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 could fully utilise the open bass string notes for an accompaniment to the melody played on the first three treble strings.
When I first started teaching grades, Grade 3 was the entry-level with most study pieces being in the keys of C or G major requiring the fretting of bass strings. This is where the problem for young guitarists begins with small hands unable to finger the bass notes and melody notes all at the same time.
The idea then came for me to put together a collection of music in keys that would only use open bass notes. This soon resulted in the very first book I made in the 1980's of just 5 pieces. Any lack of fretted bass notes was more than made up for as the arrangements allowed freedom of the left hand, giving the student guitarist opportunity to explore higher positions of the fretboard.
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 book of 5 pieces could easily expand into at least 3 books and a plan came about. 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.
I am now striving and seeking a way forward to see this 3 book set come to fruition. The music for all three books will be available as online pre-release e-books from May 2025 onwards. They 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. The pending May 2025 e-book release will contain music score and tablature only, obviously no glossy cover, also incidental pictures, illustrations and other none essential decorative graphics etc. will not be included.
If you are interested then please visit Fretbow's website:
You can also check out Fretbow's Blogspot for updates, and there's also the 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
