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Category: A Blog… of sorts
Care and Feeding of Acoustic Guitars!
Guitar care is a preoccupation among many acoustic guitar players – at least amateur ones. A lot of pros seem to take satisfaction from treating their guitars with a certain amount of careless disdain. On the other hand, there is a section of the guitar buying public that, in truth, are more collectors of guitars…
Noodling with words
As I wander from internet forum to bulletin board and back again, I come across certain topics that come up repeatedly like the sunrise. One of these is a question about the relative priority of music or lyrics when it comes to songwriting. If I pipe up and post a reply it is usually a…
(Original) Guitar Notation and Tabs
I have had a fun weekend with my favourite notation program writing out the guitar parts for some songs. I have been meaning to get down to this for some time and I’ve been postponing it “until tomorrow” for weeks. But I’ve been afforded some kick-back time while recuperation from a rather savage attack of…
Noodling with scales
How many useful scales are there – or how many would be of interest to me? Modes are one set of scales that seem to get an inordinate amount of attention from fingerstyle guitar players (and others) these days. I guess it’s their folky and archaic sound world. Arabic and other eastern scales have been…
Noodling with harmony
The guitar seems to have a tonal centre around G major meaning the further you go to the dominant and sub-dominant sides from there, the tougher it becomes to play. (I’m talking acoustic fingerstyle guitar as distinct from, say Jazz, particularly played on electric.) There is a jump in difficulty when you reach B major…
Modal chords!
Now this is a term that crops up quite often on internet forums and even printed publications. I’ve even seen tables constructed in Microsoft Excel correlating chords to modes. Modes are cool and their use as a basis for melodies will provide exciting possibilities particularly if the desire is to evoke a “folky” or archaic…
Songwriting – Causing Offence With A Song
I have thought about this quite a lot. In the UK last year (or the year before) there was a theatre play in that was closed due to a particular group of people being offended by the content and demonstrating outside the theatre where it was being staged in order to get the play closed…
Payplay.fm widget
I’ve just discovered it at a place selling my songs: Dave Keir Isn’t that cool? I’m waiting for the first $0.88 to roll in. I’m still waiting…
A Pickup On My OM-18V
“¦ was installed at the same time as the aforementioned nut job, above. So far, and after only a quick audition in the store, it is all I expected it to be: like an acoustic guitar with a pick-up on it. Let me be clear: the sound of an acoustic guitar with a pick-up, of…
My OM-18V nut job
“¦is done. Just to recap (and to save me the bother of including a hyperlink) I suspected the string slots in the nut of this guitar had been cut so that the bottom and top strings were uncomfortably near the edge of the fingerboard, especially at the first five frets, or so. I had convinced…
