History of Liturgical Guitarist: Part 2

In June, 2011, I bought a little Zoom HD Q3 video recorder. I wanted to share my first Mass composition called Guitar Mass for Peace on YouTube. The next year, I began teaching some beginning guitar classes after school in my parish school St. Thomas More, where I teach Spanish part-time in grades K – 8. Trying to make the classes the best value I could, I would go home afterwards and make a video reviewing the main techniques covered in each lesson and put it on YouTube for my students to watch. I also direct the school’s Youth Choir and occasionally used the camera to record some of our performances. I then posted those videos for parents and choir members to watch.

In January of 2013, I made my first tutorial arrangement of one of my Liturgical Guitarist Hymnal (LGH) arrangements for YouTube. I now have 42 videos of various arrangements for church on my LGH Lessons playlist on the Jim Nailon YouTube home page. These are all very simple and amateurish, done pretty much in the spur of the moment with my little Zoom recorder.

In November of 2015, during a conversation with Oregon Catholic Press about being an instructor in guitar workshops they hoped to begin presenting, I was told to contact Juan Carlos Garcia, who had vast media experience and might be able to help me develop an online community of liturgical guitarists. He had just moved to the Omaha area, where I live, to manage the Hispanic ministry and social media for the Columban Fathers, a worldwide missionary organization with headquarters in Bellevue, NE. When I met Juan Carlos, we made an immediate connection through the guitar and he agreed to work with me to make my initial online teaching efforts more effective through use of social media, a more professional website and better quality videos.

Last year, my main focus was recording my new Christmas CD, Little Baby in the Hay. But this year, my goal is to get serious about improving my outreach to liturgical guitarists. Juan Carlos has made the new website, which will soon contain a listing of all my arrangements linked to their sheet music files and any tutorial videos. I just purchased 2 new camcorders and video editing software to re-record previous tutorials and make new ones with better views of my hands so guitarists can better see how to play each piece. I will create a consistent format for my teaching videos to make them shorter and more to the point. Otherwise, I tend to ramble. I remade my first three tutorials last weekend and they are already on YouTube.

So those are my goals for 2017. I look forward to reading my blog entry a year from now to see how far I have come, with God’s and Juan Carlos’ help, in serving liturgical guitarists. I wish you all a blessed 2017, and Peace,

Jim