Stanley Garrison,the author/artist of a unique book, Basic Skills for Guitar (now available as a free download exclusively on StringDancer), is a multi-talented fellow. For present purposes, I’ll bypass his business acumen, fine woodworking and inventive luthier skills, and focus my attention on his musical accomplishments, his influence on me as a young musician, and how I came to be in possession of Stan’s original manuscript.
I first met Stanley Garrison back in the early 1970s when we were both young men. He worked as a guitarist in our hometown of Muncie, Indiana, and taught guitar at Rocky’s Music Center, where I had recently begun my own teaching career. I was still a teenager at the time, Stan in his early 20s, with already a dozen years of jazz guitar instruction under his belt, gigging constantly in successful bands, and was widely considered the most versatile and accomplished guitarist in central Indiana.
Stanley had developed into a skilled classical guitarist, as well, and used his formidable fingertstyle technique in conjunction with his jazz skill to play in a style inspired by fingerstyle jazz master Joe Pass, predating the appearance of Charlie Byrd, Earl Klugh, Tuck Andress and others.
Stanley is also a multi-instrumentalist, playing tenor, plectrum and 5-string banjos, bass, mandolin and Irish fiddle. To a younger guitarist seeking to expand my horizons, Stan was a true inspiration, and I’m proud to say that he served unselfishly as a mentor to me. We came eventually to be bandmates, working as a duo who each played multiple instruments, covering an extraordinary range of material (as such, we were extremely hard to categorize, and thus difficult to book).
Reflecting his intellect and interest in life, philosophy and spirituality, Stan delved into areas of thought that tangentially influenced his approach to the guitar. One such influence was Eastern philosophy… which included the study of zen calligraphy.
It was during these days that Stan gave me the handmade manuscript you see scanned in this PDF. He had painstakingly inked the entire work by hand on traditional parchment paper. A glance through the manuscript reveals that it wasn’t quite a finished work — Stan had scratched out the occasional word or sentence, pencilling in corrections, and killing an entire paragraph at one point.
Clearly he was passing on the product of many, many hours of work, taking a pass on fulfilling his original vision of it. Why had Stan given the manuscript to me? Perhaps he felt that he had taken the project as far as he wanted… perhaps the entire point of the work was as a way to practice his calligraphy… perhaps he was simply inspired by some new interest and felt that he had given the book all the time it deserved. I may never know the answer to that.
Nonetheless, I felt honored by the gift, and have safeguarded it all these years. With the advent of scanning technology years ago, the idea of producing a PDF of the book came to me, but it took many more years (and just happening to run across the manuscript in my file cabinet on a day when I had time to finally scan the pages one by one) for it to happen.
So here you have a gifted guitarist’s vision of the instrument as it was in 1975, when he was still in his early 20s. I can say with confidence that Stanley’s awareness of the guitar, of music, and how he would communicate all that has evolved greatly in the ensuing years. Nonetheless, this manuscript stands as a timeless and accurate presentation of the basics of the guitar, and also as a work of calligraphic art in and of itself.
Please enjoy this manuscript… I certainly have for many years. Click the link below to open the PDF in a new window:
Basic Skills for Guitar by Stanley Garrison (125MB)
“Basic Skills for Guitar” Copyright 1975 Stanley Garrison. All Rights Reserved.
Posted with the author’s permission.
Click to hear some off-the-cuff home recordings of Foster & Garrison jamming in 2004
