An interview with David Qualey
Published: 2006 Author: Colin Tommis
(on his first visit to England for over 10 years, in June, 2006.) Interview © Colin Tommis.
We all have pivotal moments in our lives when an experience utterly alters our approach to the way we live them. I can think of several such moments: one was the evening I went to a Tetra concert. They opened my eyes to a world of guitar ensemble I didn’t realise existed and I went on to spend the next few years writing only for guitar ensemble. But my first musical “eureka” moment arrived when, at the age of 16, I first heard David Qualey play; he left such an impression that, more than a quarter of a century later, his creations still have the power to excite and move me. In early summer of 2006 he came to England for the 1st time in over a decade to play at a festival in Rutland. I took the opportunity to speak to him about topics which interested me; the conversation became very free form and offers an insight into the mind of this human icon of 20th century popular classical guitar.
For those who might question this article’s inclusion on a site of guitar teachers I would say this: David is not renowned as a great guitar teacher and his focus has been predominantly in fields other than education. But his unique writing and performing style, which led me to study the guitar harder than I ever had done before, was a classic example of how to inspire students. All our students need motivation; for me David Qualey offered a fundamental reason for becoming a better guitar player: I wanted to play like he did and I wanted, more than anything at the time, to play his music.
Colin Tommis: it’s a great pleasure to be sitting down with David Qualey, one of my heroes and an iconic guitarist of the 20th and hopefully the 21st century. I want to start by asking you about the fantastic early days. Paul McCartney used to talk about the Beatles mining gold and it strikes me that you too, with pieces like Santa Cruz, Sylvia’s Waltz and opus 20, (all fantastic examples of a unique textural style,) were mining gold. How did these pieces and others like them, come into existence?
David Qualey: That’s kind of a difficult question because I improvise basically; I start out with something and I have a little bug of an idea, I’m setting up a rhythmic something or other – a lot of times a melodic thing might happen in the middle and I’ll work to both ends, work back to the beginning and work to the end. Something might hit me and I say “how am I going to get there? I can’t just start there, that’s not good enough” I can’t think of an example right now.
CT Would it have happened with Santa Cruz?
DQ No that started with the opening lick but then it was more than likely I was trying to see if I could put something over the top without stopping the bass line, I was trying to keep it playable so I was restricted melody wise – it had to be something within my grip in 7th position, but I don’t have any formulas, I’ll just be doodling around and something will hit me and I’ll think “oh what’s that, you know “….a lot of times ( and I’ve heard this said ) that a musical idea just kind of floating through the ionosphere and if you happen to be lucky you can just grab a hold of the tail and kind of pull it down. Without it sounding too mystical, it happens very fast , it isn’t over days and days and nothing goes on paper until I play it in concert in a sense. At which point I say “okay, that’s all there is to it.”
CT So there could be a couple of hours from start to finish of creation.
DQ Oh yes, maybe start to finish to almost concert ripe ..it goes quickly, or it doesn’t go at all. I’ve tried to compose and sit down and say “let’s do it” and nothing happens. It’s more of an instinctual kind of thing, it’s something that is going on and I follow what I see or hear. I’m not thinking of chord progressions from this to that, it’s is more instinctual. The melody leads me; a lot of times if I take an old composition, if I took something I imagined, I can ask “so why did I go there?” I could have maybe gone someplace else but no, that was for me the only possibility, the only thing I could do, that I found to be right. And afterwards I might say “why? There was another possibility,” but no – it just wouldn’t work , it had to be like this, and that’s why I think that maybe it’s already there and I just happen to be taking dictation. I don’t whether that makes sense.
CT Yes it does. Opus 20 is a curious example of a piece where you use a dropped D, and to most guitarists that would normally suggest one of 2 keys: either G or D itself, but no – you wrote in C major so that the bass note is a supertonic; well that was odd.
DQ I can tell you the reason for that. When you play this F chord after you get started and the thing goes F, E, D - down to this D minor, you know, OH that’s got power.
CT so is this an example of a piece that started in the middle?
DQ Very possibly, but I don’t remember. Why play a C from the 8th to the 10th fret? Having a C in the bass at the 10th fret doesn’t make too much sense although it’s a little more useable than the C you would normally have to play up there with a bare at the 8th fret which completely limits you. With this C, I can play open strings too; the whole fret board is not being held down by a barre, that would also be part of my thinking.
