All the music and publications on this page can also be purchased directly from by using the contact page listing what you would like to buy. Then I can give you some free add-ons as well. And it’s more for us both.
Solo Releases
BandCamp – Releasing music through BandCamp offers a unique and friendly environment for both listeners and artists alike. For the listener you can preview entire tracks a couple of times before you are prompted to buy. Then you can download in various formats that are easy to choose, like MP3, FLAC and WAV. This gives you a better listening experience. And you can listen on the move with the free app as well as download your purchases.
For artists we can add merch and links and this gives us a wonderful little website type page, to give our cherished customers much more of a linked in experience with our music. I have been releasing music through BandCamp for some time now and love the feel of the experience. It takes me back to the days when we could interact more with our clients but now using an up to date contemporary platform.
I’ll Be Going Then – Recorded to analogue in a beautiful country house studio in Gloucestershire. This was my first album release on CD. Mainly using steel string acoustic guitar and Fender Telecaster through a great old Valve Amp. All the tracks are originals except The Wind That Shakes The Barley, which features on rhythm Colin Harries, a wonderful young guitarist in the Irish tradition, who I was lucky enough to teach when we both lived in Manchester in the 1990’s.
A Few Short Thoughts 2010 – This E.P. is a mixture of up tempo tracks, like Fire Bon! which was written for our Son, who was around 3 at the time. He was such a cute little fella that he inspired this music. All tracks are instrumental originals using acoustic guitars, electric guitar and synth. Wind Horses uses the synth guitar and is written about the Prayer Flags that Tibetan’s use for their simple but pure & beautiful beliefs.
Blanket Affections 2013 – An album of cover versions of some of my favourite tracks from the many styles & composers who have helped me develop an approach to playing and harmony. A mixture of jazz, soul & popular music, mostly double tracked with rhythm & lead recorded separately and with a couple of solo arrangements
Dog 2013 – The tracks here are original compositions with a full band of bass, drums, percussion & keyboards, as well as guitars. I was experimenting with electronic music and guitars mixed together. The music is ethereal as well as dance oriented. Some of the inspirations for this approach are Jon Hassell and Hariprasad Chaurasia. To my ears they play music that is modern and yet timeless, acoustic but electronically aware of technological innovation and tradition.
Bug 2014 – These tracks are a mixture of originals and covers. To me they sit in a style that is light but with strong jazz elements. Some of the influences for example are the great singer songwriters of the 19060/70s. The mixture of beautiful melodies from people like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, gives much space to jazz players to have a lot of fun, while playing well arranged and beautifully crafted music.
L’Été indien • Indian Summer 2015 – This is a 1975 single by French singer Joe Dassin & was his biggest hit. It’s a really emotive melody & chord sequence and is my first single release. The arrangement here is purely instrumental with multi-tracked guitars. I’ve been looking forward to playing this piece for many years and finally had the time to work out an arrangement that I liked. The cover is a mash up photo of our youngest son, asleep and wearing a sea captain’s hat
Publications
Guitar Playing Theory into Practice
Knowing what we’re playing is fun. Not knowing isn’t. Perhaps since the Be-bop era in jazz and certainly since the dawn of some of the great singer-songwriters of the 1960’s & 70’s & right up to the present day, musicians in popular styles of all instruments have been looking in much greater detail at how music is structured.
This book is an attempt to write as concise a course as possible that musicians of any level can read from cover to cover, or use as a reference when needed or desired.
Blues Guitar Styles ~ 1. Beginnings
Aimed at ambitious beginners or players who want to switch to understanding about blues guitar playing. This is No.1 in a series that covers various aspects of different styles of blues guitar playing.
In this book you will learn basics of lead & rhythm, following detailed notes that are illustrated with MP3’s, notation & tablature. You’ll learn the blues scale and some intro & ending riffs and will apply those to some pre-written examples for both lead and rhythm. In addition you’ll start to look at how to improvise.
Once you’ve finished you’ll be able to play solo or with a duo or band, contributing backing or leads roles.
Improvisation Using the Modes of The Major Scale – For Guitarists
Improvisation as we know it in modern music is largely piecing together some of our favorite ideas to make something up on the spot. This course shows some riffs, along with backing tracks to play to and full versions of the tracks, so you can hear how the riffs sound. The backing tracks use rhythm guitar, bass & drums, with lead guitar added for the full tracks. Each Mode is tackled in a different style so we don’t get tied down to one way of playing. The audio files are available from the author direct by emailing after purchase.
Improvisation Using The Modes Of The Harmonic Minor Scale
This short course of ideas for learning to improvise using the Harmonic Minor Scale follows on from the course on Improvising on the Modes of the Major Scale, although it can be tackled completely separately as well. The course has transcribed ideas for riffs that fit to the different Modes of the Harmonic Minor Scale. The music is in Notation and Tablature with short descriptions showing which chords fit which riffs. Audio files that illustrate the music with one for lead and one for backing, are available from the author. The audio files use a full band of rhythm, bass & drums.
