Learning Guitar Diary

Learning Guitar 81 (Something Blue w/Vocals and Solo - Original)

2012-02-12T21:42:00.000-08:00

This is a continuation of Something Blue from last entry. I added lyrics, some tambourine, cleaned up the ending, put in some incidental lead guitar parts, and most importantly added a solo.

The lyrics still feel like a work in progress-- I only have two verses and a chorus but they're all 16-bar format so they are longish so I don't think I want to make the song longer (it's about 3 minutes now). I'm not sure what I'd change in the format, but it seems to need something as well. The lyrics I think are alright given what the song is but some of the wording and phrasing still needs some work.

So, it turns out putting a tambourine into a song is harder than I thought-- getting it at the right mix without stepping all over whatever is there already turned out to be tough. I'm not 100% happy with how it turned out but I wanted something that separated the verses from the chorus in the instrumentation.

I forgot to video the incidental additions, but they're pretty small so there isn't much to see. The big change is that there is now a solo in this. I really liked how that turned out. Yeah, its got a little bit of rhythm clunkiness in parts, but I think it captured the spirit of the song. It definite was going for that George Harrison Beatles sound and I think I got the sound at least.

On the production side, I had a little fun with adding a "scratchy record" beginning and end to the song to add a little to that "vintage vibe". I was hoping to play around with Final Cut Pro's multi-cam support, but couldn't figure it out immediately so left that for a latter attempt. The vocals are about as good as I can make them given my limited singing ability. I cranked up the bass a little more this time too-- I hadn't noticed that last time I mixed it down practically to zero.

Oh, and the solo is on my Les Paul-- my wife got it for me this Christmas.

Learning Guitar 80 (Something Blue - Original)

2012-01-22T21:41:00.000-08:00

This is my first rock'n'roll song. As you can guess, it is strongly Beatles influenced. It started when I was taking a shower and the phrase "If you walk down the aisle, I'll be your something blue" popped in my head. After that I worked on the chords-- I wanted to do something that wasn't 12-bar blues based but with very Beatley chords. One of the first thing that I did was decided that I wanted to go from the I (C7) to the VI (A) right away to avoid falling into I-IV-V land. I then had to figure out how to get an F7 and an Fm in there since that seemed very Beatley to me and since it seems like a potentially sad wistful song, it made sense to through some minor chords in there.

The song really started taking track when I put in a drum loop. I don't play drums so this was something of a happy accident-- the drum loop really sounded good to me. That sort of inflected how the strumming worked for the rhythm guitar and bass parts.

The bass part took the longest to come up with, in fact. I tried just about everything as far as rhythm-- whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eventually I settled on just following the drum track for the most part. I tried it with a plastic pick, fingers, but I think the felt pick sounded the best so I went with that-- sort of a compromise between the two.

The very end was somewhat lifted from "I Saw Her Standing There". I always liked that bit and hey, if great artists can steal, I figured I could at least borrow.

Now that I've got this done (instead of my guitar homework, sadly)-- I'm tempted to work on putting a solo in for the third verse and adding lyrics. I'd probably try to clean up the mistakes if I did this again since I was half writing this as I went and didn't get to really practice this somewhat final product.

Anyway, this is the second song I've written (the first was for acoustic back in entry 58-- "By The Light Of The Moon") and wasn't nearly as involved (although I like the lyrics). Anyway, it was fun. Hope you like it. If nothing more, it is good practice trying to play in time with the drum track.

Production is almost all Line 6 HD500-based (I added a little Compression and EQ on the Rickenbacker). The Ric is played with the "Slim Pickin'" and the Bass is aptly "Clean British Bass". The Logic drum set is "Cavern Kit".

Learning Guitar 79 (Yesterday)

2011-12-30T20:13:00.000-08:00

For the longest time I figured this song was really hard but then I saw a YouTube video from privettricker that convinced me I could probably manage it. I'm not sure how close to the original this is, but it sounds (minus the orchestral backing and Paul's singing) fairly close. One of the interesting things about this song is the way it is strummed. Paul does this on a few of his slower acoustic numbers: play the bass with the thumb but strum up using the middle or ring finger. It yields a much softer treble against a fairly strong bass. You'll notice I completely cheat on a few chords (F#m barre chord for instance) because I don't play any of the strings that are fingered.

