Guitar Land

Sloppy fretting

2011-12-27T09:34:00.001-08:00

I haven't posted in a while.

I was in Wales for two months and did manage to keep up my practicing there, but with less regularity than at home.

I was practicing the other day, working on Ode to joy in fact, and I realized that I am not as attentive to my fretting as I should be. I find that with nobody listening that I can sometimes fret a note pretty far from the metal. Anyway, I decided to really concentrate on fretting things carefully and was amazed at how much nicer several pieces sounded.

It's a fairly obvious point, but it just highlighted the importance of vigilance in my practicing.

Will the circle be unbroken

2011-08-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a classic, done in Carter-style. It's got up-down strums all the way through. I tried it with only down-strums, but it definitely doesn't sound as good. This is taxing my limited strumming abilities, or at least it feels like it's taxing them. Something to work on.

Although I've now decided that pieces I master tend to lose their interest. That is, by the time I learn how to play them well enough and by memory, I like them less.

Schade.

Masters of War

2011-06-25T11:37:00.001-07:00

An old Dylan classic. Really simple strum and chords: Dm and Csus2 (capo on 3). Nice

Going electric

2011-03-31T10:21:00.000-07:00

I got a new guitar for my birthday yesterday!

It's electric!

It's a "starter" model, which is just right. I need to see if I enjoy playing electric before I go off an invest any money in a nice one.

So far, I see several things. First, it's wonderfully forgiving with misfingered chords. Nothing buzzes. Wow!

On the other hand, that fretboard is really narrow, so it's really hard to do anything fancy on the fretboard.

The strings are correspondingly close together, so it's hard to do any interesting fingerpicking.

And I find I have to be pretty careful with the pick, not to run into the pickups.

But it's really pretty....

Bad habits

2010-08-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

I've decided that playing alone all the time--which is how I prefer it--leads me to perpetuate bad habits. I think I have at least these:

My timing is erratic and I should be practicing with a metronome.

My strumming seems to be based on getting the strum in the right place, rather than getting the right-sounding strum.

I fret the low e-string with the pads of my fingers, rather than the tips.

I'm sure everybody gets bad habits, but I think my solitary style reinforces certain ones.

Without

2010-07-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

I've been without the nicer guitar for almost three weeks!

There's always been a little warp in the fretboard, but it's been so negligible, that I've been able to live with it for some time. I started working on a piece where I have the capo up on #4 though and it's really hard to avoid the problem then.

So I took the guitar off to the shop. They said they could fix it easily and have it back to me within the week. At the end of the week, however, they called and said there was a problem with the finish. Since it's a Martin and under warranty, no cost, but it would take another week.

That, however, was after we were due to be on a boat to Alaska, so I'm due to get the guitar back this coming week when we're back in Tucson.

The other guitar is perfectly serviceable, but I'm definitely looking forward to getting the d-18 back....

Help

2010-06-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

O.k., I'm still on the plateau and I think I need some inspiration to get off of it.

What I want is new fingerstyle pieces (with tab!) that I can work on. I have a bunch of books with some pieces, but nothing that catches my fancy. Help.....

Change the strings!

2010-05-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while, but I have been practicing continuously.

I feel like I've been on a plateau for the last few months. I'm not sure what to do to get out of that. I think the best thing would be to pull out one of the stack of guitar books I have and get started on learning the pieces in it. What I feel most like learning now is something "strummy", but my impression is that those are the least clear from books.

Maybe I should just change my strings though.

The plucky ones

2009-07-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I started a new book with lots of fingerstyle pieces. I've nailed down the two or three that I like and want to know by heart, and started pulling out some of my many other books to find one with pieces that would be fun to work on.

I found one in the stack that I used to play from all the time that's all about Celtic and American flatpicking fiddle tunes. Real nice. There were a bunch that I used to play and that I'd marked in the book and it's been fun going back to these, finding my fingers almost remember them.

There are a few new ones that I've gotten hooked on and those are fun too. I'm noticing that my "guitar memory" seems to have improved. That is, I seem to be better able to memorize lines at a time. I'm also noticing that I'm more comfortable playing tunes with a greater fret range. Where previously I preferred the tunes where I could pretty much anchor my left hand, now I'm much better with moving the left up and down the fretboard.

