Flowers of Edinburgh

Edinburgh (pronounced edinburra) is a very old city, recognized as the capital of Scotland since the 12th century. It is currently Scotland's second largest city, the home of Edinburgh Castle, and the University of Edinburgh. "Flowers of Edinburgh" is a traditional Scottish country dance tune, in the form of an 8x32 reel.

Back in the early 1990's, before there was any such thing as "Guitar Hero", I had my own playlist of guitar heroes, that I used to listen to during my work commute. This was before CD players were common in automobiles, so it consisted of a collection of cassette tapes by guitar virtuosos such as Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Yngwie Malmsteen to name a few. In the summer, I used to play them at top volume, with the windows rolled down on my van. I never had to announce: "Honey, I'm home!" when I came in the door at night, because I could be heard coming a block and a half away. My collection included more than just rock guitar, however. I also had tapes by various other guitarists, like Larry Carlton, Billy Joe Walker Jr., and Albert Lee.

It was on Albert Lee's Gagged But Not Bound that I was first introduced to "Flowers of Edinburgh" played on an acoustic guitar. I listened to it a lot, and always thought I'd like to learn to play it sometime. But I never got around to it, and eventually forgot about it.

Until recently. I was searching for info about flatpicking, and came across the YouTube channel of a guitar player known as Fret Killer. He had a video of himself playing "Flowers of Edinburgh" that inspired me again to try and teach myself to play it. So, after a few weeks of practicing, I present you with a video of me & me playing the "Flowers of Edinburgh".

Notes on the video:
I recorded myself playing the melody, and then without moving the camera, recorded myself playing the accompaniment. The audio was recorded on two separate tracks on my multitrack recorder, and then mixed down to a single track that was later merged using Pinnacle Studio with clips from both videos, using dissolve transitions between the clips. It took a really long time to do!