Learn a Newly Found John Renbourn Arrangement of “Pipe on the Hob”
Mastering engineer Mike Walker found this previously undiscovered arrangement of the traditional Irish jig while organizing and digitizing the fingerstyle master’s transcriptions.
In the 1980s, Mike Walker, a disc-cutting and mastering engineer at Trident Studios in London, first met John Renbourn, the fingerstyle master and longtime Transatlantic Records artist whose debut appeared on the label in 1966. Transatlantic had commissioned Walker to master and digitize its catalog for CD reissue. “John was very interested in the process, and we spent a lot of time together working on his recordings,” Walker recalls. “I had been a fan since I was a kid in Scotland, so it was a thrill to end up working with John on the music which had inspired me in the first place and to enter into a long friendship with him.”
That connection would eventually lead to John Renbourn: 60 Instrumental Pieces for Solo Guitar, a major new collection of transcriptions assembled by Walker. The project began as a collaboration with Renbourn, and after his death in 2015, Walker took on the task of organizing and completing the work they had begun. Ultimately the collection has provided study material for the guitar workshops Renbourn himself founded. “It’s been an invaluable resource for the workshops, which in turn have been an incentive to keep going,” Walker says.
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An arrangement of the traditional Irish jig “Pipe on the Hob” is one of the discoveries that emerged from that process. Renbourn never recorded the tune—the notation was found among his computer files from 2014, created in Finale notation software. “This is just one of many previously undiscovered gems in the large archive Renbourn left behind,” Walker says. The piece is played in a variant of DADGAD tuning, with the third string tuned down a minor third, which Renbourn only used for this arrangement, as well as his 1979 composition “The Pelican.” Walker notes, “That E note on string 3 really empowers the A minor chord and allows some nice campanella effects.”
Technically, the arrangement isn’t forbiddingly difficult, but rewards thoughtful preparation. Alternating picking fingers for speed and emphasizing the resonant campanella passages—especially in bars 2 and 6—capture its fluid character. As Walker says, “Played slowly, this piece doesn’t pose too many problems in terms of fingering, but as always with pieces which need to be played at speed, finding the most efficient fingerings will pay dividends.”
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This arrangement is excerpted from John Renbourn: 60 Instrumental Pieces for Solo Guitar (renbournfingerstyle.com).
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.
Adam Perlmutter
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Very nice and I wish I could learn it but I am not at all into alternate tunings. I feel like I have enough to learn with standard tuning.
Re – The Pipe on the Hob. A nice piece but either the guitar is wrong or the recording. Very jangly – not at all clean and John Renbourn was always clean.