Music

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Building My Own Acoustic Guitar

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My workbench at Thomas Lloyd Guitars

My workbench at Thomas Lloyd Guitars

Ok, it's been yet another delay between posting here, but this time I have an excuse - You see, I've been down in Melbourne building my own acoustic guitar for the past few weeks. 

I enrolled in the Thomas Lloyd Guitar building workshop, and was guided through the build by master luthier Chris Wynne and his able assistant Bill. 

I actually started a day by day photo essay of the build over at the Acoustic Guitar Forum - the link to the thread is:  

 

In summary, it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.  I learned so much more than just how to build a guitar.  I learned about how I could go beyond what I thought my limitations were, and after years of self talk telling myself that I couldn't do certain things with precision - when it came down to the crunch, it turns out I got pretty damned close. 

 

2013 Challenge - May

David Essig

David Essig

Ok, I am starting to ramp up again with the monthly challenge, after going MIA for a short while.  This month's piece proved to be a fairly challenging from a timing and 'feel' perspective. 

I chose Don Ross's excellent transcription of the David Essig classic called "Berkley Springs".   A beautiful piece, but it needs a fairly subtle touch, and there are tiny timing changes in some sections which are hard to nail down at first.

This was also a chance for me to record my brand new beautiful Taylor Grand Symphony BTO guitar that I had just bought.  All my other recordings here have been on my Maton ECW80C, so it was nice to have a brighter guitar for this particular song. 

The tuning is actually higher than standard - to F.  The shorter scale on this guitar also made the job easier as the string tension was not too high when tuned up like this. 

Brian May On The Creative Use Of Delay...

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.

2013 Challenge - April

Guitarist/Composer Jimmy Wahlsteen

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... ;-)