"Chambertin," by Bert Jansch

Friends:

Welcome back for another fantastic monthly finger-style lesson. We are back to some British folk revival repertoire with "Chambertin." I admit, I was mostly unaware of this solo up until last year when several Patrons started commenting that they'd love to see a lesson on this. Based on what I heard in the studio recording I knew I'd have my work cut out for me, and Jansch had previously made a transcription available of this piece from his own hand, so the question was, what could I possibly add to what was already available?

"Chambertin" was first included on the 1974 album L.A. Turnaround. A recording is also included on The River Sessions, a live recording from later in the year. It is always nice to have additional recordings to compare to the source material for analysis when trying to capture the full intention of the artist. I also referenced a brief excerpt of him playing a portion of the intro in the 1993 Acoustic Routes documentary and the intro to "Bittern" which is similar to "Chambertin" from live video in 1980. Referencing Jansch's own transcription of "Chambertin" was helpful, but by the time he got to writing it down he had either forgotten or rewritten several passages of the original recording, which left me some room to fill in the blanks and provide something new and worthy of study.

I believe I have accurately captured all of the left-hand positions with this transcription, as well as much of the correct right-hand fingerings. Please keep in mind Jansch relied heavily on thumb, index, and middle fingers, only occasionally using the ring finger to support with plucked and rolled chords. One could easily imagine how the first few measures would be more convenient with occasional help from the ring finger, but enough source video was located to support the fingerings written in the score.

This was a very difficult piece for me to get ready in such a short amount of time. As always, an extra week would have made for a more polished YouTube performance, but the path has been laid for you now and I hope to see some of you recording stronger performances than me in the near future. There are a few instances in the piece where alternate positions would make it easier to play, especially moving the 5th position C to the first position, and I reference this in the lesson video.

I can see some additional thoughts popping up from the crowd here so any questions you might have, please post them below! This is a very challenging piece. I would have marked this as Senior level repertoire when I was teaching in the guitar program at UW. Please give your left hand time to adapt and build strength to make the stretch in the intro. You may wish to initially practice with a capo on 2 to help ease the left hand into the bigger stretches. As always, it's wonderful to see several of you back for another month and I look forward to what May will bring.

YouTube performance

Lesson Video: https://youtu.be/dq_n9WR9I2E

***Update 4-1-23 2:30pm***

All: I've discovered a critical error in the score, in measure 52 and all similar instances the C chord that was previously written in 5th position has been moved to the second position. I was sweeping the score one final time along with the audio and noticed a faint high e ringing over the chord, meaning that my barred 5th fret must be incorrect. The shift I heard that I reference in the lesson video was not a shift down to 4th position but rather a shift up to 4th position from 2nd position. I'm excited to have found this error early on as it makes the transition in measure 56 much easier, as you can use the 2nd finger to guide yourself into position on the 5th string.