CT Open strings are part of the DQ mantra really. In the workshops we have been enjoying over the last couple of days you have talked a lot about selecting chord shapes that don’t block off the open strings and here is something that I know some classical guitarists will take issue with, when you alternated in these workshops from your tonic to dominant notes, you didn’t attempt to damp. You had lots of over-ringing string when alternating from string 5 to string 6. There are people who will take issue with that.
DQ Oh the stuff we were doing in the workshop kind of thing, that is when I am doing things very clearly so I’m playing something as I would if I was performing it.
CT So as performer you advocate the damping of strings?
DQ Oh yes, I can’t stand it if for example we say a bass tone or note, it doesn’t make any difference what octave, mushing up into a following chord or progression where it doesn’t belong. Other thing too, I have things where people say “of you’ve got this G and it goes on in the bass and it’s held, it’s only hit once and it goes on for like 2 measures,” and I say “yeh and you’d better hold your finger down on that until those 2 measures are up”….and they say “well that’s so hard” and I say “well it’s not supposed to be BOMP and that’s it, because you have difficulty playing the rest of the notes, no - that thing has got to carry and it’s got be underneath and it’s got to be heard, and you take your finger off because you’ve got to go do something else and get to the other stuff…..no sorry, you’re gonna have to figure out how to do that.” I’m very much of a stickler, I damp strings with both hands. You’ll see people say “Geez, what’s he doing there?” My left hand coming way over to the 6th string, over the top of something, very fast, you hardly see anything, the hand is quicker than the eye, but all I was doing was damping the 6th string. In a sense I had, you know I thought, as I’m playing, I thought, it can’t go any further. It’s got to stop, because I’m moving on but because the right hand is doing something else I don’t have time to try to hit it with the palm of my, you know the bass.
CT So an instinctive damping would be for you a left hand damping, rather than a right hand damping?
DQ Both. I just damp. Whatever’s free at the moment.
CT This music is challenging for competent players and quite unreachable to many. To what extent do you think you have compromised your sales? Have you, by raising a technical bar, cut off some of your market?
DQ Oh yes. You know what I used to do I used to say “look, the only people who are going to play this stuff are going to be technical players, classical players, the occasional steel string that’s got a good technique – so it’s going to be a note reader and so I’m not writing this stuff in tab. It’s going to be a note reader and someone who has gone through a serious degree of guitar learning and the tab players, the hobbyists will not be able to hack the technical part.” But I am asked “don’t you have it in tab?” So I began putting it in tab just for the sake of selling more books, from a straight commercial thing. I still didn’t hear my piece being played well, I hear them played well hardly ever because although they look simple and I remember old George Clinton from Guitar International saying “it’s about level 3” and I didn’t know anything about the levels set in British classical guitar playing but someone said “if that’s level 3 we are talking just around intermediate” and I realised that “Geez, this guy has got no idea” and this was kind of tattooed a little bit as far as the British reader was concerned let’s say.
CT So when students play these pieces, what do they fall down on? What in your view are the most difficult aspects of your music?
DQ I was in Russia where they had a classical guitar competition and at least one of my pieces had to be part of the set works. They could pick and choose and I was listening to all these young guitarists who weren’t pupils of mine but were studying the stuff seriously. There’s a certain problem with the idea of the swing, which is involved in a lot of my compositions. Getting the real swing, the real feel of the piece correctly is, with younger people it’s a little easier and they seem to have a little more of the sense of this kind of thing.
CT Can swing be notated?
DQ I don’t think so, I mean you can notate anything, but when you’ve got something that looks so complicated or you know – my notation is sometimes over simplified …but it’s like saying, I wouldn’t want to read it, I wouldn’t want to have to try to …..I’d say “okay what is the feel of the piece?” I think my pieces have a feel and once you get the feel of the thing…I’ve heard my Grandma’s Old Pyjama Rag played like a march by these good technical players but they have no sense of swing, fun and ease – my pieces have to be played like they are nothing. This has been one of the things that has been a problem, to play my pieces, to really play them you’re gonna have to study them like you do a classical piece.
CT I think opus 21 is a good example of a piece that could suffer bullet like performances , entirely absent of the essential relaxation and humour.
DQ Yeh, when people see me or hear me they say “oh , that doesn’t look too hard, that looks easy enough” and I say “well that’s the idea too” I play easy, it just looks like a piece of cake and I know guitar teachers who say “Geez,, I bought that book of yours after the concert and I’m sitting on one piece, I’ve been on it for 6 months and I still can’t get there….but it looked on paper fairly easy and it looked when you played the piece easy.” I said “well, don’t think they are really that easy, otherwise I would be hearing better examples of it.” I do hope that in the sense of being a composer at some points maybe the teachers and students will give as much time and energy in learning these pieces as they do to the other repertoire that they are spending hours on.
