Culture
27 Mar 12

Computer Lessons

Sharon Shannon’s guitar accompanist Jim Murray has created a website that provides lessons in playing Irish trad guitar. He talks to Jackie Hayden about the thinking behind it and runs through his musical history.

One of the star turns at the recent Music Show was Sharon Shannon, accompanied by guitarist Jim Murray. Murray has spent over a dozen years working with various artists, including Shannon, and his album Ragairne with Seamus Begley was elected Hot Press ‘Folk and Trad Album of the Year’. More recently he has launched his own online guitar tutorial website jimmurraymusic.com.

As Murray himself puts it, “This is a unique website where anyone can subscribe for a period of time and learn how to accompany Irish music with a guitar without even leaving the house! There is nothing else like it on the net and I feel there is a great market for it. So far the interest has been great and I have customers worldwide.”
Murray has done workshops and masterclasses all over the world and found a genuine interest in guitarists wanting to learn to accompany Irish trad.
“People kept asking me if I had a tutor book or a DVD for traditional Irish guitar, which I didn’t, so that prompted me to look at doing something to fill that gap, and providing lessons on the internet seemed the best way to go, especially since there was nothing there already that offered the same service”, he explains.
Murray took time out in New Zealand with wife and child, and found himself with enough hours and space to work on the project, and after about 18 months eventually launched it last year.
“It was all done in New Zealand. I had to work on putting it together in a way that made sense and that took a bit of time, breaking it into the different segments that now constitute the site. It was important that the site was easy to get around and easy to understand, and that took some time to get right. But before I launched it, I had a list of people from all over the place asking me when it was going to happen, so I had a good incentive for getting it up and running!”
Each guitar lesson on the site has an appropriate demonstration video as well as supporting examples explaining specific techniques that the student can play repeatedly to aid the learning process. Murray reckons that potential students will get more from the site if they already know the basics of guitar-playing, but adds, “I know several fairly accomplished guitarists in other fields who actually find it harder than they thought to pick up the Irish trad rhythms. So accomplished guitar players should be able to learn from the site, as well as those who simply have the basic chords. If you take Irish trad guitar apart and look at the components it becomes very easy, and that’s what I try to achieve with the website. For example, some players think that playing polkas is very hard, but when you break it down it’s actually very straightforward,” he tells me.
Murray’s website has the added attraction of offering free samples so would-be students get a sense of the approach he takes. Subscribing to the web lessons is simple.
“There are different subscription options. You can subscribe for just one month for €19.95. You then have access to the lessons 24 hours a day for a full month for a price that’s probably less than you’d pay for a one-hour lesson! Three months costs €40, and a full year costs €100, so students can choose whatever option best suits them. Being able to go over each lesson, or a segment of a lesson, as many times as you want, has obvious benefits that the single face-to-face lesson doesn’t have.”
Students need no other items in order to take the lessons, no books, notes, CDs, videos, or DVDs, just a guitar.
“In a way, that’s what appealed to me about putting the site together. I’d been around some very obscure places in Australia and America, and maybe even in parts of Ireland or Europe, where there would be no access to music lessons of any kind. I thought that was a great pity and one of the beauties of the internet lesson idea is that it can reach those areas and provide lessons that otherwise people would have no access to. All they need is an internet connection and a guitar, no matter how remote the place you live in.”
Given that the site can take players from the basics right through to a fairly decent level of playing, Murray has no plans to expand the site as he generally feels it does what he set out for it to do, clearly and simply.
Murray has been playing with Sharon Shannon since 1998, including her recent Woman’s Heart gigs at the Olympia. This month he and Sharon release an album they’ve recorded with the National Concert Orchestra, and then on April 16 they perform at the Opera House in Cork and the following day in the National Concert Hall in Dublin, so there’s no let-up in Murray’s gig diary.
But his interest in music goes back to when he was in the cot in the family home in Co. Cork and his father had a céilí band.
“As far back as I can remember, my father played music, as did all of us in the family. By the age of three, I could pick out tunes on the piano and a year later I discovered the piano accordion.”
He started on guitar when he was about nine.
“My first guitar was a half-sized nylon string bought for me in Fermoy, although I had a bit of a battle getting it because it was suspected that if I got the guitar I would give up on the accordion forever. I bought a book to learn from, and I also tried to learn ‘Mona’ after seeing Billy Idol doing it on the Late Late Show. My science teacher was a fine guitarist and he really brought me on. He taught me tunes like ‘Cavatina’ and I think my stage debut was playing it with him at a school recital. I was also drawn to The Beatles, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and played their songs on guitar, but eventually I found my way back to the trad stuff, bringing the other influences with me. But it’s always been acoustic guitar. The one I most use these days is a Takamine nylon string which has a built-in pre-amp that works really well. I’ve had it for about 15 years. I also have a Martin steel-string. I use both for recording and they make an intriguing combination if you layer one on top of the other. I never had the inclination to strap on the Fender Strat and turn up the volume and stand out front soloing under the spotlight! I was more drawn to accompaniment and that’s where I’ve always wanted to be.”
The guitarist who’ve mainly inspired him are Steve Cooney on the trad side and James Taylor.
“Steve was just so imaginative with his playing that it really inspired me. One day I’d love to play with James Taylor. We’ve both been on the TV series Transatlantic Sessions, but never on the same show, but maybe one day ...”