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Month: May 2007
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Playing Guitar: More on ageing “chops”
I have been assuming that over the past couple of years that my guitar technique was in terminal decline simply due to advancing years. (I remember my middle age crisis with nostalgic fondness.) I mean, my fingers feel stiffer in the morning (…would that – oh, never mind…) and it takes them longer to get…
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Songwriting – Stirring the muse
Sometimes I’m asked… Most of the time I stumble across something when I’m working on some experimentation with harmony and finding different ways to change key, or trying to get some weird scale under my fingers. An idea will pop up which I’ll mess around with to see if it’s got any legs. Thoughts of…
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The fashion for genealogy
I refer to the genealogy websites and TV programmes that I’ve recently noticed which are serving a desire among an increasing number of people to delve into their past and draw up family trees. Whence this increasing interest? Is it from a suspicion that one may be descended from some noble lord or be an…
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Songwriting – a fact of imbalance
Proportionality is a lost cause. I have the curious knack of making my major key output sound more minor than most peoples’ minor key output! It might tell of a deeply troubled nature. I would, there is no doubt at all in my mind, be a deeply troubled individual did I not have the therapy…
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Songwriting – a question of balance…
… between the melancholy and joyful. What the heck? What is it about melancholy songs that they just seem to drip from the fingerboard seemingly without call or effort. Whereas, in contrast, happy songs require the skills of a musical sorcerer. I can sometimes approach a pastiche with burlesque outbursts or strains of manic hysteria,…
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Can I sing?
Nah! Not for nuts. Not likely. I excuse myself with the idea that I’m more a deliverer of songs. How’s that for sleight of hand? Some folks have been complimentary though, which I find curious. And today someone wrote something nice about my voice on a forum not too far from here which is why…
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Fingerpicking or Fingerstyle?
If I’m playing something up-tempo and aggressive then I’m definately a down-home, primitive fingerpicker. If, on the other hand, I’m doing something moody or contemplative then I’m a sophisticated, city-slicking fingerstylist. Another thing ’bout pickin’ nomenclature: whence the “Travis Picking” terminology? I learned alternate bass picking mostly from Mississippi John Hurt, whose style, I think…
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John Renbourn
Ah, now, he of the mercurial fingers! I first came across John’s playing surprisingly by way of a solo record and not as part of the Pentangle which is most people’s experience. At my youthful age (in 1972 or ‘3) he represented a totally new way of playing and a new sonic landscape. Anyway, I…
