About Fretbow and the purpose in starting this website
Hi there, I am Theo Elsey the owner and developer of this music website. The purpose behind my work here is to re-introduce music that I have collected over the years in a format that is accessible and easy to use for everyone. My intentions for 2025 is to re-release as much of my guitar music collection as possible, this is my priority, I will introduce music for other stringed instruments as and when I can.
The following is a post that I originally wrote on Fretbow's blog last year, I am including it here as it gives some background of my early teaching years in schools during the mid - 1980's An insight is given on how the idea of a 3 volume book set of finger-style guitar solos has came about.
Short Solo Studies for Classical/Finger-Style Guitar is the full title of a three book series that started out in the heyday of my music teaching in the 1980's. The original book was a single volume with just 5 arrangements. These were a mix of some early English dance tunes from the Elizabethan collector and publisher John Playford, with additional music of my own. These books came about due to the difficulty I had in sourcing suitable music for my students. Plenty of other music books were available with a few finger-style arrangements in easy keys but then they would progress too quickly into keys that for young guitarists especially, were technically very demanding.
Between 1980 and 2000 I taught guitar at many schools in the counties of Surrey and Hampshire, south west of London. The heads of music in these schools encouraged me to enter my most promising students in for grade exams, early on this would have been for Classical Guitar only as the main examination boards had not yet diversified into offering grades in other styles such as Jazz and Rock. I had reasonable success in getting a small number of students through their early grades but knew that there must be a way of tackling the technical demands of grades by providing music to fall back on that was both great sounding and easy to play. I achieved this by carefully arranging music in keys that fully utilised the open bass string notes, freeing up the left hand to play only on the melody strings.
The book proved popular with my students, it helped them in achieving great sounding pieces with the least amount of effort. For some the music was satisfying enough to play without having to take exams, for others it provided a useful step, an encouragement to go on to do well in their grades.
Right from the outset I could see that this simple, straight forward book could easily expand into at least 3 books. I would use books 2 and 3 to gradually introduce all fretted notes on the bass strings so that by the end of book 3 the best part of the guitar fretboard will have been covered.
The years have rolled on, I have collected and arranged a lot more music for this series but until relatively recently I have not got around to publishing the revised editions. The closest I got to doing so was in 2019 with a complete edition of book one with 10 pieces as seen on the front cover illustration shown below. It was a short run production with only a very few books released and now out of print. Books Two and Three were drafted but never published.
Now, at long last, I am closing in on the finalising of draft copies that will lead to seeing all 3 books published, e-book versions will be available from June 2025 onwards. The books will be offered at just a fraction of the eventual in-print book cost, these fully published versions hopefully being available by mid to late 2006.
You can check out Fretbow's Blogspot for latest updates on the writing and production of these books, also there's a likelihood of a promotional video for this series to be posted at Fretbow's YouTube Channel very soon. Thank You.
Theo Elsey - April 07/2025