My guitar is tuned down a whole step so although it looks like I'm playing this in "G" it is really in "F".

I mixed this both directly from the pickups as well as through the mic (you can see it on the left). I kept more of the pick-ups to keep my sniffling off the track and recorded the vocals separately. I think it worked fairly well. Of course, the real test is hearing it on YouTube after a day or so. I always seem to think these sound okay when I post them and after a day I start noticing all the stuff I don't like about them.

Learning Guitar 78 (Jump Jive an' Wail)

2011-11-27T17:18:00.000-08:00

Jump, Jive, an' Wail (Louie Prima) is another song from my electric guitar instruction. The main things of interest are that it has a lot of chords I haven't played before (Eb7b9 arpeggio, G6, D#9, D9, C#9, C9, G13) and has a very swingy beat to it. The 9th chords aren't too hard but the G6 is the first chord I've learned that has a non-played string in the middle of it-- the A string is muted so you have 2X132X. Very tricky for my fingers as you see pretty often. Sixth chords have the 6th in them, so rather than having a 1-3-5 major chord you end up with a 1-3-5-6 so for this G9 that's G(1)-E(6)-B(3)-D(5). I know when the root note isn't in the lowest position you call it an inversion, I'm not sure if there is some term for having the chord parts out of order (maybe it is just a different voicing). Anyway, the 6th chord gives the song a sort of jazzy feel (as do the 9th chords). For the beat, my instructed said it was the "Charleston" beat-- not because it is in the Charleston style, but because if you say the word "Charles-ton" you sort of get the that beat.

While recording this I found I could play the notes better without singing it, but the rhythm didn't sound as good so I ended up singing it while playing it (messing myself up on a verse) and then recording vocals over it. I'm supposed to do a some solo practice over this "comp" for more homework on it playing major pentatonic at the 7th fret and minor pentatonic on the 10th. I'll see how that goes.

I recorded this a little differently as well-- I used the HD 500 Gibtone setting to record the guitar and then used my Boss VE-20 on "Echo" for the vocals. I think the VE-20 helps my pretty weak vocals and the Gibtone sounded pretty "jazzy". There are two really great recordings of this song: Louis Prima and Brian Setzer. Both are more big band; without the horns my version sounds pretty thin.

The things that gave me trouble were keeping the beat when I screwed up the lyrics (A woman is a woman...) and getting back to the G6 chord (especially my pinky). The intro/outro parts weren't very clean either, but they were also a bit tricky so I don't feel too bad about that at this stage (especially that last chord-- a G13).

Learning Guitar 77 (Original Instrumental Strumming)

2011-11-12T18:26:00.000-08:00

I was playing around with the chords from Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis and sort of worked this out. I really like the F->Fm->C sound they did so I completely lifted that (hey, they lifted a fair amount from Imagine on this song, so it seemed fair). Rather than go to the IV chord (F) so much though, I tried to hang around the iii (Em) so it has a more minor feel even though it is theoretically in C major. There was a Beatles song that did an interesting job of skirting the line between being in the major key and its relative minor (like C and Am) but I can't remember off hand which one.

One thing I was going for here was a consistent strumming pattern. I also wanted to work on having an even tempo (less successful) and trying to get some "feel" into the chords by emphasizing the lower or upper strings. I am thinking lyrics over this would help it out since it gets a little monotonous.

Also, I recorded this on the road (I've been traveling). I brought some gear to see how that would work out. I ended up using a Mac with Logic Pro with the Acoustic Stereo Doubler setting and using my Zoom H4n recorder's guitar input which I had never used before. I think this might sound better than going through my Line 6 KB37 so I might try this when I'm at home too. For video, I used my Canon T1i's video capture. The audio from the Canon actually sounded pretty good too, but there was a bit of air conditioning noise.

Learning Guitar 76 (If You Want My Love - Cheap Trick)

2011-10-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

I've been on a Cheap Trick thing lately (I was a bit fan in the late 70s and early 80s) and decided to go for this song since I've always really liked it and thought it was something I could play thanks to a good YouTube video by PrivetTricker. It turns out singing this way beyond my ability so I've decided to spare you all and just do an instrumental version of it.

