3 posts tagged “guitar”
I had my weekly guitar lesson today, and for the first time my teacher and I sat down and figured out how to play a song I brought on CD. I chose Johnny 99 by Bruce Springsteen to keep it simple.
Ryan figured it out in about eight minutes. I checked the clock. It included the following.
- Figuring out that Springsteen's guitar is sharp on the recording. Speculation is that the original 4-track was sped up when mastered.
- Determining it was a straightforward 24-bar blues with a basic rhythm.
- Deciding it sounded better with a capo on the first fret after trying it both with and without capo.
- Throwing in some embellishments for the solo where Springsteen is blowing his harp.
After that it was just another five minutes to write out the basic chord structure and talk a little about the embellishments. We still have some followup on that next week.
He mentioned, by the way, that 24-bar blues shows up in the craziest places. Remember Prince's song, Kiss? Yep, 24-bar blues.
Chris loaned me his copy of 10 Days Out. I listened to it, watched the DVD, returned it to Chris, and promptly ordered my own copy. Rarely is media so obviously worth the price. Of course I enjoyed the music and seeing new musicians, but the best part was seeing Tommy Shannon and Chris Layton (Double Trouble). I saw them with Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin in the Summer of 1987, but after that...nothing but the SRV DVDs.
Just idle speculation, but I wonder when blues is going to start evolving. You see guys like Kenny Wayne Shepherd paying huge respect to the roots, and I can dig it. At some point, still, you need to keep moving. Country music has gone on a bad path. It would be nice if blues could fork...maybe do something funky merging hillbilly on one path and going somewhere completely different on another path.
Or being pessemistic, blues is just a kind of folk music, and folk is not doing so great in this day's highly-polished, media conglomerate-pushed music world. When do people sit on their porch and play music?
That reminds me. While skimming Shannon's website I saw in his advice to musicians that there is no substitute for playing with other people. You can't practice by yourself forever. You have to play with others. Great. I hate it when Chris is right.
Word on the street is that I'm learning guitar, so I might as well fess up to it.
I've been playing about five months. I'm taking lessons over at Meridian Music with the kids' piano lessons. My teacher is the lead guitarist for Austin Bridges. I haven't been learning specific styles yet...still learning the basics. I'm getting ready to move to the first book in the Berklee series and am looking forward to that.
As for an instrument, I've been playing Megan's Fender acoustic guitar and also bought a Little Martin LXM so I could practice while traveling for work. The irony is that despite being a travel guitar, the Martin sounds better than the Fender...
