Sacred Music For Fingerstyle Guitar

Product Description Sacred music creates unique opportunities for developing evocative and beautiful fingerstyle guitar arrangements. In this DVD, El McMeen demonstrates the use of such techniques as harp-like, arpeggios, alternate bass, and open C-G-D-G-A-D tuning to present moving and powerful sacred solos from around the world. A detailed tab/music booklet is included as a PDF file on the DVD. DVD is region 0, playable worldwide. Review El McMeen's solo acoustic guitar sings soulfully throughout his playing... a great introduction to the lovely, lyrical CGDGAD tuning." --Guitar Player Magazine About the Actor El McMeen began playing the acoustic guitar while attending Harvard in the mid-1960's. At the time he took up guitar, he was an accomplished clarinet player and singer, and had studied piano. At first, McMeen didn't approach the guitar primarily as a solo instrument, but used it as accompaniment for his singing. Upon reapplying himself in the early 1980's to the instrument, he encountered what he saw as an incredible breadth of music that one could try to render on guitar. He found himself attracted to Irish and Scottish music, alternative tunings, and different approaches to rendering and arranging music. After listening to Dave Evans on Irish Jigs, Reels, Hornpipes, and Airs (1979, Kicking Mule, reissued on Shanachie 97011), McMeen became attracted to the richness of the CGDGAD tuning and found it accessible, evocative, and versatile, and extremely stimulating to his own creativity on the guitar. After two decades of arranging pieces in that tuning, El has become the leading student of the tuning, and he has written extensively on it, including collaborating on the ground-breaking Mel Bay book The Complete Celtic Fingerstyle Guitar Book, co-written with Stefan Grossman and Duck Baker. El's music is characterized by lyrical beauty and a sensitivity to melodic phrases enhanced with tasteful arpeggios, cross-picking, and walking bass lines, and his uptempo pieces evidence energy and pulse. His artistry has been praised by numerous publications, including Acoustic Guitar Magazine, Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine and Guitar Player Magazine. El's music has been hailed by critics as "stirring ... unbridled acoustic beauty" and "drop-dead gorgeous" (Guitar Player Magazine) and as a "treasure" (Dirty Linen Magazine). The International Acoustic Music Awards organization ("IAMA") announced, in December 2010, that McMeen has been included in its list o