I am a guitarist, composer and songwriter, and have played and studied the guitar for most of my entire life. Formally, for the first fifteen years or so I used a pick, having almost no awareness of anyone playing any other way. Then one day, a couple of years after my family moved to a large metropolitan area, I discovered the “Classic or Finger Style” of playing. By this time I was already established as a fairly employable guitarist, playing with various groups, doing solo performances, working in recording sessions with mainstream artist and signed with a major management agency... and in essence, being exclusively in the music business.
It was then I decided to stop using a pick and play only with my fingers. This created a problem with my employability in much of the music work as I knew it then. The major employers did not like the change and I lost lots of work, but I bit the bullet and dedicated myself to study and play only with fingers regardless. As time passed, things worked out fine however and I never picked up a pick again. Today I play only with the fingers, in the “Classical Style”, as it is referred to, on all my guitars whether acoustic or electric.
In my “Guitar works” recordings, I play original pieces as well as other music in what I call a spontaneous composition form. That is, just picking up the guitar and playing what you feel at the time, following no format, or charts. On this CD, “Six String Orchestra” I decided to do a group of totally solo pieces, that is single track recordings, completely improvised and primarily built around right hand rhythm guitar techniques. Also, since these pieces are spontaneous, they were all done on the spot, in the time periods that they exist on the recordings, with no edits, no retakes, or over dubbing. These rhythms and techniques are typically the kind of stuff that could be used anywhere in other recordings, even as in backing up another artist. They are a cross section of guitar/music ideas that I place primarily in the “Acoustic Rock” genre, because they are styles I have personally used on many performances and recordings in that area. Interesting to myself also was that they were all recorded within a three day period, whenever an inspiration came to do so and left in their original order, I tried different placements but it did not appear to work, and that’s when the single word titles came to me, they seemed to express a feeling of connectedness or continuity.
Thank you for checking things out, I hope you find something you enjoy.
Craig Smith
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