My pieces have lots of finesse in them and the only way you are gonna ever play it is to put the time in. But if the teachers don’t feel it’s worth the time then ….
CT you use a lot of improvisation in your performance s but we can’t legislate for that when we notate. We have a performance will have interpretative variations and technical differences depending on the ability of the player but essentially they are playing the notes you requested, because that’s what we do – we do what we are told. How would you feel about players taking license with the notated music if it was done in the spirit of David Qualey?…..whatever the spirit of David Qualey is!!
DQ Yes and no. I have had good guitar players decide that there should be another couple of notes right there and I think they just want to have arrangement rights if they record it, but I have never found any of them to be an improvement. Not that I write perfectly, but I hear what he is doing and it’s not an improvement. So the written stuff is very much of as skeleton but it’s a harmonic skeleton which shouln’t really be deviated from. I do rhythmic improvisation and changes but very little harmonic change goes on.
CT So these would be right hand variations?
DQ Yes, more than anything else. A composition is for me a finished product although they say “you don’t play it exactly like that on the CD” and I say “yeh, they do tend to change a little bit sometimes,” sometimes I’ll find others things and think “that’s a little better right now”. I can take that liberty as a composer of the piece, but I don’t think I would……
CT You realise you are going to set a controversy for centuries to come! This is similar to accounts of what Barrios did, he was known for playing passages differently on different occasions. So there is a debate as to what constitutes the definitive Barrios. I can see a not dissimilar situation with DQ in the 22nd century. You can see the arguments over Santa Cruz, for example.
DQ Yes I play it differently than it’s notated now.
CT So would you have a problem with people playing it as you recorded it, even if this was not the notated version?
DQ I would accept both. I try to keep the music alive and speeds may change. Some things I see a little faster or slower than I used to. I might jazz it more, I might give things more emphasis or use different up sounds up and down the strings as far as the plucking part goes you know, getting harder sounds, getting softer sounds, contradicting myself in the middle – these are things that I find to be acceptable, but if somebody suddenly changed a harmonic thing, I’d say “no,no,no,no, that’s one step too far.”
CT I’d like to look at a specific piece and one you have had fabulous success with is your version of the Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiringand I’d hope you can outline the success and why you chose the small instrument to play it on.
DQ Well the arrangement itself came about because I bought this little instrument, a little octave guitar made by a chap called Klein in Germany, and of course Klein in German means small! He’s no longer alive, but I just was the thing in a music store and it took my interest , and I took it off the wall thinking it was a kid’s toy to be told “oh no, that’s a real instrument used mostly in guitar orchestras” so I bought it for I think it was 400 German marks, took it back to the hotel room and I was on a tour in Goethinger at the time and I thought “Geez, this thing is so cute, it sounds like a kind of harp kind of thing” and I thought ! “what am I going to play on this thing” because I wanted to play it that night, you know I get really impatient. I was sitting in the room and I had made a straight adaptation of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiringbut I kind of slipped into it in this easy swing in a ¾ type of thing and I was following this melody around and just kind of you know changing this, that, and the other thing; went out that night and played it, improvised it really ‘cos I had nothing really set down and the audience just went crazy. They just loved it you know and then I recorded the thing up in Copenhagen and then it kinds started to go around the world a little bit and people started to hear this thing and it got to the record company Windham Hill in the USA, and their big piano player George Winston – he heard this and took my arrangement and put it on the piano so he was doing the same kind of thing. I wasn’t really aware of any of this at the time, and then they wanted to do a winter’s solstice kind of album and they wanted George to play Jesu Joy and he said “No,no,no, you’ve got to have it from David, he’s the arranger” and in fact I still get part of his royalties, he’s a very generous fellow. They called up and I recorded it at home and sent it off. The record got a Grammy nomination, sold over half a million, and this was the 1st cut on the album. It paid the rent for a while and from the commercial standpoint it is the most successful of my pieces.
CT Do other people play it?
DQ Yes I get requests from all over the world for it and I’ve just made a DVD to show people how easy it is. People don’t catch the sense of where the accents are to give it the right feel – but it’s played at weddings and all over the place.