Dead strings

2009-06-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

I realized today that when I play strumming songs, that I occasionally have damped/dead strings. When I'm fingerpicking, these are easy to spot and fix, but it's harder when strumming.

Buzzing strings are easy to catch with either technique.

I'm always worrying about the "quality" of my strumming, and I'm thinking now that unnoticed damped strings may be part of the problem.

Second time around

2009-05-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while, but practice has been going pretty well.

I've been focusing on memorizing a finger-style piece that had been a problem for months. I'm about halfway through now. Slow going, but it's working.

I did have a little epiphanette the other day: when I go through my practice routine, sometimes pieces are rough. I'll occasionally go back to play them and they're typically much cleaner the second time through. It could be because I've simply already played it, but I'm thinking now that it has more to do with focus. The first time round, I'm trying to get through the whole repertoire; the second time through I'm focusing on just that piece.

Yet another strumming epiphany

2009-01-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

My practice schedule has been off lately as I'm in the middle of dealing with a kidney stone. All should eventually be fine, but the moral of the story is: keep hydrated!

The strumming insight, which is really a continuation of one from two posts back, is that I realized that when I strum, I now hit all the strings that I'm supposed to. I think that's actually wrong though. It sounds lots better if I pass over or only lightly graze the bass strings (making sure to hit all the treble strings per two posts ago).

Now I could just be imagining this. Or it could be an effect of playing a "boomy" dreadnaught. Or it could be a huge new step in the right direction.

I'm hoping it's the last.

In the dark

2008-12-23T07:50:00.000-08:00

I was practicing the other night at dusk working through a piece I've played for some time. It was getting dark, but I didn't want to get up to turn on the light. I realized that some pieces I play by looking at my right hand, other piecies I play by looking at the music, and others I play not looking at anything.

I realized this because the particular piece I was playing seemed to get worse as I got darker; it was one of the pieces I need to look at my right hand for.

Some of this is based on familiarity. There are pieces i know really well and I'm used to playing them without looking at anything.

Some is technique. I find that I generally have to look at my right hand more if I'm playing with a pick, perhaps because I'm less sure of the location of the pick, than I am of my actual fingers.

I guess the oddest thing is that for the pieces I play without looking at my right hand, it's not a good idea to actually look, it makes my playing worse. That is, if it's a piece I can now play without looking at my right, looking down actually causes me to stumble.

In any case, it was an interesting realization that turning the lights on or off will help and hinder playing different songs.

Low/high strings

2008-12-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

I was banging away yesterday -- trying hard not to, of course (see last post) -- when it occurred to me that it might not be how hard I'm hitting the strings that distresses me, but which strings I'm hitting.

Digression. It's hard to talk about which strings because the small strings, those that play "higher" notes, are the strings lower down across the instrument as you play. So if you say "low" strings, it's ambiguous between the position of the strings and the notes they play. I'm gonna try to say "high-note strings", etc. to keep it unambiguous.

Certain chords mean skipping over some of the low-note strings and I'm usually pretty good about watching out for that.

I think that I've gotten in the habit of hitting the (other) low note strings and missing some of the high-note strings though. Maybe I'm obsessing or worrying overmuch about it, but maybe my strums are, hm, "truncated", and don't reach all the high-note strings all the time.

I tried working on this yesterday and things sounded pretty good.

Encore doucement

2008-11-22T16:18:00.000-08:00

I have a vague memory that I actually have already posted on this topic, but that actually makes this even more interesting...at least to me.

I was practicing away and thinking as I went that my strings needed replacing. Well, I went off and trimmed my fingernails (always a good idea for lots of reasons), sat down with a nice cabernet to resume practice and was suddenly overtaken with the urge to play softly.

I almost went to jelly at how nice things suddenly sounded, was reminded what a nice guitar I have, and how all was right with the world...if only Napolitano wasn't leaving the state and the university budget wasn't in the toilet...but that's a whole different story!

