"The Lament for Owen Roe O'Neill / The Mist Covered Mountains of Home"

Welcome back friends:

Let's go back to the British Isles this month and look at a fantastic pair of arrangements by John Renbourn. 

The Lament is a 19th century Irish ballad and "The Mist Covered Mountains of Home" is a 19th century Scottish Gaelic song. Both are arranged using one of my favorite tunings, open G minor.

I would consider the lament to be one of the most accessible pieces I've so far added to the Patreon, I hope everyone has a chance to at least get tuned up to open G minor and read through it. It would be well worth the time.

Mist Covered Mountains will be a little more difficult, but is still a much simpler tune because of the repetition. You will find the greatest challenges in some of the left-hand stretches, accuracy with hammer-ons, and getting it up to tempo.

You can find the Patron exclusive lesson video here:
https://youtu.be/L_hjn77EDuw

The scores for the individual tunes are attached below. I play them as a medley in my YouTube recording, bookending Mist Covered Mountains with the lament, but they stand alone as fantastic pieces to be played individually.

I would also like to thank Shawn Gordon for bringing up a bunch of guitars to Milwaukee to try out. One of my students bought his OM style guitar after playing it for a few minutes, it was my favorite of the three and I plan to have Shawn build another like it for me in the future. I chose the modified D for this recording as I thought it would be fun to try out my first fan-fret guitar for something a little different. If you like the sound of this guitar it will be available through Shawn, he can be reached here: https://www.instagram.com/gordonsguitars/?hl=en

One final bit of exciting news. This month I've decided to make a huge investment into some new camera equipment, all YouTube performances going forward will now be in 4k. My old camera gear is 15 years old and I felt the footage was starting to fall behind in quality compared to other content creators. The new camera has terrific low light capability so I'll no longer be limited to only recording between noon and 4pm. I'll also be testing out the ability to use it for lesson videos, which will be an enormous improvement since I've been limited to using a webcam for those. I thank you for your support because I'll be using Patreon income to pay off the new equipment. It may take a couple years but I think it will be worth the investment. I'm also being encouraged to start releasing shorts on Instagram, so look for bonus content there in the future.