One of my earliest influences on guitar was Brian May, of Queen. His playing was always different from the standard pentatonic runs of most of my other guitar heroes. I was always intrigued by his melodic runs and use of amazing harmonies.
Today I came across this video in which he shows us how he uses a delay pedal (sometimes more than one delay pedal) to achieve some great sounding harmonic runs with just one guitar. Very inspiring.
Guitarist/Composer Jimmy Wahlsteen
Whoops, I realise I have let this blog sit a bit dormant for a couple of months while I got distracted with other 'life' stuff. Time to get back on it and get things moving again.
Lets go back a couple of months to April. Yes, I have still managed to keep at my initial goal of 'a song a month', and in April, I learned the wonderful piece 'Hitched For Life' by Jimmy Wahlsteen.
I found the timing of this piece quite a bit of work to get right. Also, this song required a capo on the 8th (!) fret - the highest I have ever played with a capo on, which was interesting in it's own right.
I dedicate this song to my dearest wife, to whom I am hitched for life... ;-)
I found this very inspiring TED talk today whilst randomly browsing their site. Evelyn Glennie is a very gifted deaf musician with amazing talent, and an extremely engaging speaking voice.
Here she talks about the art of listening. I mean, REALLY listening... If you have a spare 32 minutes, grab a coffee and/or a sandwich and sit back and enjoy her talk.
For my 2013 Challenge, in February, I posted about learning Ewan Dobson's "Time 2". At that time, I was still struggling with getting the speed up to where he plays it, which is around 140BPM.
This weekend, I decided to try and achieve 'racing speed' with this song, and recorded myself on video playing it through.
In my opinion, it is still a bit sloppy and could use some tidying up, but I am pleased that I managed to keep the tempo and momentum going for the whole song.
