You know what I mean. If Santa is your anticipated benefactor tomorrow, may he be as generous to you as I suspect he is going to be to me. He always does me proud.

Eat, drink, and be merry. And be safe.

        

… the changing look of my blog - sometimes on an hourly basis. Well, I have updated the platform software (Wordpress) and have taken the opportunity to mess around with some of the different themes that are available. I hope you are not finding it too confusing. If you like - or don’t like - the way it looks as you happen by, why not leave a comment? I’m here to serve. And we aim to please here at dave-keir.com!

        

Yeah, well. Much has been written. For the uninitiated we’re talkin’ guitar tonewoods here.

I have two guitars (well, two that are being regularly played) which are identical apart from some cosmetics and the woods comprising the backs and sides; to whit: one has mahogany back and sides, the other rosewood. Do they sound very different? Well…

To my - and most keen guitar players’ - ears, they sound very different. To a lay person, if a difference is detected at all it will be something very subtle and maybe inconsequential. Certainly the difference would be hard to describe. However, in an effort to articulate the difference between these woods, guitar players and guitar makers have spawned a vocabulary lifted directly from that used by wine buffs the world over. Below is a summary of the terms I’ve seen used for each tonewood, in turn:

Mahogany: a dry and crisp sounding tonewood which emphasises the fundementals of the note. It provides a ping in the trebles, a snap in the mids and a growl in the bass. Its overall sonic palette has a definite underpinning of wheat (honest - I’ve seen this written!).

Rosewood: a dark and complex tonewood whose sound is overlaced with rich harmonics. It has a deep and almost reverberant quality. It provides a zing in the trebles, a bark in the mids and a grumble in the bass.

To extend the association with wine, I would equate the mahogany with a crisp Chablis and the Rosewood with a full bodied Claret.

So there we are. Very fanciful and probably gobbledegook to a non-guitar player. I only feel slightly foolish due to agreeing with these descriptions, by and large.

Oh, and another thing in passing: I was recently relieved to read that jazz players generally don’t take to rosewood guitars because of the very richness of the harmonics that rosewood emphasises insofar as these harmonics render the already complex chord forms used in jazz to a confused mush. Hitherto, I thought it might just be my imagination.

        

These mongrel chords are the Crewe Junction of the harmonic world. You can come from many places to them and depart from them to many more. But they worry me insofar as I suspect they could be used to cover up a multitude of sins. They strike me as potentially lazy solutions to musical problems. Don’t know where to go next? No bother at all: stick on a diminshed 7th and press on regardless! Augmented 5ths are almost as bad except they can’t be so easily disguised - at least by me. Even on a dominant 7th with a flat-9 tagged on they stick out and very easily sound hackneyed. (On reflection, this may have more to do with my lack of skill in their use than the character of the chords, per se. Be that as it may; I have to use them sparingly and with care.)

On the other hand, I’ll put a flattened fifth on any chord and use it with gay abandon. I don’t care how many cliches I spawn thereby - they’re just so damn’ nice. G major 7 flat 5? Mmmm…

        

I’ve writ elsewhere (all over the world wide web) that I picked up the guitar at an age too early to learn anything proper like an extant piece of music. I was simply interested in making twanging and snapping sounds. I had no loftier ambition than to disturb the peace in our home. It’s true that I had some competition from my mother screaming at my father and slamming doors while they raced from room to room hell-bent on redefining the meaning of dysfuntionality. Nevertheless, I could punctuate brief times of truce with my brother’s guitar. I was a contended little lad.

When this random noise migrated into something more harmonious, I can’t really recall; but I do remember having the guitar placed across my lap and discovering the root position E minor chord and it’s adjacent neighbour on the fingerboard (which I suppose is an A minor ninth chord). So I would alternate these two chords in a strict 4/4 for hours, until my mother couldn’t stand it any more banged me across the head with her hand.

I think the neighbourhood in general was pleased when my brother showed me a few more chords. I wonder if he thought that the fact that these new ones needed more than two fingers to execute would act as some sort of deterrence because, if so, he was bitterly disappointed. Anyway, I plowed on regardless.

The development of any sort of musical profiency was a random affair and was punctuated by my need to use the guitar as a means of defence from time to time when my brother would, for reasons I still cannot fathom, chase me around the house promising murder and mayhem. The “boing” as the guitar bounced off his nut at the conclusion of the chase had a very satisfactory sonic stamp to it which these days I would ascribe to a guitar with mahogony back and sides, an ebony bridge, and scalloped bracing. But, back then luthiery was not my main concern. Escape was.

No sounds I made in these times evolved into any approaching a cogent piece of music, but the seeds were scattered in my soul. I did begin to learn some American folk songs from a chord book my brother had lying around and I had a couple of friends at school with whom I practiced some Beatles’ songs. But it was Bob Dylan who pointed out the obvious solution for a boy with an acoustic guitar. All I needed was a few square feet in the corner of a room, to be left alone, and be fed once in a while.

I never suffered from acne or any of the other hormonal complaints of adolescence. I put this down to the musical venting and pouting I was able to indulge in, thereby providing an alternative outlet for these irritants. Indeed, some early habits still linger. I used the guitar to complain about my luck with early girlfriends and songs of unrequited lust have been the soundtrack to my life ever since. Indeed, I became so adept at these songs that I would deliberately screw up in the romantic department so I could go home and bleat about it in a song on the grounds that girls come and go but songs are eternal. Or some such rubbish. Anyway, all of these songs should have been consigned to the flames. That I had the temerity to think that any of my output during these years had legs is evidence both of the supreme confidence of the true artist and the self-delusion of dilettante.

So today, when the muse is silent, I entertain myself by revisiting some old fragments that remain from these youthful outpourings. Very occasionally I happen across something that I think has the spark of invention or hints at musical possibilities and I noodle around with it to see if it has any legs. Perhaps more often than I think is decent I slip some forty-five year old chord sequence and melodic phrase into a new song. I could claim that that this helps give my musical life a sort of unity. But I won’t. It’s just my little joke with myself.

        

I owe him a lot. After I had picked up which fingers went where as regards fingerpicking I got a book published by Oak Publications (long gone now, I think) containing the notation (this was before the days of tablature) of this man’s tunes. And I learned and practiced just about every damn’ one. Even tried to sing them. “Stagolee” and “CC Rider” readily spring to mind. I spent so long with this book that his style has been irrevocably embossed onto mine - or the other way around. In fact, my style is largely predicated on his. Which is a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because it’s easy to learn and alternate bass fingerstyle sure provides your tunes with plenty of forward momentum, when needed.

The downside is that the very regularity of the thumb movement becomes so firmly embedded in the muscle memory that it can be hard to break out of without having to think about it. Or to put it another way: for a long time whenever I picked up my guitar and start noodling, I just fell into an alternating bass style which became limiting and frustrating after a while. It’s no longer as inevitable as it once was although when I’m putting together some up tempo stuff, it still permeates the results.

For a listener, the boom-chick-boom-chick of an alternating bass fingerpicking style can be infectious. For the player, recuperation can take a long time.