Originally Posted By: Mike Halloran
Originally Posted By: etcjoe
Tommy was arguably one of the best guitarist sight readers back in the day. …


I'm guessing that you never read his Guitar Player columns back in the day. According to Mr. T., when the part was too difficult to read, he'd always find the flute player—they were the ones who could read anything.

I learned quite a bit from those GP columns of his but the biggest money-making tip was to always bring both a soprano and a tenor uke when the session called for ukulele. For a couple of decades, I was the only uke player registered with the local Musicians Union and that netted me many thousand$ over the years. Thank you, Tommy Tedesco!

He often played on The Lawrence Welk Show. It was fun to watch his chording wizardry while dressed in those silly suits.


I read it religiously actually. He did show some very difficult parts in those articles, but by most standards in the guitar world he was a great reader. He also could fake it better than most when he had to. His story about swapping guitars for a part when the conductor kept saying it wasn't quite right and all he did was bend over and then sit up again with the same nylon string guitar is pretty telling.

My wife asked if I had seen the dog bowl. I told her I didn't even know he could.