Guitar care is a preoccupation among many acoustic guitar players - at least amateur ones. A lot of pros seem to take satisfaction from treating their guitars with a certain amount of careless disdain. On the other hand, there is a section of the guitar buying public that, in truth, are more collectors of guitars and admirers of them as objects than interested in playing them.

Here’s what I don’t do:
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As I wander from internet forum to bulletin board and back again, I come across certain topics that come up repeatedly like the sunrise. One of these is a question about the relative priority of music or lyrics when it comes to songwriting. If I pipe up and post a reply it is usually a minor reworking of what I’m always moved to write under such circumstances.

My replies are along the lines that I consider words and music equally important. More than that: I find words to be musical in their own right; their rhythm, the ability to mess with syllable emphasis, alliterations, and so forth… Colour, mood and other quasi-musical qualities are no less applicable to words.
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I have had a fun weekend with my favourite notation program writing out the guitar parts for some songs. I have been meaning to get down to this for some time and I’ve been postponing it “until tomorrow” for weeks. But I’ve been afforded some kick-back time while recuperation from a rather savage attack of ‘flu. Also, If I’m going to maintain my policy of offering these scores as freebies when I post MP3s of new songs, then it has to be done.

Curiously, it can be quite illuminating writing your stuff down because often you see little some of the devices you use when making stuff up more clearly on paper (or on a screen). Things like rhythmical figures or melodic turns that pop up again and again, for example. I can also see occurrences of awkward fingering and solutions can often present themselves. This latter is a real bonus; particularly if I haven’t yet ingrained the fingerings through practice for gigs or recording. If I have, then it’s a bit of a double-edged sword…
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How many useful scales are there – or how many would be of interest to me? Modes are one set of scales that seem to get an inordinate amount of attention from fingerstyle guitar players (and others) these days. I guess it’s their folky and archaic sound world. Arabic and other eastern scales have been explored by others, notably Davy Graham. There are dozens of the things derived from traditions world-wide and invented. I reckon that all the possible sequence of intervals have been written down and explored. A scale, after all, is simply a stepwise sequence of notes from a root to its octave; how many notes and what intervals are between them are arbitrary to the definition.
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