Tuesday, 26th May 2026 The week's run of clear weather continued into Tuesday for a booking at Bourton Hall. To think that I have lived just down the road from this venue for my whole life and have never visited, let alone heard of it before, could be thought of as absurd, but such is the way of the wedding venue industry. The scheduling here ran like clockwork, and to my relief, the venue had a blanket order that prohibited outdoor amplified performances. The compromise for

The week opened with an intention to focus on some memorisation work for an upcoming country theatre project. An all-day rehearsal was scheduled for Wednesday and would be the only chance for the full line-up to get together before the first official show on 29th August. Having secured a dozen theatre bookings for the later part of this year is a major milestone, but coordinating calendars has proven incredibly difficult due to everyone’s competing professional commitments. I

The countryside is remarkably good at hiding things. Yesterday’s gig was in rural Bedfordshire, near a charmingly named village called Newton Blossomville. My primary map dropped me off at an unlabelled patch of grass by a hedge and gave up. With zero signal on my phone, I was off the grid. I finally hunted down enough data by driving through the lanes, conscious that data and stopping places didn't always occur in the same place. A second app finally chimed in, to cheerfully

It's been a couple of weeks since I put these notes together, so unfortunately I've forgotten what they were specifically to work on. I'd...

Some tunes are more involved than they first look. I find I need to look at the micro changes so that the sum becomes playable. Such a...

There are a couple of ways to look at this study. One is to take a pair of strings and work your way as far up the neck as you're...

If there's one thing that guitarists and singers are good at, it's changing the key of a song. If there's one thing that has the...

There's a phrase that's been around for as long as the hills, which is that if you want to get good at something you need to Repeat,...

I found this riff while jamming to a backing track. I tend to play the riff swung, but can be played straight. The exercises from the...

Loosely based on a bit from the prelude of Bach's cello suite #6 where the piece goes from quavers to semi quavers.

More up the scale and down the scale, but this time there are some double stop exercises mixed in. The idea is to move fingers only when...

First in a series of Scale exercises I'll be publishing - originally for violin but can be adapted to any instrument This exercise...