Guitar blues for relaxation:
Ever since my early 20's I've owned at least one guitar. Everywhere I went the guitar went with me. I've been writing my own music since 1996 and I'm starting to get dividends from all the time and practice. There have been times in my life where I barely played, but each time I've gone back to the guitar I have made noticeable inroads in my progression towards a passingly competent musician.
The greatest challenge for me has always been understanding and applying music theory to my playing. I have never had a guitar lesson as such and I cannot read musical notation. Each time I dive into the "maths" of music I resurface with little gems that allow me to play more expressively year after year.
To me, music, particularly guitar music, is how feelings sound. This has always led me back to the blues time and again. I believe playing the blues is my best form of musical expression. I feel the music rather than play it technically like I would a cover of a popular rock song. I have been always best able to improvise and develop my own signature sound and style with blues and rock blues sounds. My music is quite percussive often and this is a serious throwback to the great music of the Australian pub bands of the 1980's.
Music is how feelings sound
Sitting in the sun on an autumn afternoon on the front porch watching the sunset is my favorite venue. Improvising minor pentatonic scale progressions is my idea of a great way to kill a couple of hours and just relax with my music. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to own a Maton 808 series acoustic guitar. These hand made in Australia instruments have the sweetest tone and beautiful mid range and sustain.
Recently I got the opportunity to finally get one. I opted for the Performer model which is basically a lighter cutaway 808. http://www.maton.com.au/acoustics/performer-series.html
I also own a Yamaha acoustic which is a fine instrument, it lives with my BFF in New Zealand at the moment. And my go to instrument for many years has been a much loved and faithful Squire affinity strat, with a humbucker pickup fitted at the bridge, red of course, because red goes faster! Until fairly recently I also owned a Garrison 12 string acoustic but it was hell on my fingers and nearly impossible to bend the notes with a bluesy feel. Many years ago I owned an old battered Maton electric guitar it weighed a tonne but it sure had a sweet tone, I really regret selling that instrument.
Well recently I decided it was time to have a go at recording some of my original improv music and putting it out there, so I got some cables, I downloaded the great open source music editing software known as Audacity and sat up most of the night playing record producer. The bulk of the music was recorded using the new Maton EBG808CL Performer. The strat got to pretend it was a bass for this exercise and my nifty little Digitech RP50 modelling guitar processor got to fiddle the effects and play the drums. The Peavey rage 158 amp got to show it's stuff a bit too. So these two first attempts ended up as video's mainly because I couldn't figure out how to upload MP3 files direct to facebook... Anyway here is my music, warts and all ;-)
The photo's of the art in the slideshow for this video is all my own work, I like to sketch and paint with watercolours too.
Here is the second little demo, the pictures in this are just some from my collection of art and images I've always liked.
Well that's it for this blog post. Until next time ;-)
