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Category: A Blog… of sorts
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More on How Well
I posted How Well at a few places to get the benefit of some objective ears and some feedback on any “issues” with the recording. It seemed be liked by most of the good folks who took the trouble to listen and respond with comments. That’s always a relief and provides a little charge of…
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Spring!
The season has arrived shockingly in the north-east of Scotland: warm sun, coloured vegetation and increased variety of birdcall. Easter with it’s usual display chocolate eggs and religion on the radio. Try and be patient with the tourist traffic and caravans tootling down the local byways. Ha! If it wasn’t so nice, I wouldn’t live…
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Mixing it
Getting to grips with some new titles is always interesting for its own sake – but it also refreshes the ears if they’ve been only fed a diet of familiar sounds and songs thereby slowly losing critical acumen. At another level, there’s the odd effect caused by continuously recording and mixing solo acoustic guitar and…
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More on jazz
Driving to the day-job listening to Charlie Christian certainly optimises any vestige of motivation I have for the day ahead. I’m looking at a book which analyzes Christian’s licks and which I’m trying to commit to memory; the more kid on the inattentive listeners that I possibly know something about jazz guitar. I have a…
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On altered guitar tunings
I used to play in altered tunings extensively and arranged a number of Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes in them (particularly DGDGCE). Now, I’ve grown to really quite dislike open tunings. Why? Mostly because it’s impractical to change tonality, or keys, in them. Play in DADGAD and your stuck in (the key of) D, or…
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Jazz guitar
I’m a big fan and I’ve bought books on the subject and CDs of some of the greats – but I can’t call myself a jazz player by any stretch of the imagination. I’m toying with the idea of getting a Gibson ES-335 for some of that groove which might kick-start me into putting in…
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Folk Music – Tradition and traditionalism
My relationship with folk music has always been ambivalent and has oscillated between a passion for arranging Irish and Scottish fiddle tunes for guitar to a real distaste for the precious attitude of many of the practitioners of the genre. I’ve come across examples of posturing ethnicity that is non-inclusive and reeks of a superior…
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The Cabbage Patch and a lost guitar
I wrote a couple of days ago about how I came to “lose” my ‘Gibson Country & Western’ guitar. Well, I found a piccie of the pub outside of which I “lost it”. It sends a shiver down my spine to look at it. Inside this place on a Sunday evening convened – and still…
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Nervy
I have this new thing called The Little Tinker and an older one called Local Anaesthetic. There are parts in each that feel as if there at the limits of my technique. It’s all very well making up cool sounding “licks” and changes when you’re noodling at a slow tempo and sotto voce, but if…
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Can songs be timeless?
A topic on an internet forum not too far from here. Various examples were proposed that might be timeless songs – examples from The Beatles, Dylan, Sinatra, et al. All the usual suspects. I opined that perhaps genuine folk songs that had been around for a couple of hundred years, or more, could lay some…
