Interview with David Jaggs

David Jaggs is an accomplished classical guitarist, arranger, teacher, and recording artist with 11 album releases to his credit.

He is also a long-time ArrangeMe user and several of his popular arrangements were recently released in the brand new collection *Classical Guitar Music for the Solo Performer* published by Hal Leonard. We recently caught up with David about his journey as a self-published arranger and being noticed and taken to print by Hal Leonard.

ArrangeMe: How did you get started arranging?

David Jaggs: The arranging bug hit me when I was in conservatoire studying classical guitar at the Guildhall School of Music in London. I noticed that many guitarists seemed to be playing a lot of the same repertoire. My teacher showed me a shortcut to arrange Bach’s 3rd Cello Suite in C. He told me that you could change the bass clef to a treble clef, put in three sharps, add a few bass notes, and you have a guitar piece in the key of A that no one else is playing! That really got me hooked, and then I started doing a lot of Baroque and Renaissance transcriptions from Lute direct from the tablature, which got me into the transcribing side.

What really got me into arranging more popular music was as a student, I would go out busking, playing Bach, Barrios, etc. Then every now and then I would play Stanley Myers’ “Cavatina,” the theme from The Deer Hunter. I noticed the amount of money coming into the hat would triple! Of course, I wanted to find more of those kinds of arrangements and realized there weren’t too many out there, so I started doing some myself. The first one I tried was “If” by David Gates purely because it seemed to start with a very similar melodic shape and chord structure to “Cavatina,” so it wound up working well. That lead to arranging and recording many popular songs in a similar style for my own CDs that I sold at shows.

AM: What does your arranging process look like?

DJ: Sometimes I’ll hear something on the radio, usually ballads, and I’ll just know it’s going to work. Some songs work instantly, they go straight onto the instrument, but not all songs work well. A good example is “The Man with the Child In His Eyes” by Kate Bush. Whenever I hear that song, I sit up and think, “yeah, this could be good!” But when I sit down to actually work it out, the nature of the melody just doesn’t lend itself to the guitar.

Songs that work really well often have some kind of instrumental hook that grabs the ear, and of course it is especially helpful if it’s a guitar riff. From there, the process tends to be about 70% transcription, getting the melody and chords down, and then 30% creative arranging, filling up the gaps with musical material that ties the song together. It’s like a Sudoku puzzle trying to figure out how to fit everything together: finding the right key, whether to use standard or alternative tunings, using a capo, there are all sorts of tools to capitalize on to add variety. I’d say it takes two or three days to finish an arrangement typically.

I recently arranged Adele’s “Easy On Me” and thought it would be fun to try to upload it to YouTube on the same day that she did. She released a teaser video with just the introduction to the song and I decided to do something similar for my YouTube subscribers. It was announced that her single was to be released at midnight and in my video, I said my arrangement would be available by “about tea time” the next day. I’ve never worked so hard, arranging, editing, and uploading an arrangement in just a few hours! Sadly it didn’t go viral, but I was quite pleased with how the arrangement turned out and people are still buying it!

”The hard bit starts after you’ve finished the arrangement, doesn’t it? You really have to do the work and promote [your arrangements] yourself.
”

– David Jaggs

AM: That is a really creative way to not only challenge yourself, but also to engage your customers! How do you typically let people know they can buy your sheet music? Do you have any kind of marketing plan to get the word out when you finish a new chart?

DJ: The hard bit starts after you’ve finished the arrangement, doesn’t it? There are self-publishers who think that once they put up their scores, they will just automatically begin to sell and are disappointed when that doesn’t happen. You really have to do the work and promote them yourself.

I have Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts that I use a little, but what I really focus on is YouTube. It takes a lot of work to make a YouTube channel successful, but I think it’s worth it. You can actually get paid once you get a certain amount of subscribers, which is a bonus. The nice thing about YouTube is you can put direct links to buy the sheet music both in the description and using end screens and cards on the video itself. I set those up to go to my website where I have further links set up so customers can purchase directly from SheetMusicPlus.com, which of course is possible via ArrangeMe. It’s really quite wonderful how it all works together.

AM: When (and why) did you start your websites DavidJaggs.com and ClassicalGuitar.online?

DJ: I originally started DavidJaggs.com so that when I played live shows, I could give people leaflets with the web address to order my CDs and DVDs from the site. That’s really more my artist site. I began doing guitar tutorial videos to download for students and started ClassicalGuitar.online (which is just digital) because I thought there were guitarists that could really benefit from those, so that became more of an instructional site for educational purposes. Of course I link the two together, but it made sense to separate the educational site from my recording artist site.

I also have a third website because I’ve got a small record label called TimeSpan Recordings where I record other artists such as John Mills, Antigoni Goni, David Miller, Cristina Gallieto, and others.