It is kind of interesting in that it is in E major and E minor which is an odd combination. It also has a really great bass walk down at the same time as the melody is walking up. I think that is the golden nugget of this song, honestly. I also really liked the B-augmented arpeggio part (this took a while to figure out by ear and once I figured it out I realized PrivetTricker was doing the same thing but I couldn't figure it out from the video). I worked at it quite a bit to keep that in rather than cheat on it. This song uses a lot of guitars! There is the 12-string which is probably the most obvious, but the solo is played by Nick Nielsen (awesome fashion sense by-the-way-- I switched hats as a bit of an homage) using octaves on one guitar. I cheated and used two and wonder if they did that in the studio version too. There is also a 12-string bass! This is the first song to actually use one (I used my 4-string Fender P-bass). Robin Zander sings this an octave above what I can and my vocal version just sounded horrible-- especially the E-minor parts. This is also the first time I played keyboards (very simple part admittedly). That's a flute mellotron plug-in I found for Logic.

I think this went pretty well. It is good practice to try to play along with a band even if it is just me. I've gotten into the drums, bass, rhythm, solos and incidental instruments recording workflow and usually I'll end up redoing the bass part later. This is the first time I really did it intentionally though.

Learning Guitar 75 (Where Is My Mind?)

2011-09-05T18:59:00.000-07:00

This is my first attempt at playing a song on bass. Fortunately the bass part is really easy: mostly straight quarter notes following the bass notes that the acoustic plays. The only really hard part in this song is the solo which was a little harder than I can pull off right now. The acoustic part is pretty easy, but I did have some troubles getting clean barre chords.

As for the song, this song is the one at the end of Fight Club and was the original reason I started liking The Pixies. It's surprisingly simple, but really sounds great.

A few production notes: I recorded the "Oooh"s in my shower to get that echoey feel and then pitch shifted it up one octave (because I can't sing that high). It still wasn't echoey enough so I put that through an echo plugin in Logic. The guitar distortion was interesting-- it sounds good most of the time, but it really makes the chords muddy. The palm muting parts sound right though so I think this is probably more a technique problem on my side than bad settings. I do find the compression makes my solo kind of muddy here (not that it sounds that great without it).

Anyway, since this it my first entry for year 3 of learning guitar, I thought I'd go for something more involved than usual. Three guitars and two vocal parts seems about right ;-)

Learning Guitar 74 (Paint It Black)

2011-08-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

Two Years!
Seems like only, well, two years ago since I picked up the guitar. So what can I say, I'm getting better and I'm having fun. Since I'm learning major scales, I had pick something non-lesson related for this week. Since I was thinking scales, I wondered about this song since it has sort of a weird little scale it uses. It turns out it is the harmonic minor scale which I know nothing about other than it sounds vaguely Indian to me. This is also the first #1 single to feature a sitar-- take that Beatles!. Of course, Brian Jones learned to play sitar while visiting George Harrison, so maybe they should get a little credit.

Learning Guitar 73 (A Minor Connection)

2011-07-31T16:54:00.000-07:00

It's been a while! I've been doing some traveling and that caused some disruption to my guitar playing but I'm back now. I noticed my fingers were a bit sensitive after a little over a week off guitar. It didn't take long to get my calluses all the way back, but somehow I figured paying your dues once was enough.

This is another Latarski tune from my electric guitar private lessons. The main take away in this is noticing the positions and shifts. This is an A-minor 12-bar piece but the melody has three blocks of pentatonic regions where you shift hand position to more-or-less play A-minor pentatonic scale notes (bonus points if you can spot the non-pentatonic bits).

So, I created a backing track for this (1/8th note U/D strumming) so I'd have something to give me some timing. I did okay the first time through, but the second time was pretty messy. I'm definitely trying to play more with some sort of rhythm enforcement these days since it seems to be a weakness. This is a tough (for me anyway) piece because it doesn't cleanly fall on the beat everywhere. Also, I'm not 100% sure my backing track kept good time during the repeat-- next time I lay down the backing track over a click track.

The other song I'm working on is another fingerpicking piece-- Gone Fishin'-- which has some tough pinkie reaches that are giving me grief. I can't, for instance, make an open-position C chord (X32010) and reach my pinkie over to fourth fret of the B string (D#) without lifting my fingers. Since this song alternates between the two, it is a lot of motion. That and the usual thumb-over F pains.

