The studio has been decommissioned (except for some editing and podcast recording) and the acoustic treatment is just about to get torn down. We’re moving to Edinburgh from this rather remote part of the world - at least culturally. Pretty as Deeside is, there are damn’ few places to play guitar.

Anyway, we’ll be out of here at the end of July. Truth be told, we’ll be renting in Banchory for few months (maybe less) until we find our new home in Edinburgh. Anyway, it’ll be a while before I can get the studio up and running again. Got many songs “in the can”, though, so plenty to do, plenty to do. Look out for some of these recordings here soon.

        

Within limits I do my own tweaking. I can mess around with saddles and truss rods quite happily confident that “I know what I’m doing”. The only setup issues that I would want to take to a professional would be anything to do with the nut. I’ve never felt the desire to get into the ungluing and gluing side of things or to invest in nut slot files and other accoutrements associated with minor guitar surgery - partly through laziness and partly through the knowledge demonstrated by efforts into picture hanging around the house that my DIY skills are not part of my oeuvre.

Now, as every acoustic guitar player knows, we occasionally get plagued by mysterious rattles, buzzes, creaks, and squeaks which emanate from our beloved instruments. These can reduce sensitive souls to tears as they poke around and shake about their guitars in attempts to track down the source of the offending sound. Leaving well alone is not an option because these sounds are invariably of a sort that would drive the most robustly constituted musician crazy. So more than once I’ve had my forearm deep inside a guitar via the soundhole in a manner reminiscent of a farmer delivering a cow of a newborn calf trying to figure out if a brace might be becoming loose. I’ve even invested in an inspection light and mirror that would have been more suited to an ear, nose and throat clinic. Sometimes I’ll attack the tuners with spanners and screwdrivers in attempts to make sure there’s nothing loose that’s not meant to be. Yanking strings to make sure bridge pins aren’t the cause of my misery is also compulsory at these times. These were all inevitably futile gestures in establishing the structural integrity and other aspects of the health of my instrument. Voodoo and witchcraft would have been a better investment of my time.

My biggest fear has always been that the truss rod deep inside the neck was resonating in some evil way designed to make me learn the trumpet. The remedy for this (so I’ve read) is to drill a hole in the fingerboard and squirt some oil through it. I’m not going there. I’m also not going to buy a plane and take it to my fingerboard in attempt achieve what is referred to as “dressing the frets”. At least not without being under sedation. That’d be me – not the guitar.

Anyhoo, let me pass on a couple of links to websites that are riveting reads in the area of guitar setup and repairs. If it’s possible to become hypochondriacal on behalf of one’s guitar, then these sites will induce it.

These folks are among the top in their field and I commend the information to be found on their sites to you. I, for one, have learned a great deal from them. Mostly about not messing too much with my guitars…

        

A recipe for a contented (albeit a shorter) life. The world would be a little grayer without these little pleasures. This view is not very fashionable but there’s little about me that is fashionable.

And this urge to live as long as possible: if an eternity of oblivion awaits then a lifespan of forty years or one hundred and forty - are both a blink of an eye. And if we go to a “better place”, then the sooner the better, no?

And more: do I not hear from the TV and radio that the nation (the UK in this case) is getting swamped by old people who will shortly become an unsustainable drain on the health care system? Not to mention the lack of money for adequate pensions!

Apropos the length of my own life: I’m not sure how much it will matter when I’m dead how long I’ve lived. (I’d like to smoke less, though… )

        

…that I can think of: namely; (1) muscle memory which enables the fluent playing of the guitar, (2) that which enables aural recognition of intervals when hearing them and, (3) that which enables recall of which chords are diatonic to which keys, their voicings, and their placement on the fingerboard. All three need attention on my part, for sure, because it strikes me that if these three memory sets are optimised then I could say I could really play my guitar, improvise, and write.

Muscle memory is a double edged sword. Sure, it’s essential. Without it we couldn’t play a damn thing with any fluency. Indeed, we couldn’t remember how to finger even the most simple chord. When it (muscle memory) is performing at its best, it enables you to focus on the performance while your fingers go where they’re supposed to, as it were, blindfolded. But it’s a curse if you’re trying to correct some mistake that’s become ingrained through repetition. I can’t recall who, but some smart player or teacher opined that too many of us spend all our practice time practicing our mistakes. Re-educating your fingers is hard, hard work. It’s like digital boot camp.

Recognising musical intervals when you hear them is a faculty which I’ve never spent any time concentrating on. This has resulted in my only being able to differentiate major and minor triads – easy if they juxtaposed next to each other – and major sixths, which seem to have a distinct aural flavour. Well, come to think of it, dominant 7ths with augmented 9ths rarely pass me by unnoticed. Augmented 5ths, also. Well that’s quite a few, you might think. But I couldn’t tell you which key they might be in, or what keys might be involved in a modulation.

Clearly, I’m talking about music I hear. If I’m playing it, I only have to look at my memory challenged fingers.

The recall of what chords are diatonic to which keys is a matter of sheer repetition of playing in different keys – or learning by rote. This might seem trivial in “guitar keys” like G major or C major. But do you know which chords are nominally diatonic to E flat minor? Can you list them? Or even A flat major (without thinking) even though it’s only a half-step away from G?

Not being fluent in these areas makes me feel a bit like a cheat. Sort of like I had landed an engineering job with a fake qualification. I keep meaning to set some time aside to practice all of this. Even try writing down in notation things I hear in my head. The trouble is that there is no time and I don’t hear new music in my head, anyway. I’m a noodles sorta guy…