The gist of all that is that I have to remember not to bang away at the guitar and play with some delicacy sometimes.

Little progress

2008-11-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

Things have been really really busy at work of late and this has meant little time for the guitar.

I'm trying to keep up quality practice sessions on the weekend, but during the week, I can miss several days at a stretch.

I don't think I'm backsliding, but I sure miss it!

New floors and the guitar

2008-08-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

We're having new floors put into our living room and den. The work isn't done yet; the floors are down, but we want them to come back and fix the edging. This means all our furniture...or most of it...is still stuffed into other rooms.

This has meant that I've been practicing occasionally in rooms with a bare floor with virtually no furniture. This, in turn, means that there is a whole new acoustic dimension to my practicing in those rooms; I can hear all sorts of things I don't normally hear.

I've found that when I'm playing fingerstyle, my fingernails occasionally bump up against neighboring strings. This isn't a problem if those strings aren't vibrating, but I'm playing fast enough and more complex pieces where that's now often the case. When those neighboring strings are vibrating, I get a noticeable buzzing when I bump.

I suppose this is normal. The better and better one gets, the more little bad habits one notices and wants to correct.

The alternative analysis is that I'm getting worse!

Precision

2008-07-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

I find I have a whole bunch of songs that I "can" play, but that don't really sound like music to me. Some of that's probably that they're so familiar, or that the versions I'm playing are so simple, but some of it is that I think I'm just not precise enough.

I find that practicing alone I settle for all sorts of mistimings, buzzing strings, etc. I tried working on that one day last week and had very sore hands the next day!

I figure if I say it out loud here maybe that'll keep me honest!

Another strumming epiphany

2008-06-08T14:45:00.001-07:00

I've never liked my strumming. Somehow it feels like I'm banging away at the instrument, either too loudly, or hitting the wrong strings, or there's buzzing, or there's an evil strumming gremlin made of broken glass who lives between my strings.

I did discover something about my right-hand technique recently. It seems to be that fingerstyle things sound better with my right hand further across the sound hole than flatpicked strums, which seem to sound better further back to the right.

I could be imagining this....or it could be that gremlin has simply moved for a few days, but that's my current thinking.

Close your eyes

2008-03-08T14:50:00.000-08:00

There's this version of Wildwood Flower that I've been playing for a long time. Over the last few months, it seems to have gotten a little rockier. Moreover, I've been finding that the harder I work at trying to get it back to something smoother, it just stays rocky and clumsy.

I noticed the other day that when I closed my eyes and stopped looking so closely at where my fingers were going that it got a lot smoother.

Regularity

2008-02-12T06:53:00.000-08:00

The semester has started up again and even though I'm not teaching this term, it's really irregularized my practice schedule. Now there are at least two or three days a week when I may only get in a few minutes: tune up, a few scales, maybe a few of the pieces I know by heart and then put the guitar back in the case.

I'm trying to make up for it by doing really full practice sessions on the weekends, but I can really notice the difference when I miss a day or so.

I'm definitely off the plateau and am making some progress with the fingerstyle book, but it's slow going....

The edge

2008-01-03T15:43:00.000-08:00

Well, I'd been on a plateau for some weeks and then the holidays were on us. Somewhere in there I decided two things. . First, I was going to pursue lessons again. Second, I was going to make an effort to really get in quality practice time every day.

I found a guy to do the lessons with and met with him. A very nice fellow, but after I explained where I was and where I thought I was going, he said he wasn't sure he had anything to teach me. It was very weird. I guess what he was saying was that unless I wanted to change my goals, I was doing the right thing to advance them. That sounded like a good thing. Anyway, I mulled that over for about a week and then decided I'd skip lessons for now.

Practice. Practice over the holidays has been good. I've been making lots of progress with the fingerpicking book. I can't really put my finger on the nature of the progress, but some of the ones that are supposed to sound like music actually vaguely almost mostly kind of sound like music.

The endless plateau

2007-11-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

It's been almost two months since my last post. I'm still playing away, but I feel like I'm on a huge plateau and the temptation to reduce practicing is ever present.

