El McMeen Guitar Tab Books, Instruction DVDs, Solos, Arrangements, Video Lessons

El McMeen

    El McMeen began playing the acoustic guitar while attending Harvard in the mid 1960's. At the time he took up guitar, he was an accomplished clarinet player and singer and had studied piano. At first, McMeen didn't approach the guitar primarily as a solo instrument, but used it as accompaniment for his singing.

    Upon reapplying himself in the early 1980's to the instrument, he encountered what he saw as an incredible breadth of music that one could try to render on guitar. He found himself attracted to Irish and Scottish music, alternative tunings, and different approaches to rendering and arranging music.

    After listening to the Dave Evans recording "Irish Jigs, Reels, Hornpipes, and Airs", McMeen became attracted to the richness of the CGDGAD tuning and found it accessible, evocative, versatile, and extremely stimulating to his own creativity on the guitar. After two decades of arranging pieces in that tuning, El has become the leading student of the tuning and he has written extensively on it including collaborating on the ground-breaking  book The Complete Celtic Fingerstyle Guitar Book, co-written with Stefan Grossman and Duck Baker.

    El's music is characterized by lyrical beauty and a sensitivity to melodic phrases enhanced with tasteful arpeggios, cross-picking, and walking bass lines, and his uptempo pieces evidence energy and pulse. His artistry has been praised by numerous publications, including Acoustic Guitar Magazine, Fingerstyle Guitar Magazine and Guitar Player Magazine. El's music has been hailed by critics as "stirring ... unbridled acoustic beauty" and "drop-dead gorgeous" (Guitar Player Magazine) and as a "treasure" (Dirty Linen Magazine).