Ar yr arfordir (on the coast)

I'm on sabbatical this term and my wife only has online classes, so we're taking a few days on the California coast in a little town called Cambria. We've been here a number of times: nice restaurants, quaint, but the main attraction is that we can afford to spend too much to rent a place where we can see and hear the ocean.

The reason this is relevant is that it's much more humid here than at home, humid enough that I can leave my guitar out of its case. (Our home is Tucson where it's way too dry to leave the instrument unhumidified out of the case.)

The other reason it's relevant is that, because this is a rental, there's lots of room to leave guitar, music, etc. out.

What I've found is that this really helps the practice. I find that I can wander back and forth between guitar and other activities all day long.

I'm thinking this means we have to find a way to humidify the house in Tucson?

Or I should just leave my everyday guitar out of the case all the time?

Hiatus

It may look like I've taken one, but not so. I just haven't had much of a chance to post recently. What's new in the interim? I'm still playing, practicing many of the same pieces. I've gotten hooked on the Welsh language, the most relevant aspect of which is that I can say guitar in Welsh: gitâr. My latest epiphany is that practicing the same things a lot, I find I get sloppy with my fingering. I went through a bunch of old pieces the other day just trying to fret them properly and was amazed at how much better they sound.

Plateau

Still working on Ode to Joy....seriously plateauing. I need to find something new and fun to play.

Sloppy fretting

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

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

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

Going electric

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....