I think it's because I've gotten into what I think of as a "runner's dilemma". The idea is that you build up your regular runs to some particular distance and then the next time you run you feel like you have to make that distance or better. That can be a really good thing as it encourages you to improve. It can be a bad thing because it makes each run more daunting.

I haven't run in quite a few years, but I feel like I have the same thing going on with my guitar practicing. I have a set of songs that I go through and if I don't get to all of them, I feel like I was a slacker.

Music and families

2007-09-10T16:53:00.001-07:00

I've taken to reading what appear to be extended obituaries in the morning paper. The "Region" section of our paper does longer stories once or twice a week about some fairly ordinary person who's just passed away. They're really charming stories that often reveal some interesting personal history, e.g. Aunt Edna moved here from Romania and bought a ranch in Sonoita, or my dad invented peanut butter, or uncle Fred owned a little store where kids could get snowcones for free, etc.

Anyway, I found one the other day about a guy who was described as an incredible guitarist, but who had never taken a lesson. On reading the story, it turned out that i) he really was an incredible guitarist, and ii) that both of his parents were guitarists and that when he was a kid both parents would routinely pull out their guitars for the evening.

Not to detract anything from the guy in question--who really seems to have been an incredible guitarist and an all-around nice person---but I'm wondering how much variation there is in terms of "music in the home". While the person in question may never had had any formal instruction, it seems like he had almost daily exposure to guitar playing by several family members.

I think my experience is probably pretty close to the norm for most Americans. My siblings and I all had music lessons of various sorts, but our training and playing lasted only a few years. Neither of our parents played anything, though both had had similar upbringings. (My parents are divorced, but I think that's orthogonal.)

So the general question: how much variation on musical "exposure" is there and does that play a role in whether kids pursue music?

The specific question for me: can I honestly expect to make serious progress on the guitar when I did not have extended childhood or current exposure and am no longer taking lessons?

A new book

2007-08-16T17:13:00.000-07:00

I'm still working on songs in the Shipton book, but I've got another book that's been sitting around for a few weeks that I've started playing from: You can teach yourself fingerpicking guitar by Tommy Flint.

Fingerpicking, if you don't know, is when you play the individual strings with individual fingers. No pick. No strumming. I've got a few songs like this already, but this is a whole book of them.

The very beginning of the book is way too beginner-oriented, even for me! But I've flipped through the book and the stuff near the end is way more advanced than I've done so far, so I figure it'll be a nice one to work through.

At the moment, I'm struggling with the fact that the introductory material appears to have been written before the dawn of time. It's not so much inaccurate in any technical way; it's just culturally way out of date.

The broad expanse

2007-08-01T16:53:00.001-07:00

The other day we went over to our friends AVF and JI's house to make sure that AVF wasn't sleeping in the carport. (Long story; see AVF's blog!)

I was immediately distracted by AVF's classical guitar. I've certainly messed around with them before, but I hadn't held one in quite a while.

I tuned it up and was immediately reminded of the differences: nylon strings, smaller body than my own dreadnaughts, wider fretboard. The last took some adjustment. I felt like I had to stretch even further for some chords.

What surprised me was the sense of liberation I had. I think I must be at a phase where I'm fighting not to run into strings I shoudn't. The wider fretboard made me feel so much more "on target".

And with such light and friendly strings.

Bliss...especially since there was major puppy bonding...and we found that AVF was not sleeping in the carport that night.

Drop-D

2007-07-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

I finished the Shipton book (minus a few pieces I didn't like).

I feel like I'm doing some backsliding though. Things don't seem to sound as good as they did a few weeks ago, especially strumming pieces. I suppose this is some sort of plateau that I just have to play through, but it's a bit daunting.

On the other hand, I'm learning a version of the Pachelbel Canon in what I believe is "drop-D" tuning.

If you're not a guitar person, the normal tuning of the six strings from low to high is: E A D G B E. Drop D tuning involves lowering that low E down to D. Thus: D A D G B E. I now have a "chromatic tuner", so this is actually pretty easy to do on the fly. It's amazing how this one little change makes such a difference in the sound of the instrument. That low D is sooooooo low!

