Skip to main content

Day One Hundred Sixty Two (Year Four)

Over the years, I've talked about doing a lot of things in this space.  I've mentioned (a lot) the desire to even out the time I spend with the electric guitar vs. the time I spend with an acoustic in my hands.  I've talked about wanting to make records.  I've talked about wanting to put together a set list and play some gigs.  I've talked about wanting to be a more well-rounded musician.

Here's what dawned on me tonight: absolutely everything on this list centers on the acoustic.  When I sit down to write music, it's not the electric I reach for first.  When I sit down to record, sure, I may lay down an electric riff as it goes through my head, but I'm always trying to block the song out on acoustic.  When I think about playing live, 99% of solo singer-songwriters play acoustic (and as much as I love the idea of making a solo-electric singer-songwriter record, I'm not there right now).

Don't get me wrong, there will be plenty of days this year where I reach for the electric first, but I just feel that starting the year by making a bigger point of the acoustic ties in really well to all of my other goals this year.  It'll definitely strengthen my hands, and I suspect it will also make my electric playing more fluid almost by default.

I've found some pretty good books with solid acoustic-based lessons in them, and I know I've got a pile of old Guitar World Acoustic issues at my Mom's place.  If I can find a way to grab those the next time we're up north, I know there will be a ton of stuff in them that I didn't appreciate enough the first time around.

Tonight was a good night for playing.  My fingers are just the tiniest bit sore as I head off to bed.

Oh, and I picked up American Weekend by Waxahatchee tonight.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Two Hundred Twenty Seven (Year Two)

So, the new Springsteen disc is amazing.  There's enough of a mixture of his upbeat rockers, his ballads, and his message songs to make this his best record since The Rising .  And speaking of that record... Buying The Boss the day it comes out always takes me back to a specific moment in life.  It was July 30th, 2002, the year after 9/11, the year after someone on the streets of New York told Springsteen "we need you now."  I had driven to Oshkosh, WI to visit some friends, when I remembered that Springsteen's disc was scheduled to come out that day.  I drove downtown to The Exclusive Company, but had to park a few blocks back.  At the time, there wasn't much going on downtown, but when I got out of the car, I could hear this music coming from up the block somewhere.  The closer I got to Exclusive, the more it began to dawn on me, they had set up a giant set of speakers in their upstairs windows, and were blasting the new album out into the streets....
Post a Comment
Read more

Day Two Hundred Twenty Six (Year Four)

So I dove back into 100 Riffs tonight, going into it with the hope that the hand written tabs I did last night would help me unlock the issue I was having transitioning from the first half of the riff to the second half.  It worked.  With both halves clearly written in front of me, I was able to work through the transition that had been tripping me up when the screen cut off was happening on SoundSlice.  That's going to be a nice thing to have in my bag of tricks for the times when I get stumped figuring these things out. I played a little bit of acoustic tonight as well, trying to be better about finding the balance between both instruments.  Late 90's-early 2000's rock has come up a lot in conversations at work of late, so in that spirit, I picked a song from that time period out of my set list notebook ("Your Winter" by Sister Hazel), and took a quick look at it.  Admittedly, it's a song I had mostly learned a long time ago, so the essential parts of it w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day Two Hundred Thirteen (Year Five)

Finally!  A really good day.  And one that I really needed after the frustration with the rest of the weekend. I took a step back from a few things today, and got what I hope will be a bit of clarity in the process.  Instead of worrying about the progress I really haven't been making on the EP, I told myself that I needed to be happy with the few bits of lyric I stumbled across today, and that maybe I needed to focus my attention elsewhere, at least for today. I had picked up a really cool book on music theory as it applies to guitar last Tuesday when I was out and about, and having spent a little bit of time paging through it over the last few days, I focused in on it tonight and started reading, taking notes, and reinforcing some things.  It felt like progress.  It was great. When I had worked through some of that, I moved on to the whole "100 Riffs" thing, and got myself moving on that again.  It's astounding how much I can get inside my own head a...
Post a Comment
Read more