Fingerstyle is my main muse, too, although I've been doing a lot of Albert King style crosspicking stuff, just for the sake of re-learning scales with those crazy cascading open voices. A couple of Kottke tunes for the backyard was my main motivation at really
learning guitar, a project that came many years after I started
playing guitar for the purpose of picking up womenses. You don't need to really learn much in order to do that, and that is exactly how much I learned prior to attempting stuff like
Brain of Purple Mountain -- a puzzle box I am still learning in 2012.
My main muse this summer has been Canon in D, which I re-transcribed from some sheet music a few weeks back. I kept tinkering and re-writing it with my own voicings and minor shadings because the straight piano was not doing justice to what I heard in my head. Then a couple days ago I checked out George Winston's "variations" version of the song and realized:
I geeked out on LSD to that song for an entire winter back in 03 and his version is in the key of C! That explained the weird hybrid version I've been hearing in my frontal lobes, something I'm still working on because there's so much theory for a neophyte like me to chew on.
Pachelbel's piece is not a simple chord progression, there are many subtle changes but the overall harmony is so flexible you can do all sorts of slippery shit. I have definitely been trying to pull it from that solemn funeral tempo and either give it some Mississippi John Hurt bounce or....slow it down even further, like Gillian Welch would. I mean,
like I think she would...I haven't asked.
Here's a great tabulature version, by far the best:
Noda's Canon in DIt's in "drop D" tuning, something I've usually got the guitar set to anyways due to my proclivity for Tool, Meshuggah and Radiohead. Enjoy. Also, here's a terrifyingly good (and apparently effortless) version from a young Korean prodigy::
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRIp0r6xto8