Goals

2007-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Still working through the same book (Shipton).

One of my goals for my current sabbatical had been to try to finish the book before the end of the sabbatical.

I'm really really close, but there are still 4-5 songs in the book and my sabbatical technically ends at the end of this month.

Hm. I just realized that I have my own sense of making progress with a piece.

First stage is that I can play all the notes through, off tempo.
Second stage is that I can play them through and it vaguely sounds like the actual piece.
Third stage, would be that I can play through at tempo with the music.
Fourth stage is playing through at tempo with no music.

I'm certainly not to stage four with the whole book, but I'd love to be at stage three.

Reading music

2007-06-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'm still working through the Shipton book. I'd been making what seems like good progress.

A couple of times, I've really stalled. Sometimes I think that's probably normal plateauing, but other times it's been something else.

The fact of the matter is that I can't read music very well. I learned how when I was really young and have had no reason to keep sharp with it over the last 30 years or so. What I find is that when I come to a new piece that's written in normal musical notation as opposed to tablature, I can read it, but it's really slow.

This has shown up in the book several times so far, but I'd come to a couple of pieces back to back in the Shipton book over the last two weeks or so written in standard music and it had slowed me down.

I seem to have overcome it a bit. I can play both through (slowly and awkwardly of course!), but I can get through them. So I figure I'm due a little celebration.

Youth

2007-05-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

My wife went on a youtube binge the other day and at one point I looked over her shoulder to see what had gotten her attention. Well, there were bunches of videos of dachshunds, but there was one music one. It featured three kids sitting on the sofa playing a bluegrass piece. (I've been searching the site and have been unable to find it again, so I can't post the direct link here.)

There were two guitars and a mandolin. The kids were somewhere in the 6-10 range and they were really good.

What got me though was that they didn't appear to be having all that much fun. They kept looking to the person holding the camera and all I could read in their eyes was something like: daddy, can we stop now?

What really got me was that I feel like here I am pouring my heart into the guitar and I may never get as good as these little kids. On the other hand, I think I'm having more fun than them.

Relax

2007-05-14T08:57:00.001-07:00

I think I tense up for some things. I find that's certainly true for pieces that I'm making an effort to play without error, or for difficult chord shapes (bars), or difficult fingering patterns.

I would imagine that, as a relative beginner, I'm generally holding my hands, fingers, arms too rigidly.

While practicing yesterday, I tried monitoring this and really made an effort to loosen up. I'm not sure it sounded any better, but it certainly felt better.

Should it sound like music?

2007-04-25T18:36:00.000-07:00

I had another epiphany. Lately, things have been sounding a little more like music and I'd been taking that as a good sign.

Then I began thinking about my son and his violin. He's been playing for years and, over the years, it's sounded more and less like music. At the very beginning, it had lots of rough patches and, though I was proud of every note, sometimes, it was a stretch to find music in there. Later, it sounded like music a lot, and this lasted up until fairly recently. Of late, though, he seems to often work on bizarre scales and exercises that don't sound like music. I suppose the difference is that the bizarre scales aren't supposed to sound like music.

So the issue is this: if this is the typical continuum, where am I on it? I'm thinking I'm at that first break between initial non-musical and musical.

I guess the moral is that the more progress I make, the longer the path to where I want to be seems.

Rhythm

2007-04-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

I'm back from my trip, a week away from the guitar and no noticeable backsliding.

I've been working through the Shipton book (described in an earlier post). I'm up to the third part and had been having trouble with some of the fancy syncopated strums. I had a little epiphany today though. I noticed that if I just hold one chord shape it's easier to figure out the strumming pattern, than if I'm trying to do the chord changes at the same time.

This is probably the most obvious thing in the world, but it's fairly typical of my epiphanies!

Hiatus

2007-04-09T14:54:00.000-07:00

I'm off to an international conference for a week and, because of all the other carry-ons I'm taking, I'm leaving the travel guitar behind. This may be the first break from daily practice since the beginning of the year.

I'm going to miss it and I worry that I'll backslide.

