How did you get into fingerstyle guitar, and what songs and artists do you advise them to listen to get into this world and would like to deepen their studies?
I had my first experience as an electric guitarist in various bands before discovering the 33 LPs of only acoustic guitar. I immediately felt interested in this original path that, at that time, was not very popular. When I moved to Bologna, I got to know some acoustic guitarists and thus began to broaden my knowledge and discover the music of Leo Kottke, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and many others.
I had my first live experiences in pubs performing solo and in a duo.
I then met Giovanni Unterberger in Florence, who was producing books for Bèrben and was looking for a guitarist who could write a book dedicated to fingerstyle blues.
It was the beginning of my career just for a talk. In truth, nothing happens at once, just with one contact or a publication. It was just a first step. Slowly I entered this little world intending to write a good book. I went out to discover the pioneers of the blues and began to expand my contacts.
I have to say that I was looking for what I liked to listen to; I was perfectly aware of what I loved the most.
This approach is still valid. Still, I recommend personally deciding what to listen to and not passively submitting.
It sounds like a detail, but think about what you listen to on the radio, TV or just walking into supermarket-noise pollution.
That is why I advise young musicians to form musical tastes and then search for what they like and perhaps can play or arrange.
But don’t just listen to guitarists. I’m talking about the music as a whole band, orchestras, soloists, and anything that grabs you and surprises you.
Regarding the study, it is also fundamental to have a good teacher, perform scales and exercises, complete pieces correctly, study harmony and have continuous comparisons with enthusiasts and, especially, professionals.
What are the principal “skills” a fingerstyle guitarist should have?
Above all, avoid lack during the study. Then besides having a good teacher, it is vital to be a good student. Having a strong motivation to improve, set goals for yourself. For example, improve your reading, posture, playing, and regarding the latter, try to be a strict judge of what you play yourself. Never get excited about your first results but always move forward.
Essential is also to experience playing with others, mainly because, as a soloist, you have few opportunities to do so. Moreover, it is not sure that your path is to perform as a soloist. Never take anything for granted.
Often the guitarist’s setup is an issue. How do you recommend approaching studio and live preparation?
The setting should always be the same, whether a studio or live. We are talking about the way you play. It is good to play the instrument with the same setting, which should provide maximum performance with minimum effort.
At the same time, the posture must be the best according to the body, favouring the movements of the limbs and fingers.
For example, bending the wrist too much is not conducive to finger movement. Unlike the classic, the acoustic guitar generally stands on the right leg, and the fingerboard below has a horizontal position. With this setup, I started to have back problems and later realized that resting the instrument on my left leg in a classical manner was conducive to proper back posture. Now I use the shoulder strap even when I play sitting down, and the fretboard position is oblique, just as if the guitar stands on my left leg. Therefore I have solved the problems with my back and improved the sound of my right hand, too.
You perform your compositions using alternative tunings to the standard tuning. What criterion do you use to change tuning and compose a piece in alternative or standard tuning?
The acoustic guitar conceptually is closer to the banjo than the classical guitar. Metal strings allow more or less frequent use of different tunings. Again, to have an idea, it is worth listening to what other guitarists have recorded. The concept is always to broaden or modify the sound spectrum of the instrument to one’s needs. A different tuning from the standard must be studied to know what it may or may not give you. Above all, you need to know that alternative tunings sound good in specific keys but not as much in others. Easy example: drop D tunes are generally played in the key of D because you get the bass of the tonic an octave lower, resulting in fullness and depth. We could also consider the key of G, if you want those same characteristics to have the bass of the dominant chord, precisely D. However, in addition to theoretical examples, it is also good to have practice with the study of specific pieces, perhaps in DADGAD which is a tuning widely used for Celtic music, see my book Celtic Fingerstyle Collection (The South Wind).
The criterion to choose the tuning is first to try playing the same tune with the standard. Sometimes it happens that this is the best tuning, it’s different from case to case, so the choice of tuning on the acoustic guitar is always a major one.
