Purpose

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Friends Don't Let Friends Play Alone

Welcome to the Finger Lakes Friends of Guitar. Our primary purpose is to help you improve your guitar playing. While geared for acoustic guitar players, all music lovers are encouraged to browse our site and drop in to one our meetings if you are in the area. Please see the "Schedule" tab for our local events information ...

Background

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Our History

In April 2007 we joined forces with the Syracuse NY Guitar League and launched a similarly modeled Ithaca based group. Over the past several years we have adjusted our approach to meet the needs and desires of the greater Ithaca community as reflected and shaped by our members. While moving away from a baseball structured metaphor, we still focus on the common goal to entertain, educate, and encourage guitar players of all skill levels. Please see the "Monthly Meeting" tab to learn about past meetings ...

Approach

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Our Approach

We meet monthly at the Carriage House Cafe in College town. Generally the first Tuesday evening of every month from 7-9pm - unless delayed a week due to a major holiday, weather incident, or facility scheduling conflict. Our meetings are a combination of guest performances, shared learning activities, and hands-on playing opportunity. Definitely bring your instrument along, but note that no one is required to play in front of others if you are not comfortable doing so.

Usually we have a guest artist share on a topic of general interest to everyone for the first hour. Past meetings have covered topics ranging from Song Writing to Blues Guitar Styles to Guitar Set-up and Care to Recoding Your Music. Then we break up for the second hour with everyone involved and hands on (the frets). Sometimes we continue with the guest presenter in a Q&A manner. Often we break off into mini-workshops covering topics such as open tunings, chords, finger-picking patterns, learning songs, and music theory. Generally there is opportunity for individuals to perform something newly learned or composed for others in the group.

Please see "Resources" to check out some our recent learning activities ...

Values

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How we run our meetings ...

Our intent is to educate, entertain, and encourage each other for the purpose of becoming better guitar players. Our monthly meetings provide a means to connect with and learn from local community artists and other like-minded guitar players.

We welcome players from a wide variety of styles and skill levels. We want everyone to have an opportunity to learn new stuff, share work in progress, and meet other like-minded guitarists. Members include flatpickers, singer-song writers, folk, jazz, classical, and contemporary players. Often, people come having had their guitar "under the bed" for many years and just want to get started playing again. We provide the inspiration and connection with other players to help that process.

We are geared towards acoustic guitars. It is not practical to bring amplifiers and associated electronic gear for our group sessions.

We are not an elitist hot licks club just for people with fancy guitars. While there are some excellent players and some people have really nice guitars ... we simply ask everyone to "check their egos at the door" and come to have fun, learn, contribute and ultimately support one another in the pursuit of making good music.

We do not offer group guitar lessons. We are not a guitar school and do not pretend to be a replacement for structured lessons. If that's what someone needs there are many members who can point you towards an appropriate teacher. That said, there will be plenty of opportunity to learn stuff, supplement what you are learning elsewhere, and also play with and for others.

Membership

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Funding

Our activities are made possible primarily through memberships, visitor fees, and generous contributions of time and money by key individuals. Our monies go toward facility and equipment costs, guest artist fees when applicable, and operating our website and email services.

Annual membership is $50 per year, or you can participate "ala carte" and pay $5 per meeting - attending when your schedule permits. Memberships not only save money for regular participants, but also help us to optimally plan ahead and host engaging events.