Improvisation Using The II V I Chord Sequence – For Guitarists
The II V I Chord sequence is the most commonly used sequence in both jazz and many other styles of music. Mostly used from the Major Key it is the 2nd 5th & 1st chords in sequence. It is used so much simply because we like the sound it makes and it occurs at the beginning of sections of music, at the end and in the middle. So we need to know as many ways to use it as possible and this course will help you start.
Music Reading – For Guitarists
The ability to read music is often seen as a mystery and it does not have to be that way.
With knowledge of a few simple tools you can read music onto the guitar, or any instrument and get better & quicker just by doing it. This short book gives you the tools to do this and empowers you to have a solid foundation in basic music reading skills. We can get better at reading music for as long as we use it but a few basics is a solid and practical foundation.
Collaborations
Projects with others. Session work, composing, production, engineering etc.
Ravi.FM – For some years now Seattle based singer-songwriter Ravi.FM and I have been co-writing and recording songs across the Atlantic. Ravi is wonderful to work with. His songs are mainly electric and acoustic guitars and vocals. The lyrics are often beautifully sparse, which allows the music to have more significance. This approach has been honed down to a high level in his recent release Between Intensions, which is available on all major platforms, as are all his releases.
If you live in the Seattle area I’d recommend trying to catch Ravi.FM live. There’s a driving music scene in Seattle and I expect that Ravi will be a growing, cherished and sought after part of that scene, as people become more aware of his talent. He won’t remain a secret forever.
Rocoto Blues Band – Further South Rocoto Blues Band’s 5 track E.P. 3 of the tracks on the 2017 release are songs written by Diego Vargas the lead vocalist and guitarist and Andy Brotherton, the main guitarist on most of Rocoto’s work & music arranger for the project. Both Diego & Andy in collaboration with Julio Gallardo, were also the engineers & producers of the E.P. in it’s recording stages. That is apart from Hoochie Coochie Man which was beautifully recorded by Jose Carlos Ponce at Elias Ponce Studios in Lima in 2016.
The contributions of each individual in every stage of the musical processes should not be underestimated. Jose Meneses bought some great ideas to the track Cry, which was written by Diego but which Jose added many elements that made the track so haunting. The subject is the floods in Peru in the Summer of 2017, which affected & displaced so many of the indigenous population and most often those least equipped to cope with such an event. The bass lines that Jose chose to counter the simplicity of the chords and lead guitar, punctuating the vocal plea of the character portrayed in the song, were a crucial addition.
Sofia Buckingham – “The songs that Sofia writes come from deep inside and speak of emotions wide ranging, telling of experience and understanding of life, way beyond her young age. In 2016, after many years writing songs she spent several weeks in Lima-Peru, recording her first album “Mistakes at 2 am”. This was Sofia’s first album, documenting her life to this point. The album is now available from iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, CD Baby and by emailing the contact page on this site for a CD copy.”
On this album I was lucky enough to play almost all guitars, act as co-writer on some tracks, do all the arrangements and be co-producer. Then came the single Stars, where we also programmed some of the basic track as well as working together on writing and all parts were recorded in my home studio, apart from the vocals, which were recorded in Madrid.
Ruth Royall – Ruth has many years’ experience working both in Studio and as a live singer. Ruth has worked and performed with artists such as Fred V & Grafix, Mo Pleasure (Earth, Wind and Fire), Kevin Mark Trail (The Streets), Adrian Crutchfield (Prince), Imaani (Incognito) and more. Ruth has written for commercial brands including Universal, YouTube Kids and Dove UK.
She is also a solo recording artist and has released a number of her own singles. Ruth’s voice features on the Forza Horizon 4 video game, the XFactor video game and a number of adverts broadcast worldwide.
Ruth asked us to work on 4U her first single, Mastering & some Mixing, which we did between our Munire Studios in Lima and my home studio in the UK.
Roger Frankham decided to release an album to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Ike’s birth and kindly invited some musicians, mainly guitarists who knew Ike, to contribute a track. This includes luminary players like Martin Taylor. I was humbled to be asked by Roger to do the same and contributed an original instrumental that we had fun naming Acai Skies, an anagram of Ike Isaacs.
Lengendary jazz guitarist Ike Isaacs is best-known for being part of the Hot Club-style band led by guitarist Diz Disley that worked with Stéphane Grappelli. A self-taught player, Isaacs began playing professionally while in college where he studied chemistry. He moved to England in November 1946 where he worked for many years as a freelance player.
Among his more significant jobs were being part of the BBC Show Band, recording with George Chisholm (1956) and Barney Kessel (1968), and touring with Disley’s Hot Club of London which worked frequently with Grappelli in the late ’60s and ’70s. In the ’70s, Isaacs was part of Velvet, a group with Digby Fairweather and guitarist Denny Wright.
The following decade, Ike Isaacs moved to Australia where he became a teacher at the Sydney Guitar School. He led a little-known sextet date for the Morgan label in 1966.
https://www.facebook.com/ikeisaacs/
We Like Ike on CD: Australian site, but will ship anywhere in world
https://www.sanity.com.au/products/2437474/We-Like-Ike-100th-Birthday-Tr
We Like Ike multi-link for download/streaming sites:
https://welikeike.lnk.to/Album
Intimate Interpretations (Ike Isaacs solo guitar album from 1991)
multi-link for download/streaming sites: