A New Recording

I'm a little late with this, but I recently added a new piece to my Soundclick page, called "Sunday Morning Ramble." The title was suggested by Steve Perry (no, not THAT Steve Perry - THIS Steve Perry), but it seems a little ironic to me, as Sunday mornings around here are usually more scramble than ramble. At any rate, it was done on the Larrivee, with John Pearse PB lights. For some reason, the MP3 artifacts are more audible than usual on this one - my WAV file of it sounds much better (from a purely sonic POV - it's no better from a musical POV).

Guitars of the Past - Part 4

My first electric was a Hondo copy of a Les Paul, paired with a Fender Vibro-Champ amp (both purchased used). The Hondo may have been a decent enough Les Paul copy when it was new, but by the time I got it, it wasn't in the best of shape - it wouldn't play in tune and made various rattling noises. I don't remember now if I traded it in or sold it outright, but in any event I didn't have it long. The amp wasn't bad, but it was neither very powerful nor very versatile; it probably went away the same time the guitar did.

Wish list, part 1

Number one on the wish list: another nylon-string guitar. I haven't had one in a while, and there are times when a nylon-string would work better than anything else. I don't have any specific model in mind - just something comparable in quality to the Larrivee OM-03. The Pavan guitars look like they might be good possibilities.

Guitars of the Past - Part 3

For a short time I owned an Ovation Folklore. This model has (or had) a wider than usual neck (1 7/8" at the nut), supposedly to facilitate fingerpicking. I did like the neck on the guitar, but eventually found myself dissatisfied with it - my first encounter with the fact that, for me at least, Ovations can be impressive at first but don't "wear" well in the long run.

Gig report

Playing at church last Sunday went fine - no major foul-ups, the timing was just right, and it seemed to be well-received. The only real problem was balance: the (unamplified) guitar didn't project as well as the flute, but we expected that and decided we could live with it for the kind of performance it was.

More Gig Preparations

I've been away (without a guitar!) for a couple of weeks, and since getting back a few days ago have been trying to concentrate on practicing for the July 29 church gig. I feel that the hiatus has left my left hand fingers rather weak, and I need to get my strength back. On the other hand (no pun intended) I also put a set of mediums on the Larrivee as soon as I got back (feeling that I need the extra volume for the gig, plus the intonation is better), and that's also probably making my fingers feel weaker than I remember.

Overall, though, the practicing is going well. My wife and I ran through the pieces together last night, and even picked out a possible additional piece to do.

Guitars of the past - part 2

After the Fender classical, my next guitar was a Yamaha FG-365SII, a dreadnought-style guitar (though Yamaha, at least at that time, insisted on calling their dreds "jumbos"). This was a big step up in quality - solid spruce top, laminated rosewood back and sides; this was, I believe, second to the top of Yamaha's line of dreadnoughts. I loved its neck profile - easy to play, though I'm not sure it was ever set up as well as it might have been. It served me quite well while I had it, and my motives for getting rid of it were, in retrospect, not well-considered (I thought I needed an acoustic with a built-in pickup), but it was probably a case of making the right move for the wrong reasons, as I traded it in for the McPherson that I still have (almost a quarter-century later).

I do still have the case I got with the Yamaha - a D'Andrea Geib-style case - though I no longer have a guitar that it really fits.

Gig preparations

In preparation for playing at church in late July, my wife and I have spent a little time reviewing some music we'd played in the past at another church (perhaps 15 years ago now), and I think we've settle on three pieces (pending pastoral approval), which together should be more than enough to fill the time required, and have run through them together a couple of times. Nothing too challenging - except for the challenge of trying to practice them with our two daughters running around playing recorders and a variety of percussion instruments at the same time!

Aside from that, though, the flute and guitar combination still sounds great. This will be the first time we've played in public together since I got the Larrivee - I think this guitar's sound goes particularly well with my wife's flute.

Guitars of the past - part 1

The first guitar I ever bought for myself was a cheap Fender classical. Given that it was their bottom-of-the-line, it was a far better guitar than it had any right to be. I've since seen other examples of the same model that were not nearly as good. Strung with Savarez Red Label strings, it played and sounded great. While I can't say I regret trading it in, since it no longer met my needs at the time (I needed something with a more powerful sound to be able to even hear myself when playing with other musicians), I nonetheless have often wished I still had it.

Why the change in appearance?

After setting up this blog and making a few posts, I discovered that two of my favorite guitarists, Phil Keaggy and John Michael Talbot, were using the same template for their blogs. While my first reaction may have been "great minds think alike," on reflection it seems that it would just look like deliberate imitation (especially since I added the links to their blogs), so I decided it would be prudent to switch to another template.

Of course, if anyone is reading this via an aggregator, none of this will make sense....

A bit about strings

I generally use phosphor bronze lights on my acoustics. (John Pearse is my preferred brand, but I've had good results with other brands as well, though I don't like D'Addario's packaging.) I think the Larrivee actually sounds its best with 80/20's but for whatever reason - be it my skin chemistry, something inherent in the strings, or something else - 80/20's seem to "die" very quickly, so I'll accept the minor compromise in sound and use the PB's.

(My limited experience with coated strings has not been positive, but I've probably never really given them a fair chance. The problem is that they're so much more expensive than other strings, so if you try them and don't like them, you've lost a more sizable chunk of money, and I would feel I needed to leave them on longer to get my money's worth out of them, even if I was dissatisfied with the sound.)

I've tried mediums on the Larrivee as well, and really liked the results, but started getting joint pain in my left thumb which took some time to clear up. I don't know that there's really any causal connection here, but it seems like there could be, so I'm sticking with lights for now.

On the electric I've got a set of 10's, in the "house brand" of a local music store. As I've said, I don't play electric much.

More about the Larrivee

I mentioned in my previous post that the Larrivee has a "lovely, well-balanced sound." But that's hardly a fit description of it. It's a very expressive instrument that responds to a variety of touches well, rather than imposing its own character on every piece of music. I mostly fingerpick, and the guitar can put out as much expressive tone and dynamics as I can put into it. I don't generally do much hard strumming, but I suspect it could handle that as well without falling apart tonally.

Some people don't care for the 03-series' matte finish, but I rather like it - I think it lets the grain of the wood show through more easily than a gloss finsh. The one thing I might change about it is the bridge pins - I don't care for the look of the plastic pins; I might try switching to some other pins at some point.

Still, every time I play this instrument, I find myself thinking, "Man, what a guitar!"

Meet the guitars

Time to introduce the guitars in the family.

First, there's "Evangeline," a Larrivee OM-03 (sitka top, mahogany back and sides - solid wood all around) that I got in 2004. This one is currently my main instrument. Lovely, well-balanced sound.










Then there's "Judith," a McPherson JL-40M. This is not like McPherson's current production; this is one of their early '80's triple-soundhole models. It has a solid spruce (sitka, I assume) top and laminated East Indian Rosewood back and sides. I bought it in 1984 and it was my main guitar for many years. It has a lovely, ringing tone, but sounds a bit muffled compared with the Larrivee. It has a humbucker at the end of the fingerboard which makes it quite versatile, as it can double as an electric in a pinch.









Finally, there's "Heather," an Ovation Preacher solidbody electric. It was made in about 1979 or 1980; I bought it used around 1982. Solid mahogany. This model was sort of Ovation's take on the SG theme, but with a bolt-on neck. I don't play electric much these days, so this one mostly lives in its case.





There is one other guitar in the house, but it's not in playable condition and just hangs on the wall - but that's a story for another time.

Upcoming gig

Well, I found out this evening that I'll be playing at church (with my wife on flute) at the end of July. This will be our first opportunity to do this since joining our current church; I wish the opportunities would come along more often, but at present we wouldn't be able to easily take advantage of them anyway; perhaps things will change a bit by the time we're more free to do so.

Meanwhile ... I'd better start practicing!

Practicing

Tonight on a guitar-related forum that I'm on, someone posted a question about how much time people spend practicing. I responded that these days I usually practice about two to two and half hours a week - and that there was a time, long ago, when I was doing that much each day.

This is the problem with guitar playing as a hobby: it takes time to achieve and maintain a skill level that makes it worthwhile, but almost anything else has to take priority over practice time.

This problem is compounded for (would-be) multi-instrumentalists, who need to keep up on several instruments - all of which are likely to suffer as a result.

Changing strings

I've never been one of those people who can change a set of strings in five minutes, so it's something that I don't do as often as I probably should. In fact, I hadn't done so since before Christmas. But I finally got around to doing so the other night. (John Pearse PB lights, on my Larrivee; what was on it previously was D'Addario PB lights.)

So why did it take so long to get around to this? Here's a clue: to find time to do this, I had to multitask - at the same time I was changing strings, I was transferring video from my camcorder to my computer to eventually burn it to a DVD. And I didn't start on any of this until I was done with various other tasks.

But that's kind of the nature of my musical endeavors in general. I've been working off and on on a recording project for months. I've been noodling around with a new instrumental piece for months, and have never really developed it into a finished form. The list could go on...but you get the idea.

And so that's probably why I remain a talentless hack....

It's also probably why this blog will go largely neglected: no time to devote to maintaining it.