There's research that shows that appropriate "visualization" can help more than actual practice in some kinds of learning. I don't think the learning involved is middle-aged guitar, but I'm hoping it'll generalize.

Collectors

2007-03-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

I just got a new guitar. Actually, it was a very generous gift from my mom on the occasion of a momentous birthday: a Martin D-18. I put up a picture to the right.

It's just gorgeous and sounds like bliss. It's clearly worthy of someone who can play a lot better than I can at this stage, but i) it gives me a goal to shoot for; ii) it was a really nice gift; and iii) did I already mention that it's just plan goegeous?

I think that there is a collector syndrome. My impression is that it shows up most often with men who collect guns, of all things, but I think it shows up with guitars too. I've run across quite a few guys who "collect" guitars. I'm not sure how well they play, but they seem to have way more guitars than they have time to play them. (There are obviously women who collect things too; there just seems to be something very male about this kind of collecting.)

With this beautiful new guitar, I now have three, All Martins.

LXM A baby Martin for traveling.
DX1R My previous guitar. Quite serviceable and probably the one I'll use for trips where I have enough room to bring a full-size instrument.
D-18 The new beauty. So far, I want to guard it with my life and keep it at home!

When I was shopping around for the D-18, I did see some really beautiful Larrivee instruments....

Consumed

2007-03-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

I found a new little riff that I'm totally consumed by. It's from a song called "The Junkie Song" by a band called the Be Good Tanyas. I found the tab on the web and it looks like this:


  Am                      C           G
----------3-3-------------------------------
---1----1--------1----1----1----1--0-----0^1
-2----2--------2----2----0----0----0---0----
--------------------------------------------
0----0--------0----0----3----3--------------
----------------------------------3---3-----

Hauntingly pretty to my mind, but really really easy. I suppose I have this naive view that the most interesting music should be hardest, but maybe that isn't so. It would seem that there's music that's hard to play and then there's music that's hard to think up.

I guess the trick for me at my stage is to try to enjoy learning the latter, rather than the former!

Bar-chord ruminations

2007-03-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

I'm refusing to use the spelling barre on general principle.

I have a general understanding of bar-chords and use them occasionally, but I've been working hard of late to make my transitions to bar-chords smoother and to get them to sound better. The ones I use the most seem to be the E-shape


|-1-|---|---|
|-1-|---|---|
|-1-|-2-|---|
|-1-|---|-4-|
|-1-|---|-3-|
|-1-|---|---|

and the A-minor shape.


|-1-|---|---|
|-1-|-2-|---|
|-1-|---|-4-|
|-1-|---|-3-|
|-1-|---|---|
|---|---|---|

The E-shape barred at the first fret is a full F, which I use all the time and the A-minor shape barred at the second fret is a B-minor, which I'm using a lot too.

I find that I'm really slow at moving into these positions and that my left hand is pretty sore. (The old soreness seems well under control though and I'm assuming the new soreness will fade as I get better at this.)

O.k. a switch of gears. I just noticed that a C-shape barred at the second fret should be a D and seems to be identical to a D if you just look at the first three strings.


|---|-1-|---|---|---|
|---|-1-|-2-|---|---|
|---|-1-|---|---|---|
|---|-1-|---|-3-|---|
|---|-1-|---|---|-4-|
|---|---|---|---|---|

Is this right??? If so, does this mean that what we think of as D is really a truncated barred C?

Doucement

2007-03-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

For xmas, my wife got me a subscription to a guitar magazine: Acoustic Guitar, which I've really been enjoying. I was reading an article in it the other day about some guitar player named David Wilcox and they highlighted a really wonderful quote: "The dynamics on the guitar have so little to do with how loud you make it and a lot to do with how soft you make it."

I'm a linguist and the semantics are almost self-contradictory. Setting that aside though, I think the point is really apropos for me at this stage. Lately, I've been working on learning different strumming patterns and I have a huge temptation to wail away at the instrument. I find that if I hold back and concentrate on making strums that sound good, rather than feel good, that it starts to sound like music!

Strumming

2007-02-22T17:38:00.000-08:00

I found a new book. Or rather, I was digging through the bijillions of guitar books I have and found one that I hadn't worked through before. It's written by a Russ Shipton and it's very nice.

