song of the week: duane allman, goin' down slow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkFOBZRAbMU
clearly the man. his work makes me smile.
haha. think i'll talk a little bit about my guitar hobby.
you know, my favourite work pastime is to listen and trace guitar players' playing and influences. guitar music history, basically through wikipedia, interviews, fan pages. behind the music, there's a tapestry of story, musical history and collaborative interaction between the great guitar players of each age. many musical threads run together to create each guitar player and each band and each rock genre and each age. in the chaos of making music in a band different styles and aspirations meld in tempo and key and time signature and musical understanding to create a sound that both depicts and defines the players. it's wonderful.
i'm not going to talk much about guitar tone specifically. suffice to say that it... it is really wonderful. different guitars sound so different. you could tell by listening, and then understanding their technical characteristics, and then by listening to the type of songs they are used for, and then sometimes, if i'm lucky enough, by getting to play them. every man is an indiana jones of tone. it's a bit connoisseur-ey, cos you really have to know what and how to hear things sometimes when people get all excited talking about their tone. tone is a pretty sexy thing.
the second guitar that i ever bought was off an ad on luthermusic classifieds. heh, it's still there. but obviously most people use soft nowadays. anyway, it was a craftsman les paul, flamed top. don't know what it had and what it was made of, but well. can't remember too much about it, now. i think i first tried to learn november rain and fade to black on it. haha, that went alright. pretty squawky in a bad way, that one. sold it off and got an epiphone sg, also pretty squawky in a bad way. but it was an alright guitar, pretty light. should have changed the pickups, but back then i didn't know it would have made a difference. it was basically the guitar on which i learnt to play rock.
it's interesting that i didn't really buy much stuff back then. in some ways, having soft really sped up that part. i guess if you don't think about needing something then you just won't need it, which is true of a lot of things. and i guess i didn't think about things like tone and quality and feel. i just played with what i had. but it's hard to go back to being a minimalist when it comes to guitar things, at least in the sense of having less quality. having less things is not so bad, because really a good guitar and amp is basically all you need to be awesome. i could do with just those two, but i'd envision a three thousand dollar guitar and a two thousand dollar amp. i mean, i could play pretty well if i went back to the two hundred and fifty guitar and one hundred and ten amp, and i could probably feel pretty good about it and all, but i'd be cookin' with the first set.
having good stuff doesn't make up for not being able to play, and i'll be the first to say it. i'm happy with where i am, and i know where i am, going forward. i miss playing in a band. it's hard to want to improve without the band; it's much easier to stagnate. of course, improving on technique is clearly my own thing to work on. there's cycles to applied learning, but it takes time, which i find quite precious lately. i do some recording when i feel like it, but it's songs that are recorded, not guitar playing. haha. i used to think of myself exclusively as a guitarist, but usually when i record it's cos i want to sing. and i think singing has to be whatever is true; there's no bad singing if it's true. must be brave to sing.
the first really classic thing i bought was the fender stratocaster. jimi, ritchie, stevie, eric... i thought i'd save for a les paul first, but when my sg had problems i actually first got the stratocaster, cos it was cheaper than a les paul. i like it alot. it feels like i'm a part of something, a class of guitar players who mainly play the stratocaster. it's such a classy guitar. when i hold it i feel like i'm holding a real art piece. i actually think guitars are cooler than cars. i mean, you drive a car, and basically it's not important how well you drive it, long as you get from A to B without knocking the thing. it's a box with four wheels, right. a guitar, on the other hand, talks about music, and music, in the humanly pursuits of this world, is truly noble. i mean, it's not a violin, and it's not a piano, it's kinda more recent than those two, and it obviously sounds a lot ruder, but the idea is basically good: the pursuit of music.
and the guitar has been good to me for very very long. a lot of times i feel sad about things and i pick up the guitar and play until i feel sleepy enough to fall instantly asleep, cos i don't like having to wait to sleep. guitar playing makes me feel bluesy which is alright when i'm sad about stuff. it's like a voice coming out of my hands, coming from my heart. it's not the best voice in the world but it's not bad, and it's alright to me. playing makes me think of all the guitar players who play when they feel emotional, and it feels like i'm drawing from this emotional relatedness. a lot of these people look really grandfatherly, and talk like that too. they play like they miss things that they love. i like that.
a lot of the time, playing in a band must mean that each instrumentalist must play less to play more. i've come to accept that, and embrace it. i've come to value the role of each instrument, understand how it forms part of the sound. bands, like any other combined human endeavour, have their problems. how five people with different motivations and values and valuation systems come together to produce something that is them is pretty amazing. i mean, every now and then i pick out something that i don't like that i want to say, but would be pretty hard to take. i don't like to do things just to have fun, in fact i sometimes despise people who say that. my idea of having fun is to be good. anyway, i guess my point is that constructive communication is as much a skill as it is flattery and fortune. so even if the band is just, really, to bang on things and make loud awful noises, i want to do it with some semblance of accomplishment. and i suppose as we get older it's going to be harder and harder to play together, or at or for something, if at all. i mean, how many lawyers' meets need rock bands. haha. but it'll be fun all in all lar. i guess we could play at weddings. or someone could run a bar and... hire us.
there's still so much to do out there on the horizon. some places aren't meant for me, but some are, and i don't intend to miss on them. i honestly think i'd rather be at home getting to where i want to be with the guitar than travelling. haha, at least if i'm single. guess that's one for the future.