I'm still playing around with Twenty Flight Rock. I can mostly play the non-solo part now, but need to work on the solo and of course, mix singing into it. The singing will be tough since its got some pretty fast lyrics. I might have to record those separately, but we'll see.

Learning Guitar 72 (Hesitation Blues)

2011-07-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

After a brief jaunt into 60's pop, I'm back in the blues with Hesitation Blues. This is definitely the hardest thing I've tried to play fingerstyle so far. Lots of reaches and pinky movement including a rough thumb-over F with a bend that caused me lots of trouble. Oddly, the last thing I was able to learn was the bit with the D9 and bass walk-up to C. My fingers just didn't want to remember it. I finally got it through lots of repetition going slowly and increasing the speed. Seems weird to think I can spend that much time on just five notes but that's what it took.

This song is adopted from a traditional tune with lots people claiming writer credits for the blues version. This is a short piece of the song so if you like it, or want to hear what it is supposed to sound like, I'd recommend the Hot Tuna that is closer to my version for single guitar although it has a bass or the one with the great intro from their WDST 25th Anniversary album that has multiple guitars.

Learning Guitar 71 (That Thing You Do - Solo & Vocals)

2011-06-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

Last week I did the rhythm guitar part before I ran out of time so I've picked it up this week and added the solo parts. I also added singing. It isn't the worst I've done. The solo part is actually very simple-- it's either 5 or 6 notes depending on whether you count the bend on the 11th fret a separate note. The tricky part was getting the rhythm (you can tell) and not tripping over the notes. Not a fantastic job here, but for an early effort I'm going to call it victory and move on. I realize that the string on my Gretsch and much tougher to bend than on my PRS. I probably have thicker string on it which might not be a smart move for a guitar that I'm mostly using for solos and bends (George played lead not rhythm most of the time).

This is the first video I did with Final Cut Pro X which is getting mixed reviews. I can totally see how it moved a lot of people's cheese. Once I figured out how to align things with markers though, it was pretty easy. I did notice it was quite a bit faster though and the rendering quality seems much better. We'll see how it looks on YouTube with its fancy "Share to YouTube" settings.

Learning Guitar 70 (That Thing You Do - Rhythm Only)

2011-06-20T22:33:00.000-07:00

BeatlesGuitarPlayer1 suggested I give some simple solos a shot and recommended this song. I've always liked this song (and the movie which was Tom Hanks first directing gig) and much later found out it was written by Adam Schlesinger who is the bassist and one of the songwriters of one my favorites band: Fountains of Wayne.

I did a little something different here in that I used Guitar Pro to create just the bass and drum tracks for the song from tabs I found on the internet and recorded my guitar over it. I did this for two reasons: first, I wanted the bass line and while I have a bass, I haven't started to learn to play it yet, and second, I wanted to play to a beat since I really am bad about playing with a metronome. I have the solo part of this song down but wanted to just finish up the rhythm track. Unfortunately, it turns out this song is difficult enough that I couldn't quite get a good track. I'm thinking I might just keep at this song for a while longer before I put it all together since I want to do a solo on one of these entries (last and only one was Nowhere Man).

In my electric guitar lessons I'm mostly still working on Latarski stuff. I've got an E6 triplet-feel blues thing I'm working on putting a solo on but I haven't practiced it enough since I was messing around with "That Thing You Do" a lot. "Hesitation Blues" is still pretty sad-- I can get through the notes but only very slowing in rhythm. Lots of thumb-over, slides, alternating bass, etc. in that one. If I get it decent I might post that one up in the future, but I may just end up moving on to something else before that.

Learning Guitar 69 (Peggy Sue)

2011-06-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

I was just playing around after doing "Oh! Darling" on entry 68 and Peggy Sue is one of those songs I used to warm up but it wasn't until today that I figured out the bridge part with the A->F7 from "Oh! Darling". You can kind of tell the F7 transition is pretty new to me since I didn't play it very well but since I had the camera going, I figured I'd go ahead and put this up too. I'm curious if the solo is impossibly hard since it is the only part of the song I can't play, might have to look around to see if anyone has tabbed it.

