Guitar | Dom Turner | Intermediate/Advanced | Period 1 | Week 3 (July 21-26, 2024)
The hands-on workshops will focus on early 20th Century blues and gospel bottleneck/slide guitar styles in open G and Open D tunings using traditional fingerpicking (not flat-picking) including use of fingered chord shapes within songs. Also, included is a (brief) overview of slide guitar in standard tuning.
We will explore bottleneck/slide technique as well as fingerpicking and rhythmic approaches through breaking down a number of songs from tradition-bearing artists such as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Muddy Waters, Charley Patton and Blind Willie McTell. We will also focus on improving listening skills as a method of learning new songs and techniques. Audio and video recordings are encouraged (for personal use). Students will need to have knowledge of general chord shapes in both open G and Open D tuning as well as some degree of fingerpicking and bottleneck/slide guitar skills.
About the Instructor
Voted ‘Traditional Blues Artist of the Year 2022’ by the Sydney Blues Society, multi award winning Australian blues artist, Dom Turner is best known as guitarist, ‘bottleneck’ slide guitarist, lead vocalist, and founding member of the Australian hybrid-blues group, Backsliders as well as other international tours and recordings with including R.L. Boyce with Dom Turner (with Mississippi hill-country blues legend RL Boyce), The Turner Brown Band (with Sacred Steel artist Nikki Brown) and Phil Wiggins & Dom Turner (with US National Heritage Award recipient and harmonica virtuoso Phil Wiggins)
Dom has toured the festival circuit in Australia and internationally since the 1980s and regularly appears at major, blues-related music festivals. He is a regular visitor to the home of the blues, the USA performing at festivals including Augusta Blues Week in West Virginia, RL Boyce Picnic as well as the Otha Turner Goat Picnic in Mississippi. He also toured Mexico with US blues greats, Del Ray and Steve James.
Dom’s musical influences are many and varied – a blend of Mississippi hill country blues, delta blues, Piedmont blues, dub and sounds of Asia. His first love though is early 20th Century rural blues of all styles. As a teenager he first started listening to artist such as Lead Belly, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton, Son House and Big Joe Williams.
He has had a lifelong journey playing learning about blues, along the way recording and collaborating with various blues and gospel tradition-bearers including Phil Wiggins & Dom Turner, R.L. Boyce with Dom Turner and The Turner Brown Band (with Sacred Steel artist Nikki Brown). Dom’s other musical projects include international collaborations; Kim Sinh & Dom Turner (with Vietnamese stringed instrument master Kim Sinh) as well as Dom Turner & Jin Hi Kim (with innovative Korean komongo musician, Jin Hi Kim).
During the 2010’s Dom completed a doctorate in creative arts, connecting American blues and gospel with early Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese forms of ‘microtonal’ or ‘slide’ based music, through a series of cross-cultural collaborative recordings. In 2004 Dom was voted ‘Blues Songwriter of the Year’ at the Australian Blues Awards. His trademark ‘slide’ guitar sound and song writing can be heard on myriad session recordings and his songs have featured on the ABC TV programme ‘Seachange’, as well as the soundtrack to Tim Winton’s best-selling novel, ‘Dirt Music and the 2013 Channel 9 TV series ‘Underbelly – Squizzy Taylor’.
In 2008 Dom was invited onstage to play with slide guitar legend Derek Trucks at the Adelaide international Guitar Festival. Turner is a phenomenal guitarist – slide and otherwise – and brilliant songwriter with trademark vocals” Rhythms Magazine
“The man is a phenomenal blues player.” BWW Reviews
www.domturner.com.au