Clinic on Arranging Pop Tunes for Solo Guitar with Doug Young

Clinic on Arranging Pop Tunes for Solo Guitar

Saturday March 2 at 10:30 a.m. Free admission.

DIRECTIONS: Evergreen Valley High School

In this session, we’ll explore the process of arranging a tune for solo instrumental guitar from scratch. We’ll go step-by-step and develop an arrangement of a pop tune – though the process could apply to any piece of music, including traditional songs or even your own compositional ideas. We will be using standard tuning with the examples applying to both nylon and steel string guitars using fingerstyle techniques. The session is accessible to all levels as long as you are comfortable with basic fingerstyle or classical playing. Handouts will be provided using both tab and standard notation. Recording is welcome.

Doug Young is an instrumental fingerstyle guitarist, composer, and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He focuses on defining his own voice as an instrumentalist and creates compositions and arrangements that emphasize melody, tone, and phrasing. He performs solo as well as in a duo with Teja Gerken.

His recordings include Laurel Mill (2003), named after a campground in the Santa Cruz Mountains where he studied with Alex de Grassi, Closing Time (2011), Forever Christmas (2020), and Duets (2020) with Teja Gerken. His tune "Autumns Roads" from Closing Time won the Best Instrumental prize from the International Acoustic Music Awards.

Doug is the author of the best-selling Mel Bay instructional book Understanding DADGAD: For Fingerstyle Guitar and Acoustic Guitar Amplification Essentials from String Letter Publishing, among other books devoted to fingerstyle guitar. He is a contributing editor for Acoustic Guitar Magazine and also teaches a course on alternate tunings on instruction website Peghead Nation.

An experienced audio and video recording engineer, Doug has recorded his own CDs and singles as well as other artists including Steve Baughman, Anton Emery, and Teja Gerken. Doug's mixing and mastering projects include Fran Guidry and Led Kaapana’s Kaleponi & Kalapana and Teja Gerken Test of Time.