CT Arrangements and Transcriptions now then; you’ve talked about composition being an improvisation based activity, but how do you arrange, for example, the Beatles tracks? Is it the tune, the harmonic fundamentals?
DQ Well if we take Yesterday as an example, its original setting is in F. I look at the umfanger of the melody
CT Tessitura
DQ yes, so in this case there are high Fs, E minors, D minors – the original key might work well. Remember that over the years I have needed the skill to play these things pretty well instantly, as a punter calls out “play this”. In such cases I quickly look at the song from the point of view of the moist suitable key. I might set up a rhythm in a way that the left hand of a piano might and then I try to play the inversions to keep the bass line and melody alive.
CT there is also a degree of artistic licence I suspect – they’re far more than mere transcriptions because there is a lot of your own personality which you pour in too, sometimes to such an extent that chords can change or entire sections can be subjected to your unique musical makeover.
DQ This might sound hypocritical but I’m cool with that, but I get upset when people do that to my music! With this popular music, I have never chosen chords which you could be called a rape of the original.
CT These are maybe fantasies on a theme then? A case of you taking the original as a starting point for a further exploration.
DQ Oh absolutely. Take the theme of Eleanor Rigby, I go off and do my own thing and come back to the melody.
CT Do you notate that sort of thing?
DQ Well I did and Eleanor was a big hit.
CT Tell me about Germany. You came from America and I recall seeing you in the early 70s in the UK, and the decided to set up shop in Germany.
DQ I already had shop in Germany. I had a German car, a German residency permit, but I was a silly American and I didn’t know how things worked over here. I met the Ian Campbell Folk Group in Germany because they were playing some British Army bases at the same time as me. And they said “you must come to Britain, you’ll take it by storm and we have a lot of contacts.” So we took off for England and I didn’t look like a dead beat so off the boat at Harwich I told the passport control we were going to live here and he asked,
”have you got any work set up here?”
“oh yeh”
“Mr Qualey – you just don’t come marching into Great Britain, like this, you can have a visa for 6 weeks.”
So I was advised to go to Croydon where the passport office was, and advised to explain I had money and there had been a mistake, and I wanted to see all of Great Britain and 6 weeks was not enough...well maybe we’d get a longer visa. So I did that. I had some money with me from some recordings I had done in Germany just before leaving for the UK, (when the radio recorded me, they were the 1st, no-one else wanted to and I got paid 75DMs a piece, which was 1500DMs.) So I got the 6 weeks changed to 6 months, but I couldn’t do anything here. There were chances to do Radio and television work here, but I didn’t have a work permit, only a tourist visa. I couldn’t do anything; I couldn’t open the case, basically. Of course, unofficially I was working in the clubs, camping on people’s floors and getting cash fees, but it was not the easiest of times in England. But just before I left Germany I recorded these 20 pieces, pop arrangements for the radio in Hamburg. I got here just after the start of January and about the middle of January I got a telephone call from my manager who said, “David, you can’t turn the radio on over here without hearing these recordings, 25 or 20 minutes at a time!” It was going wild fire over there and people were asking, “where is he? Who is this guy? We want him for concerts.” So I went back to Germany in May for about 5 weeks to do concerts, and there was a bit of back and forth before we decided we had to be in Germany because there I was all legal and entitled to work over there. I got my capped tooth fixed in the UK though on the NHS!!
CT Stay where you are welcome then?
DQ Well that’s why I came to Europe. I had a great time in Britain and I had great audiences – but in America I was not welcome to do what I wanted to do. America was only the land of opportunity if you took the opportunities they offer you. With me it was “can you sing so and so?” American audiences are conservative and they only want to hear what they know, and if you are not known it is hard. They’ll accept you if you arrive with a great track record,, if the big bots have said “he’s good, we’ve seen him on television so that must mean he is good”, the Americans will listen to you. But if you don’t have that advantage then you are just a servant, like a waitress in a restaurant, you are there to serve the people musically whatever it is they want to hear. Not that I thought I was God’s gift to the guitar, but I wanted to do this other music. When I got to Germany and we ran out of money I ended up playing on the streets in the subways of Frankfurt. Instead of doing all the John Denver songs, singing and making a lot of noise, and some money…no,no, I just played guitar. I would find a quiet spot and my singing busking colleagues could make 100 DM in an hour and I made for a whole day only 30 DM. But I was so stubborn that I was not going to do this commercial stuff. I ate whatever it was we could afford to buy and lived in a tent in the forest – I would pay whatever price was needed to do what I felt I should be doing. To not compromise. If no-one wants to hear it, well fine. If I can’t live like this, I’ll have to go some place else. The English and German audiences were fantastic in those early years, they listened and they appreciated. This was heaven on earth for me. If they don’t like my music well this is one thing, but at least they were giving me the chance to play it before deciding, that’s all I wanted.