There are several aspects of the book that seem to be working well for me. First thing is that it has whole sections on strumming. This is such a remedial topic, yet it's a big gap in my training. There are some weekend players who really only strum and it's something I have only a "theoretical" understanding of. The Shipton book has a number of examples of pieces to be played with all sorts of strums that I don't know. I feel like I've really made some progress on this.

Another aspect of the book that I've found really pleasant is that I know a lot of the music. Most of the pieces that are included are old rock songs from the 60s and 70s. This is really nice. I've found books before with "popular" music, but usually it's music that I either don't know or don't like. This book has lots of pretty stuff, lots of familiar stuff.

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post, but it really helps for me to know the music I'm playing to have a picture(?) in my mind of how the piece sounds.

I do have to admit that there is one shortcoming with the book. It includes a CD, which is very nice, but the version of the music on the CD is i) electric, not acoustic, and ii) includes lead parts that make it hard to hear the rhythm part for pieces where you're supposed to learn the rhythm part.

Classical Gas

2007-02-12T07:41:00.000-08:00

I found tab for an oldie, Classical Gas, and have been working on it. It's probably way beyond my abilities, but it's such a pretty piece.

By the way, most of the tab versions I found on the web attribute the thing to Eric Clapton, but a check of iTunes shows that he never recorded a version of it. I finally found that the famous acoustic guitar version is by Mason Williams and there are a number of references on the web to how it's been misattributed to Clapton.

Musicality

2007-02-04T15:53:00.000-08:00

I feel like I can get pretty good at hitting the notes for various pieces I practice, but that doesn't seem to entail that they sound like music.

I believe this is called musicality, but I'm not sure. What seems to help most is songs that I actually sing. Singing is not something I enjoy or am good at, but I find that if I at least hum along with a piece it sounds much more like music.

I suppose that could just be to my ear, that singing makes a piece sound more musical to me, but to no one else.

Sore hands

2007-01-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

I seem to have perpetually sore hands. My wrists have always bothered me with the guitar, but now my knuckles are trouble too.

The latter seems to have started when I overdid the rock climbing...which I stopped. Stretching out my wrists seems to help the first some, but I'm convinced now that they're just the price of doing business, that my fate is to have sore hands. C'est la vie.

Carter style

2007-01-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

There's a style of playing called Carter Style. I believe it's named for Maybelle Carter, a member of an old group called the Carter Family. It involves alternating pass notes with strums and the base notes effectively pick out the melody.

I've got a bunch of pieces like that that I like and have worked on for some time. I enjoy them; they're a lot of fun to play.

I've gone listening to the original Carter Family tunes though, and most of them don't float my boat all that much. So I'm having a bit of a disconnect between what I like to play and what I like to listen to.

Railroad Bill

2007-01-18T13:39:00.001-08:00

There's a wonderful version of "Railroad Bill" performed by Etta Baker. I think the most often heard one is from an album with Taj Mahal. You can find free mp3 versions of the song on the web.

It's pretty straightforward and real pretty. I found a book that offers a simplified version of it that I've been working on.

It's fingerstyle, which is new for me, and the picking is nicely syncopated.

I'd love to find tab for the full version by Baker, but no luck yet.

One story

2007-01-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

I'm an older fellow going through my nth life crisis: my only son has just left for college out of state to study music.

With time and conflicting emotions on my hands, I'm resolved to spend more time with the guitar and really try to move from the "fiddling around with it" stage to the "actually can make music" stage.

I think I'm guided by my son in several ways. First, there's the empty nest syndrome. I've got some time. Second, he's a musician himself---violin---and he gets such pleasure from his playing that I think I might too.

I think there's a third reason too possibly. Is it that I miss the sound of somebody practicing in the house? Is this at least partially a way of trying to deal with my son's moving out?

Why

2007-01-16T16:09:00.000-08:00

The overt goal of this blog is to document my progress--or lack thereof--in learning how to play the guitar.

There, are, however a number of covert goals as well....which, for full dramatic effect, I'll leave to later posts.