Learning Guitar 68 (Oh! Darling)

2011-06-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

Marty Schwatz did a lesson on The Beatle's "Oh! Darling" so I thought I'd give it a try as well. I made one minor change: I adding a E7-F7-E7 instead of sticking on the E7 since it sounded better to me. This required me to use the barre fingering for E7 so I could just slide down to the F7. I had been trying it the normal way but figured out this was much easier.

I was feeling a little lazy, so I didn't do the full Logic Pro treatment on this and just recorded it from the camera. We'll see how that affects the quality. Sadly it means you get more of my humming along (hey, I just get into it).

Learning Guitar 67 (An American Girl)

2011-05-30T01:02:00.000-07:00

My wife got me a Rickenbacker 12-string guitar for my birthday a while back and I've been looking for a good excuse to play it on one of these diary entries. Fortunately one of the internet's guitar lesson legends, Erich Andreas (Your Guitar Sage). did a lesson on An American Girl. While I liked it a lot, it was on acoustic and I really wanted something electric so after hunting around I found a version by privettricker on YouTube that used a Gretsch (which I also happen to have). I decided that I'd play it on the Gretsch for the rhythm and add some single-chord "chimes" in on the 12-string. I think it worked out fairly well but I think I mixed the chimes a little too heavy.

I lifted most of this from privettricker's video but I did skip the bass part since it didn't seem that interesting. I also shortened the intro and outro since I didn't have a lead part to make it less monotonous. The one bit I'm very happy with is how the bass walk turned out. It is a little thing, but it really worked out well here.

My singing is about as good as it gets on this song as well. Taking the advice of a friend of mine I took a few takes to get it reasonable rather than just slapping it up there. It still isn't 100% right (I flubbed a lyric but it was minor). The part I'm less happy with was how the chorus seemed a little rushed. Originally I thought I'd play the 12-string part and single with the chords, but the melody of this song are actually really tricky so I settled for doing each part separately.

Learning Guitar 66 (Doc's Guitar)

2011-05-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

This is another one of my fingerpicking exercises from my guitar instructor. It has a few tricky things in it-- the most obvious is that there is a lot of hammer-on/pull-offs as well as just alternating fingering of chords. It also has the dread F with the low-F in the bass courtesy of the thumb-over. This causes me no end of grief and I'm hoping someday it will be easier. I think I may have gotten one to sound half-way decent in here somewhere, but most of them sound like a badly muted string.

This song is normally played at a much faster tempo. However, I tried to play it here so that I could almost play it cleanly. I had one mental lapse on a picking pattern, but I'm very proud of myself for just making something up to fill out the measure that sounded plausible. I'm definitely getting better at just ignoring the mistakes and carrying on and staying with the beat.

Since this is the 66th posting, I was hoping to play Route 66 but it turns out that is probably too much to ask on short notice (I thought of it the day before). Still, I poked around and found a few good lessons. I also didn't realize the Rolling Stones did a version of it-- I'm probably the last person to know that, but hey, now I know!

Learning Guitar 65 (Buckdancer's Choice)

2011-05-09T21:07:00.000-07:00

Buckdancer's Choice was another assignment from my electric guitar class but since it is an "old mountain song" I figured it probably should be played acoustically (I think it sounds better this way). The song was made popular by Sam McGee in the 1920s.

I'm playing it at a considerably slower pace than it should be played since it is still a bit tricky for me. I can play it a bit faster but not without a bunch of mistakes. Here is a version that is more up-to-speed.

Learning Guitar 64 (Jumpin' At The Double Stop)

2011-05-08T20:38:00.000-07:00

More Don Latarski Blues this week. This one is full of double-stops (playing two strings at once) and is somewhat reminiscent of Jump blues (although I'm playing slower than what you'd expect from Jump). This little song is weird in that it only has one note that isn't a double stop.

Learning Guitar 63 (Walking on the C)

2011-05-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

Another blues installment from Don Latarski's Blue's Guitar but this time in the key of C. One of the interesting things about doing videos of myself playing is that I see some of the things I do completely differently with a bit of detachment from the playing. For instance, I'm bending strings I didn't notice I was bending. I also see I'm using the flat parts of my fingers more (which is okay to a degree) than I do when I'm playing chords. I think I'm supporting guitar weight on my fret hand too, which I shouldn't be doing.