CT You have talked about, back in Germany, you are not any longer interested in mixed ability teaching, but as far as the UK is concerned, this is now what many have to do. How can we engage with different abilities? Did you find solutions?
DQ I teach infrequently and this new idea of a master class with one person, letting them decided what they would like to learn from me in 2 days. This is fine. In the group situation there were no prerequisites for getting in to the workshop; so I have 3 or 4 simple pickers who can’t read, the guy who studies at Peabody University in the USA. So we lower the overall expectation, which is good and bad and try to find something that will reach both levels. So improvisation based on chord inversions can be as foreign to the trained classical player as to a beginner, there seems to be a universal lack of knowledge here. I am not in the music school system in Germany and a friend of mine has 4, 5 or 6 players and we work on a piece of unifying level. But costs are making the teaching just as hard in Germany as elsewhere. I still run a group class for about 4 days and the folks who come seem to be satisfied enough; they go home feeling they have learned something they didn’t know before.
CT I want to explore your relationship with the classical guitar world. There are many serious classical players who would not be aware of DQ. Why is that? How does this differ to your reception in the rest of the world?
DQ In South America and Central America they accept me hands down as some sort of blessing for the classical guitar and they play the music, study and learn it with a high degree of respect. They are closer to it because it is conceived with a South American consciousness and so they can relate to it perhaps more than the European. The European old school has never accepted anything very quickly, and I don’t come out of their school as a self taught player; in Germany for just hanging on as along as I have and having not disappeared and a lot of the young generation have grown up with my music. A lot of them are now guitar professors and they play and disseminate my music. The federation of music schools in Germany accept me as a composer of the 20th century so if they do Jugendmusizieren, which is an open musical contest, and they have to play pieces from different periods, Qualey is accepted. In Britain I started in the folk scene, the only scene that would have me at the time – truthfully I don’t understand it, I don’t get their attitude. It is considered “nice” but they are condescending; and a lot of people believe what they read – I don’t think my music has got a fair shake. I was always in the wool with George Clinton. I was reading Guitar International but the same old names, John Williams., Paco Pena, John Mills, etc. kept cropping up month after month at the expense of less familiar guitarists.
I wrote a letter to him:
“I’m not criticising these players, but there are other players and this magazine is surely there to serve a wider interest than the promotion of just these few…..”
Well that was the wrong thing to say and of course after that I NEVER got a mention! He replied that I was ungrateful and wallowing in my own beer.
Furthermore, there was a contrast in the attitude of Germany and Britain. The classical guitar scene in Germany respects me, but England was belittling me and offering me up as a folk guitar finger picker.
CT Your inimitable sense of swing is to me one of the things that marks you out, and even players who can play your pieces never play them like you do. You have a unique and unattainable touch…where did you get it?
DQ It took me so long to get it, I was maybe the slowest student in the world. I didn’t have a feel for rhythm to start off with. Here’s a little story: I don’t listen to my recordings, that’s for other people, but late one night at a gas station I went in to pay for my petrol and the radio is on, and I thought “geez this guy is good. Who is this? I think I am getting some competition here. Whoever this is, it’s getting awful close to what I’m doing”… and of course it turned out I was listening to myself! I know I have a signature, a feel, a swing, the way I intone things, the way I emphasise, but how I got to it I can’t honestly say I know.
CT How do you think you have improved as a guitar player and composer in the last 20 years?
DQ As a guitarist I have more understanding as to what it is I am trying to do musically, I know what I want to hear and as I play I am listening and trying to impress myself and have this piece of music move me. My right hand technique has much more finesse now; it’s much finer than it was 30 years ago. For me, it’s all about the performance, the moment – because at that point I have the chance to try to do it right. Recording is a bit of a torture to me, I don’t like to play a piece more than once or twice so my recording is live basically. There might be a splice, but no more than that. A piece played more than once is boring. Television gigs are horrendous because you play for lights, sound, camera, timing, dress rehearsal, and by the filming I am so fed up of the piece I don’t want to play it and I can’t really remember how to play it. This afternoon I’ll warm up and fiddle around, but in the gig my instincts take over. The ability to make better music has been my improvement. To drift away to some place, the music takes me to somewhere else.
