Stefan Grossman – Buckets Of Rain: Fingerpicking Possibilities In Open D Tuning taught

Stefan Grossman: In these last few years I have been spending a lot of time exploring and wandering in the Open D tuning (D A D F# A D). Henry Worrall composed and arranged Sebastopol, a solo parlor guitar piece, in an Open D tuning and published it in 1860 with A.C. Peters & J.L. Peters, music publishers, Cincinnati, Ohio. The piece was very popular throughout the nineteenth century. Worrall intended the piece to be an imitation of a military bugle and band. Somehow, Worrall’s Sebastopol entered in to the folk music tradition of the 1800s and both Black and White rural musicians played versions of this tune. Over the years the title changed from Sebastopol to Sevastopol and then to Vestapol or Vastapol. Today’s guitarist generally refer to an Open D Tuning as Vestapol tuning.

In my lesson Fingerpicking Blues Guitar Arrangements in Vestapol Tuning (GW1011) I explored various blues ideas, arrangements and techniques in the Open D Tuning. In this new lesson we go beyond the blues with five arrangements that span a Country song (Tennessee Waltz), Pop (Bob Dylan’s Buckets of Rain and the Beatles’ In My Life), an Old-Time banjo tune (Waterbound) and a funky downhome Delta blues (Como Blues).

In this lesson you’ll enjoy the many tonal possibilities that this tuning offers in a variety of diverse music. Hopefully these arrangements will open up your guitar playing to encompass new and evocative sounds and textures. Each tune is taught phrase by phrase and played slowly on a split-screen. A detailed tab/music booklet is included as a PDF file on the DVD.