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Guitar
Posts about Guitar
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I think I am not going to do any more Songs posts until I buy a microphone and an audio processor. I have been planning to do this sometime soon -- I think I will feel much better about the music I am posting if the audio quality is a little better. What I have been doing up till now counts as a sort of a proof of concept -- the concept is pretty well proven.
If any of you have got advice about what sort of mics and audio converter I ought to buy, please leave them in comments, or e-mail me if you prefer. I will be most grateful.
This afternoon I thought of a short tune. Played around with it on my violin and I came to realize that it integrates really well with "After Midnight".
I came up with guitar chords to accompany "Creepy Charlie" -- I am looking forward to recording the piece with viola and guitar, and maybe to writing a "b" part as well. (In the recording I posted the other day, there is something that sounds like it might be a "b" part but I think it is actually just a second voice on the "a" part. This is something I don't know how to figure out.)
Update: bullet two is no longer operative; I have ordered an Edirol E-MU EM8740 audio interface (which I will call "emu") and a pair of Behringer C2 microphones.
posted evening of January 7th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Music
I realized a difference between my guitar playing and my fiddling while I was practicing today -- I approach the guitar from a framework of the music's structure, where I just go with the feel of it on violin. I don't have much clue of what measure I'm playing or often even where the beat is, when I'm playing melody on violin. This is a major shortcoming; and yet I believe I am a much better violinist than I am a guitarist. I am the same with singing -- I think I can sing pretty well, but I don't understand what is happening with the structure of the melody I'm singing. Something to work on -- I would like to be able to understand (and to feel) the chord changes going on under the melody.
So a couple of weeks ago I was writing a murder tune based loosely on iconic murder tune "The Banks of the Ohio" -- I came up with "Braddock" as a good name for a town to be the setting; did a little research and found there is such a town, and it is pretty ideally located on the banks of the beautifully named Monongahela River, one of the two principal tributaries of the Ohio. Came up with "Veil of Mourning", which John and I played at our New Year's jam. And weird, this story seems to be sticking with me -- I spent some time last week listening to "The Cuckoo, she's a pretty bird" in different versions including Richard Fariña's, "The Falcon"; and the thing to do suddenly seemed to be to write a new version of the Braddock story, called "The Buzzard" -- so that's what I did. Check it out:
It was fun picking up my guitar -- I have not played it in a while.
Wow! I must say I'm enjoying playing with the new picks I recently acquired! It is opening up a whole new sort of relationship with the guitar for me. Some songs and attempts at songs that I've been recording with these new plectra, are at my Soundcloud stream. Look!:
I'm kind of flabbergasted still about how seemingly good, worthwhile music is just about pouring out of me since I started using these picks! It's like it was the crucial next step from the Dunlop Thins that I used when I was recording "The Modesto Kid" -- suddenly I'm actually a musician! Check out this playlist [redacted rant of self-justification] -- "Jim Dunlop" by Jer "The Modesto Kid" Osner, traditional music and beyond.