AM: Looking back, is there anything you’d change in how you started out selling your arrangements? Anything you wished you’d learned sooner? Any assumptions you had to correct?

DJ: I used to try and include everything in my arrangements, but over the years I’ve found that often it’s what you choose to leave out of the original song as well as what you put in that makes it work. A solo line on the guitar is so gorgeous that sometimes you don’t really need to add too much else to it. As I mentioned earlier, if you can include the little instrumental hooks and motifs along with the melody and correct harmony, you’ll probably have a really lovely arrangement. The best advice I could give to someone arranging for guitar would be don’t try to cram everything in and detract from what’s important about the song.

I would also say that in my early days, I would always be faced with the problem of licensing arrangements, which was such a challenge. The process took ages and not all publishers are keen to do it. But now with ArrangeMe and Hal Leonard, all that hard work of licensing is done for you!

AM: What do you find most rewarding about arranging music? Most challenging?

DJ: It’s always really nice to get to see or hear someone else play one of my arrangements. Reading comments on my videos, that’s always nice to see, if they’re good! The main thing is the satisfaction of creating something new for the guitar, then playing it live and seeing a positive reaction.

The most challenging thing about arranging is when I’ve invested a few days working out a beautiful verse, only to find that the chorus just doesn’t fit. I find it difficult to accept defeat and walk away from it.

AM: You arrange a wide variety of repertoire from both current and classic pop/rock tunes to classical music for guitar. Do you have a process for choosing which songs you arrange and which ones you don’t?

DJ: If you’re making an album, it’s good to have a theme. I recorded an album of Scottish folk tunes, so that was fun to work on. I’ve also done Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Joplin. I think generally I just go by the song, really. If the song speaks to me and I’ll say, “Okay, I’ll give that one a go!” Eventually, you arrange enough songs and there will be titles that naturally go together. I’ve done a few Simon and Garfunkel tunes like “Scarborough Fair,” “The Boxer,” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Arranging one tends to lead to the others since they are related by the writers. A couple of those are in the new Hal Leonard book, so that was great to see those get included.

AM: Let’s talk about your new Hal Leonard collection! Tell us how that project happened and what that experience was like.

DJ: The book is called Classical Guitar Music for the Solo Performer and I have two things to thank for it: YouTube and ArrangeMe. I did my arrangement of “The Boxer” during lockdown along with quite a few other new arrangements done in that time. Two or three months later, I received an email saying I’d won a prize from SheetMusicPlus.com for it! I think from there it got the attention of the team at Hal Leonard and then they emailed me asking if I’d like to do the book and of course the answer was “yes, I’d love to do it!”

The idea for the book was the top 20 arrangements I found most success with over the years, the ones that consistently connected with audiences and that fit the best on the instrument. I revisited each one and improved everything I possibly could from an arrangement standpoint, then sent in what I thought were perfect PDFs to the Hal Leonard editor, Jim Schustedt. He is some kind of genius and made all sorts of corrections and edits, not in the arrangements themselves, he didn’t change any notes, but improved the presentation. How to represent artificial harmonics properly, layout, voicing, stem direction, etc. He was a real joy to work with and I learned a great deal during the process. It wouldn’t have happened without the ArrangeMe program, and I’m very grateful!

AM: What is your favorite thing about the ArrangeMe platform, what do you find most valuable?

DJ: With ArrangeMe, the licensing of such a wide variety of copyrighted songs is already taken care of and I can just get on with the fun part, which is the arranging! Also, the availability of my arrangements to customers all over the world through SheetMusicPlus.com and now SheetMusicDirect.com is huge.

“With ArrangeMe, the licensing of such a wide variety of copyrighted songs is already taken care of and I can just get on with the fun part, which is the arranging!”

– David Jaggs

AM: Where do you find inspiration most often?

DJ: Going back to my early days of arranging popular songs, the biggest influence on me has been Cuban guitarist Manuel Barrueco, who did an album of American tunes called Sometime Ago which included some Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and some Paul Simon. I heard that and thought, “that’s how I’d like my arrangements to sound.” But I just love playing the guitar, and that’s the real inspiration.

AM: At this point in your career, what is your ‘100-foot wave’? What, if anything, are you chasing?

DJ: To still be able to do what I’m doing now in another 20 years: playing, arranging, creating videos, and producing records. I still love the classical guitar!

In addition to his self-published arrangements available through ArrangeMe at Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct, be sure to check out Classical Guitar Music for the Solo Performer, David’s brand new collection published by Hal Leonard!

To find out more about David and his music, subscribe to his YouTube page, follow @dpjfilms on Instagram, and be sure to visit DavidJaggs.com and ClassicalGuitar.online.

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