Be a Record Producer

I've been taking guitar lessons for about 8 months now. I suck at it still, but I enjoy it. Nick is a great instructor and does a lot by ear and encourages you to bring in music you're interested in to motivate your effort. So I've been going back through my music collection looking for songs that have relatively simple, easily heard guitar parts that I can learn. It is fun to play along with a song.

My latest effort is the Jill Sobule song called "Somewhere In New Mexico." It's a song about an agnostic girl that wants to change her life around. It's kind of funny and dark at the same time. I have a ways to go before getting it down. Dianne has heard the song about a 1000 times in the last month.

While looking around for guitar tabs and videos of the song, I ran across Jill's effort associated with her latest CD project. You can read about her next project on the aptly named site Jill's Next Record. Instead of working through a record label, she is making a grass roots effort to raise money through her fans. There are various donation levels and each one has something associated with it. For $25 you get an advanced copy of the CD. For $5000 she'll come and do a house concert for you. Can we get a group of 100 fans to each kick $50 in and have her come to Cincinnati for a private show? :^) You can hear her talk a little about it, and hear a little ditty about Super Tuesday voting, on the NPR site here. Click on Listen Now near the top of the screen or watch the video to hear and see her play the song.

Macro Mondays Music

I'm so far behind in posting pictures! It's been a busy week.

This past Monday the theme for the Macro Mondays group on Flickr was "music." This one was relatively easy to get a couple photos. For the last several months I've been trying to learn how to play the guitar. I used that for my main subject. At the right is a tuning peg on our electric guitar. I like the spiral wound string on the peg. Below is a shot taken with a slow shutter speed just after plucking a string. I thought the vibrating string represented the music theme well.

Lately I learned the chords to the Oasis song Wonderwall. That was relatively easy. Now I'm trying to learn some picking techniques for the song White Bird. K. T. Tunstall is good acoustic guitar player! That song is a lot tougher, but I like the sound of that style of playing.

Dianne is very quickly getting sick of hearing both of these songs. She's also sick of hearing Everywhere I Go. A great blues song I learned a couple months ago -- although I have no idea what the lyrics are!