Ok, I'll admit that my challenge has become a little inconsistent later in the year. As things have become busy, and I have been distracted with building a guitar etc, I haven't had the chance to post one song a month as I intended. Lets see if I can squeeze in a couple of songs in the last few weeks of the year! ;)

Today I would like to talk about my first song I recorded on the acoustic that I built myself (see earlier blog posts for details). This guitar has been somewhat of a 'challenge' since I built it - mainly with the fretwork being rushed, I have had to remove and replace ALL the frets on it. The bridge also started to lift on it, and necessitated a total removal and reglue, with the assistance of Jim, a local luthier.

After all that, I finally deemed the guitar playable, and strung it up and decided to record this song with it. The song is called 'For My Father' by Andy McKee, and when I saw Andy play it on Youtube earlier in the year, I just knew I had to learn to play this song.

It took a few weeks to get up and going - It has quite a difficult timing 'beat' to it in my opinion. Some aspects of the song require a 'classical' technique, which I had to practice and practice over and over again to try and make it as smooth as I used to play it in my younger days.

That's one of the sad facts that I am realising now - that a lot of my playing skills are diminishing with age, so I had better hurry up and record as much as I can before they get to the point that people laugh at me.

Oh, and I would like to dedicate this song to my own dad, who passed away nearly 5 years ago. I hope the wherever he is now, that somehow he can hear it and know that I still think of him every day.