As a composer; I don’t know. I’m very sceptical of my abilities as a composer. If I was writing on a serious basis, I might be able to answer the question. But composing is something that is spontaneous for me; maybe as I am doodling, I’ll hear something
And it sparks an idea. Where it will end up compositionally I don’t know. I follow my senses until the circle is concluded and I feel the end of the piece.
CT Do you listen to much away from the guitar?
DQ I don’t listen to guitar music, but piano music and pop music. I come out of a pop background, recall. I don’t listen to as much as people might sometimes think. It’s awfully quiet at my house. I either listen to it, or I do something else. I don’t like it babbling in the background. I enjoy the quiet and if I want some sounds I’ll pick the guitar\if I want to hear some sound. But I don’t study the guitar or its repertoire. I’m not involved in that; I’m just here doing my thing and I’ve got my hands full. I go to concerts but I rarely buy CDs because I like the spontaneity of the live performance. I don’t belong in a group and I always have felt like I am an outsider. So I can’t talk about it.
CT Could you identify composers that have guided you?
DQ No. This isn’t meant to be egotistical – but the guitar stuff has been done on my own. There were no guitar players around me, I didn’t like school lessons, and I pretty well sat in a solitary confinement. I would learn chords and finally hooked up with a piano player who taught me some fantastic chords. I had heard Chet Atkins and Segovia but I reckoned the stuff was way out of my league. Barrios I really like, Villa Lobos to a degree as is Tarrega. But I have never studied it and because my pocket money from 13 was playing the guitar I was always gigging rather than studying from others. This is where the individual style has developed because I don’t hear others to be influenced, even positively. If I have too many outside influences, I’ll get confused. I grew up in a vacumn.
The record company approached even the 1st record I was offered in Germany cautiously because they wanted to include pop tunes that people would know. They said “well it won’t get any airtime without a Paul Simon or Beatles cover” and I responded “but if I do, the radio will play those and not my compositions.” This is a paradox because I didn’t think of myself as a great composer. I thought, “well I’ll make just one record of my stuff and if nobody buys it, it’s not my problem, it’s their problem. But I’ll do it my way.” I’ve just gone down roads that were open to me.
The album had some success, and my 2nd album was quiet a bit different with experimental things which I recorded in Copenhagen.
CT My impression of the 2nd album is that maybe it came at a time when DQ was beginning to think there was a composer in him and he made a more conscious effort to apply compositional techniques to the writing. This isn’t meant to be pejorative, but maybe in some ways it is almost more contrived than the 1st album.
DQ I think that’s true. I was trying to compose. I followed intensely to develop them, but there was a lot of freedom and a lot of things were created on the floor of the studio and they didn’t exist before or after, until I had to go back to the recording and figure out what I had done. The 2nd novel is always going to be scrutinised 10 times more than the 1st one, and the common view is that no-one’s 2nd is ever as good as their 1st. I don’t put a value on my compositions. I know if something is commercial or okay. It may not be a super composition, but it’s an average composition, it has something – it’s not throwaway material. I am not putting it up on a pedestal.
CT You produced a book called A Guide to Independence and you say on your web site “what is missing are simple pieces in an almost chordal fashion that allow you to concentrate your energies almost entirely on the movement of your right hand.”
DQ I feel that the right hand is overlooked when it comes to guitar instruction. I see it in schools, universities and workshops. I am real stickler for using good right hand technique that is natural. The independence aspect was to open up the player’s hearing, to hear what you are playing. The bass line 4 5, 6 strings is barely heard at all. I wanted to turn his hearing back on, not by giving him something in the left hand to distract him, but to keep it melodic, easy and chordal with simplified right hand elements so that he could hear. I reckon in most books the left hand gets the most attention, the right hand fingers the next most, and the left hand gets left out in the cold. But the guitar is a full spectrum and if you have too many aspects being presented all at the same time it can confuse. You’ll see guitarists look at their left hand; it’s never the right hand, it’s always the left. Their visual concentration in on the left, their audio concentration is on the left, and the right hand thumb gets neglected. My Guide to Independence uses simplified but moving bass lines which jump strings. A,E,A,E, back and forth and then just adding one right hand finger, and then another finger, and then plucking upper strings in pairs, whilst all the time listening to the bass and being aware of what the thumb is doing.
CT David, thank you for your time, it has been a pleasure.