Improve your fingerpicking speed

WHEN I AM composing and arranging music, I like to think as an orchestrator. As the guitarist, I try to represent just about everything that’s in the arrangement — the drum syncopations, horn parts, k

Echoes of Exile Works by Bartók, Ben-Haim, Enescu, Ysaÿe and Zimmermann Sueye Park (violin) BIS BIS-2332 63:06 mins Turbulence from the Second World War impacts most of the composers on this album. Th

When I first heard the classical music of North India, my musical world shifted on its axis. I was in the cinema, watching Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which had just opened in the UK and was takin

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

I enjoyed reading Francesco Piemontesi’s Concert Heaven, Concert Hell interview (September) about his ‘best’ and ‘worst’ performance... in the semi-final of the Elisabeth Competition in 2007! In fact,

LAST MONTH, I talked about how I devised the primary riffs in the title track to my 2023 album Hard Wired, which is played in drop D tuning (low to high: D, A, D, G, B, E). I’d now like to share some