The Master's Hand

I've been away for a couple of days at a blues guitar master class weekend, which was taught by the very gifted Matt Schofield and by Professor Tomo Fujita of Berklee College of Music.  In musical terms it has been challenging, if great fun. 

This is a picture of Tomo playing an original 1962 cherry red Gibson 335 with a block inlaid neck and original PAF hum buckers.  Its owner kindly lent it to Tomo for the weekend when he heard that he was going to be in the country.  You have to know your guitars to understand, sufficient to say that this is a very special guitar and conservatively worth upwards of £30,000.  It sounded fantastic and was a great piece of history, but nowadays its an investment primarily and a musical instrument second.

Tomo asked us to individually consider who our 5 favourite blues guitarists were, and then what were our 5 favourite blues albums.  If you chose an album not by one of your selected guitarists then you needed to rethink your first answer.  

He then made us refine that down to our favourite 5 tracks, which represented our blues core.  From this we then needed to decide what we needed to learn to be able to play the blues better.  Many of us could not answer those questions (at least, not without some time to think). He smiled at us and said with an air of sadness, that if we did not know what we wanted to learn, then he was not able to teach it to us.

 I certainly have plenty to think about over the next few months.