Puget Sound Guitar Workshop: An Overview

On Friday I returned from my first week at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop. I expected a relaxing week of casual fingerpicking, swimming, and strumming Kumbaya around the campfire. Instead, it turned out to be a profound educational and spiritual experience. I returned home electrified.

I’ve got a bunch of photos of the week posted here.

Here’s an overview of how the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop’s three weeklong summer sessions work:

The camp is located at a retreat center about two hours from Seattle. It has a main hall where all 150 of us could eat together, a side hall we used as a performance space, and about 12 other cabins of varying sizes where we slept, took classes, and jammed. There are some mile-long hiking trails through the woods surrounding the camp, and an absolutely lovely lake, where I spent most of my hour-long afternoon breaks swimming and sunbathing.

Each camper selects two or three classes to attend over the course of the week. These classes meet once a day for about an hour and a half. Most of the classes had about eight students in them, which gave us all the opportunity to get to know our teachers and receive one-on-one help. I took an intermediate-level blues fingerstyle class, a Celtic guitar class which taught the DADGAD guitar tuning, and an advanced songwriting class.

Here’s a little story about my last night at camp. If you don’t see it above, you can click here.