Learning Guitar 62 (Steppin' Out)

2011-04-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

"Steppin' Out" is from the Don Latarski book that I'm using with my private electric guitar lessons. This assignment is mostly about playing using the blues scale. The blues scale is the minor pentatonic (root, third, fourth, fifth, and flat seventh) but with a sixth note added: the flat fifth. This particular lesson is about playing the blues scale in a key other than "E"-- in this case I'm playing in "A". The tricky part of this for me is skipping strings (2nd to 4th string). I think I did okay here but it took around 6 takes to get a reasonably clean playing and this one still has a few minor timing issues.

I recorded this one a little differently-- I used two mics on my AC4TV amp (plus a little bit of distortion pedal) rather than the usual method of recording through the Line 6 KB37 and messing with it using Logic inserts. I wanted to try amp miking and this seemed to go okay.

I'm also working on learning the arpeggio's for the A, D, and E chords at the 5th fret as part of this lesson but that didn't seem that interesting for a diary entry.

Learning Guitar 61 (Death Comes Creeping)

2011-04-17T17:27:00.000-07:00

Death Comes Creeping is a folk-blues song (sorry heavy metal fans) and has been recorded by lots of people. The version I'm playing is based on Mance Lipscomb's version. There is a nice YouTube video of a different version by RagMama123 if you want to learn it too.

This song is an assignment for my electric guitar class, but I thought it just sounded more acoustic. Also, this is the first song I've tried to play that has an alternate tuning. As this is in drop-D tuning (low E string is lowered a whole step) you get a nice alternating D bass line on the 4th and 6th strings (both Ds now). This song also has a lot of finger lifts and a few bends which makes it a little trickier than it sounds (well, for me at least).

Learning Guitar 60 (Nowhere Man Solo and Vocals)

2011-04-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this is part two of the Nowhere Man attempt. I added the solo parts and the vocals but somehow managed to really hose up the sync of the video (the rhythm part). I sort of cheated with the solo in that I didn't play it along with the whole recording-- I did little bits of it where there was a spot for the solo and sometimes took a few attempts. Even so, the result wasn't that great. I think I did okay on the short fills and the bit at the end but the main solo part (the part with the harmonic) was kind of disappointing to me. This was one of the better takes and shows that I've got a way to go on that. Part of the reason is that I practiced it at a much slower pace and without trying to play against the music and it was a bit of a stretch to make that translate into really playing it "live". I've been pretty lazy about practicing against backing tracks or a metronome but I'm paying for that so I'll be good and do that more in the future, honest!

Okay, the vocals-- this song really shows me I have a limited vocal range since this is at the very top of it, but it sounded really muddy if I sang an octave lower. Also, there is only so much a pitch correction plug-in can do. Hopefully my singing will get more tolerable if not good if I keep it up. Singing in E is particularly tough for me which is unfortunate since The Beatles seemed to really like it (probably their favorite key).

As for my classes, I'm only taking my individual electric guitar lessons this quarter. I'd have taken a cool Bob Dylan acoustic class but it was at a time I couldn't make which makes me sad. Also, I wanted to give me hands a rest after my wrist issues. So, for now I'm working on a lot of finger-picking (All My Loving, Freight Train) and starting in on rock-blues scales.

Learning Guitar 59 (Nowhere Man Acoustic Rhythm)

2011-04-01T23:47:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time but I'm back. I've had to cut down my playing quite a bit since my last entry (58) due to some wrist problems which are now, thankfully, on the mend. I actually recorded this entry back on March 13th but because of a splice I had to make (that I wasn't sure how to do) I didn't post it until just now. I was doing great and then near the end the phone rang and so after it finished, I did the rest of the song. I spliced the two parts together in Logic Pro pretty easily, but getting it to work in Final Cut Pro was a bit tougher.

I actually picked Nowhere Man because when my wrists were giving me trouble I decided to work on some short and simple solos and this one looked fairly easy. My plan is to do a two part entry with this part being the rhythm and the next doing the solo (and maybe adding some vocals). I played the beginning of the song (but muted it) so that I'd have something to sing over if/when I add vocals. The Beatles sing without any backing until the word "making" and then the instruments come in. I'm going to see if I can do that.