I use the standard for fingerstyle jazz arrangements, which are more complex harmonically and melodically. By the way, we have recently reprinted and expanded my Fingerstyle Jazz Collection.
I also use standard tuning for early repertoire pieces such as the book “Easy Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar.”
How do you organize your work when you have to arrange a piece for the guitar? And when, especially in arrangements of jazz pieces, you add ‘improvised’ parts, do you somehow try to fix those as well, or do you leave room for actual improvisation during the live concert?
In particular, the reason why I arrange ‘jazz standards’ only in standard tuning is simple. Besides being the tuning you know best, it allows you to play complex melodies and chords that other tunings would turn out to have positions that are too extended for the fingers and, in some cases, harmonically incomplete.
Even for jazz standards, I try to play the same tune in different keys to check the one that sounds best and is complete in counterpoint.
Well, I must confess that improvisation in fingerstyle, as Duck Baker used to say, is always risky in the sense that you are never totally free to improvise if you accompany solo lines with basses, always you need to compromise.
On my CD “Miles of Blues,” I perform a kind of pre-prepared improvisation after the theme. I play melodic lines and solo parts accompanied by the bass, so they have to be played in certain parts of the keyboard.
You can make different variations in practice impro must be studied in advance to work well.
Playing ‘solo’ do not requires just great technical skill but also intensely emotional and stress control. What do you advise for those performing?
When you play in public, the important thing is that what you play you have to know very well if you hope to play it well.
In addition to being very prepared, you better accept that ‘live’ you might lose 10 per cent or more of your performance level for various reasons, including stress and emotion, as you say.
It depends a lot on your character, but the only advice I can give is to play many times in front of an audience, no matter if they are your friends, parents or relatives, every opportunity is good to get used to it.
If you always play in your room, it is normal to have some tension in the presence of others. Understanding whether you were doing an introspective exam wouldn’t do any harm.
Ask yourself: ‘why do I play?’ To prove to others that you are good, or to communicate a certain kind of music?
I have to laugh, remembering a guy on a guitar course who answered: “Well Franco, actually I am a beach guitarist. I play the guitar to hit on girls in the summer.” I tell you: it was an honest answer. He bared his soul with his real goals. Good, he wasn’t naked or in a bathing suit, at least. 😂
Joking aside, when you play in front of an audience, try to be yourself and not play parts that are not your own. If you are well prepared, you will see that everything will be fine.
How do you build a good sound on the acoustic guitar, and what instrumentation do you use for your live performances?
There are many ways to electrify a guitar. The best is to try as many different models available as possible.
The goal is to get a sound that is present with good sustain even when playing outdoors or in challenging or noisy places.
But I tell you, in the presence of a proper audio system and a quiet audience listening to you, the sound of outdoor microphones is always the best as if you were in the studio. I use for live shows a system made in Japan that doesn’t have a pure acoustic sound, but it is still a good compromise: magnetic Sunrise + contact microphone, then I mix the two sounds through a preamp.
What do you recommend to a young person who wants to pursue a career as a fingerstyle guitarist?
Study, play, then study and then play. Repeat ‘ad libitum’.
You have to learn to become a good manager of yourself, too, knowing what to do to be more widely known and learning how to use new tools for producing your music. Nowadays, I see it is more engaging than yesterday. Try then to be focused more on your career as a musician than as a fingerstyle guitarist. In this way, the possibilities and opportunities become more numerous.
Would you like to tell us about the last “Strings of Heart” record and mention something about plans?
For the end of the year, I am preparing a collection of songs that, for many, I think will be a surprise.
I don’t talk about it otherwise: where is the surprise?
From the online shop of the new website www.acousticguitarworkshops.com (basically an extension of www.francomorone.it), we have sold many copies of the new CD “Strings of Heart” and streaming listens have also gone well, with appreciation received from fans from all over the world. It’s online also Strings of Heart’s book, with music notation and tabs, and it covers a long period of my activity, compositions that are very different from each other.
I hope to have more opportunities to present this new work in Italy and maybe have close encounters with guitarists and fans who follow me.
So see you soon and have good music!
Greetings, Franco
