greetings

Cornelius

i'm new here. i've been playing guitar for 25 yrs, but i'm new to playing django's style of jazz. i've always been a fan and recently i decided to get into it. at the moment, i'm practiciing on a normal steelstring or 175, but soon i hope to get a selmer style guitar.

i recently got john jorgenson's books (1 and 2) which i found very useful. i think his playing is really awesome and he's a great teacher, but i'm not sold on his left hand fingering concept. anyone else feel this way? it obviously works great for him...and of course django made it work. but i'm not sure i want to alter my technique that much. i've checked out some vids of other modern players like stochelo and fapy and they use all four fingers. what do you guys think?

MichaelHorowitz

Contemporary Gypsies rarely use just 2 fingers exclusively...most use the third. A few use the pinky as well. Stochelo mostly uses just three fingers....occasionally the pinky comes into play.

However, there are many licks and arpeggios that work better using mostly or entirely 2 fingers. Many others can be fingered using the other fingers, but the position still comes from how Django would have fingered it with two fingers.

I used the traditional fingerings in my books...the Unaccompanied Django book is probably the best resource because just about every concievable arpeggio, chord, and lick is in there. You'll see how it all works it out in different situations...over all, you'll find that many of the fingerings will seem very unconventional. But they work much better once you get them down.

Good luck!

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