Collectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.