Garcia Course
A focused eight-week deep dive into Jerry Garcia's guitar playing. Twenty-six iconic Grateful Dead songs, organized not by chronology but by the specific harmonic and technical "buckets" Garcia drew from, major pentatonic with the flat three, modal playing, harmonic minor over the dominant, the Cornell-style enclosures.
Subscriber-only. Limited enrollment per cohort. Pricing confirmed when you reach out.
How it runs
Two sessions per week for eight weeks:
- Monday, review of last week's material
- Tuesday, the next chapter
Both sessions are live. Both are recorded and added to your personal archive for the duration of the course.
Who it's for
Intermediate-and-above players, though Jack tries to keep it as palatable as possible for ambitious beginners. The songs you play sit in different harmonic neighborhoods, the skills you develop playing I Know You Rider are different from the skills for Estimated Prophet, and the course explicitly maps which songs build which chops.
The 26 songs (approximate)
The exact setlist for each cohort shifts as Jack tailors to the group, but the running selection draws from:
Althea · Bertha · Bird Song · Brown Eyed Women · Casey Jones · China Cat Sunflower · Crazy Fingers · Cumberland Blues · Dark Star · Deal · Eyes of the World · Fire on the Mountain · Friend of the Devil · GDTRFB · He's Gone · I Know You Rider · It Must've Been the Roses · Looks Like Rain · Mississippi Half-Step · Not Fade Away · Ramble on Rose · Scarlet Begonias · Ship of Fools · Stella Blue · Sugar Magnolia · Sugaree · Tennessee Jed · They Love Each Other.
The Garcia "buckets"
Rather than teach 26 songs as 26 isolated items, the course groups them by the harmonic moves Garcia made:
- Major pentatonic with the flat three, the most-used Garcia vocabulary
- Modal playing, Dorian, Mixolydian, Aeolian; when each one shows up
- Harmonic minor over the dominant, that Spanish/Eastern-European flavor
- Cornell-style enclosures, diatonic above, chromatic below the target tone
- Retreat dynamics, Garcia's signature push-and-pull
- Mixolydian-into-Lydian moves, the IV becoming a Lydian center
Interested in the next cohort?
Slots are limited. Reach out and Jack will get back to you with the next cohort's start date and any specific prerequisites.