherman's Friends Special Edition album (thanks to my mate, Jon Bishop for the contact). The two songs were (What Shall We Do With) The Drunken Sailor and When the Boat Comes In.

A couple of days ago, I was idly watching ITV1, as one does, and the ad for their new album came on, and there I was, banjo-ing away in the background :-)

Glad they kept my parts!

Acoustic Guitarist of the Year 2011

Hi all,

Last Friday, June 1st, I was invited to be a judge for the prestigious Acoustic Guitarist of the Year competition, run by Guitarist Magazine (for whom I've been the acoustic techniques columnist since the year Umpteen-Hundred and Eleventy...). The competition was held in the beautiful Queen Elizabeth Hall, at the South Bank Centre, and run in conjunction with the London Guitar Festival (part of IGF).

There were six nervous finalists, and frankly, they were all fabulous with vastly contrasting styles, ranging from country picking to slappy-tappy to folky and melodic.

I think there would have been no uproar had any one of them walked away with the lovely prize guitar kindly donated by Takamine Guitars, but as the cliche goes, there could be only one, so...

...many congratulations to Will McNicol, for his stunning composition, that I was humming for the rest of the afternoon!

I also had a great time catching up with old friends, fellow judge Michael Watts and wonderful guitarist Amrit Sond, who'd come to enjoy the competition.