Also, if you listen to the guitar you'll notice that I've heavily filtered it so that the treble is boosted and the bass is attenuated. This is, according to Beatles Gear, when they did for the album but since I don't have George Martin around, I suspect my version won't be quite as polished.

It's good to be back doing these diary entries and getting some real practice time again.

Learning Guitar 58 (By The Light Of The Moon - Original)

2011-01-22T19:36:00.000-08:00

The poem "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear is the inspiration for this, obviously, but it is a bit more special since a friend of mine did a reading of this at my wedding. Also, the Runcible Spoon is probably my favorite coffee house. The reason I did this in the first place was that it was an assignment for my Songwriter's Craft class. We're supposed to take a poem and make it into a story song (like what Paul Simon did with Richard Cory). She suggested that we start with an existing song and use its structure to build the song around that. I started with Elvis' "That's All Right, Mama" but it definitely morphed a bit from there. I think I picked that originally because I went with the Carter-style acoustic playing and it seemed to match.

I made a few playing/singing errors here which is somewhat embarrassing since I wrote the thing, but all-in-all it wen't pretty well. There are only 3 chords (not counting the A6 at the end) so it isn't exactly challenging. I did put a rhythm track of a sampled cheap tambourine I have and looped it. I fell of the beat a few times, but I think it is good practice to play this way. Also, I added some "harmonies" to the chorus bits and that turned out pretty well. This is definitely the most complex production I've put together.

Here are the lyrics and chords if someone wants to play it:

The [A] OWl and the PUSSycat sailed OUT upon the SEA

to WED on pig-wig’s ISland beNEATH the old bong TREE

[D] PUSSycat then WONdered DO we have the RING?

[A] OWL checked his POcket and he DIDn’t find a THING.

Don’t [E7] WORry my dear PUSSycat WE’LL be married SOON.

And we’ll DANCE by the LIGHT of the [A] MO-oon.

[A] HOW can we WED she cried with-OUT a wedding BAND?

DON’T you fret my PUSSycat we’ll GET one when we LAND.

It [D] MAY not be a DIamond and MAY not be of GOLD

but [A] IT’ll be FROM my heart and TOgether we’ll grow OLD.

Don’t [E7] WORry my dear PUSSycat WE’LL be married SOON.

And we’ll DANCE by the LIGHT of the [A] MO-oon.

[A] PIG-wig had one READy and THEN he told the GROOM

he MADE it out of GUItar string and a RUn-ci-ble SPOON.

With [D] RINGS upon their fingers I DO’S they finally SAID

[A] TURkey called them FOWL and wife and THEN they were WED.

[E7] SEE my dear we’re MARried now! I TOLD you it’d be SOON.

And we’ll DANCE by the LIGHT of the [A] MO-oon.

They [A] HEADed down TO the beach toGETHER hand in HAND

and TENDerly they shared a KISS where WATER meets the SAND

They [D] ATE mince cakes and HONey with ALL their wedding GUESTS

And [A] OWL slipped the BAND a five SO they’d play their BEST.

[E7] SEE my dear we’re MARried now! I TOLD you it’d be SOON.

So they DANCED by the LIGHT of the [A] MO-oon.

[E7] SEE my dear we’re MARried now! I TOLD you it’d be SOON.

And they DANCED by the LIGHT of the [A] MO-oon. [A A6]

Learning Guitar 57 (Across The Universe)

2011-01-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

I was looking to see what song I did exactly a year ago so I could do another comparison and was happy to see it was Across The Universe. Looking back to Learning Guitar 19 I can definitely see a lot of improvements. I even tried to put the intro onto this song (which is a bit beyond me still) so a year from now I hope I can see improvement on that as well. The version I'm doing here is heavily based on the excellent tutorial by famed internet instructor Marty Schwartz (martyzsongs from guitarjamz.com). If you're learning guitar and want to see someone that does a really excellent job teaching it, I highly recommend his videos.

Across The Universe has a few weird things going on. First, there are two measures that aren't in 4/4 (one is 5/4 and one is 2/4). It is pretty seamless and you might not even notice it (or play it right) unless you played along or were looking at the sheet music.