Fingerstyle Guitar Tunes: Beautiful Airs and Ballads of the British Isles (Solo Guitar)

This fingerstyle guitar collection features 20 engaging lyrical tunes from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales plus three original pieces by accomplished guitarist, trumpeter and composer William A. Bay, president, and editor-in-chief at Mel Bay Publications. Tasked with writing intermediate-level arrangements in either standard or dropped-D tuning, guitarist/arranger Raymond Gonzalez displays uncommon music rethinking skills while preserving the plaintive and lilting nature of these enduring melodies.

Unique to these settings, you will find sparse, open-chord harmonies accentuated by double hammer-ons and pull-offs, and the odd harmonic mixed with normal tones within a melodic line— all reminiscent of gentle waves washing up against a rocky island shore. Conceived to be played on either steel or nylon-string guitar, these pieces are written in both standard notation and tablature. Includes online access to the author’s own audio recordings.

SONG LIST:
An Drochshaol (The Hard Times)
Auld Lang Syne
Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms
Cailin Deas Crúite na mBó (Pretty Girl Milking Her Cow)
Call the Ewes
Down by the Sally Gardens
Fair Flower of Northumberland
Fields of Culloden
I Went to Visit the Roses
Irish Prayer
Jock O’Hazeldean
John Anderson, My Jo
Once I Had a Sweetheart
Scarborough Fair
She Moved Through the Fair
Sí Bheag, Sí Mór
Star of the County Down
The Flowers of Sweet Erin the Green
The Galway Shawl
The Marsh of Rhuddlan
The Shearing’s Not for You
The Water Is Wide
Wild Mountain Thyme