Has anyone here heard of this: “Irish Rhythm Guitar: Accompanying Celtic Tunes taught by John Doyle - video”
(which I found on the Ossian website)
I have played guitar for about 14 years and have been building up my Irish guitar for about a year and a half. John Doyle is probably my favourite guitar player in this realm and I am considering getting it. Any ideas if it’s good?
thanks,
I’ve not heard of this video but would be very interested to purchase it if it’s available.
What I do have is a video by Gavin Ralston called ‘Irish Traditional Guitar Accompaniment’. Ralston uses only drop D tuning but his advice carries over easily enough to other tunings. Even though I came to this music with even more experience on guitar than you have, I still find teaching resources like this very useful. So much of my guitar education came from standing in front of guitarists on stage and watching and listening intently.
I have the Doyle video. He uses dropped D tuning. There’s a booklet that gives you his chords and the chords to the tunes that are played on the video. The video is good and the approach could be carried over to another tuning-particularly DADGAD. The thing is that the video demonstrates his strumming pattern. It’s essentially an invariant eight-to-the-bar strum (in reels) with fairly subtle accents. By eight to the bar I mean that he constantly strums back and forth eight strums to a bar in reels and hornpipes and six in jigs. The way he accents makes it seem as if this is not actually what he is doing but I have watched him (on TV) and he actually plays this way all the time. He is a master of this type of strumming but I find it very difficult to do it his way. Impossible, actually. Therefore the main thing for me was his chords and the way he applies them to tunes. It’s worth having.
Steve
Thanks Steve. That strumming style is what’s so distinctive about Doyle’s rhythmic work so it’s good to hear that it’s featured.
One thing that can’t be emphasized too much about Doyle’s style is his accenting. I’ve heard guitar players strumming back and forth and a lot of times it’s very heavy handed. Listen carefully to Doyle’s work with Solas, Liz Carroll or whatever you can find. He doesn’t use a lot of chords but he sure makes the most of them. I have a book by Gavin Ralston and I like some of the stuff in it but I have to adapt it so I can manage to play it. Using the bass runs that he suggests is really more along the lines of what I can manage on the guitar since my previous background was mainly just folk and old-time.
Steve
Thanks guys! This is what I was looking for. I have almost stretched myself thin. I play whistl, guitar, mando, and now working very hard on flute for the past several months.
I will try to get this for Christmas then!
John Doyles strumming patterns are similar to the rhythms produced by a very good bodhran player. The hand goes up and down but the emphasis or accent of the beat can shift to produce 2, 3, 4, or other divisisions of a beat producing reels, jigs and syncopations.