Well it has been a long while since I recorded an acoustic guitar piece, so this weekend past, I decided to resolve that deficit and record a new song.

I remember a friend sending me a video of Simon Fox playing this particular piece in a live setting a few months back, and I was immediately taken with the song, which had a lilting Celtic cadence, combined with the feel of a lively jig. Thankfully, Simon provides the tabs for all his songs on his website for free, so I downloaded them and learned "The Fisherman".

Technically, it was not an overly difficult piece, but the 'trills' proved to me more difficult that I thought. Strangely, I find that some days they seem to come off perfectly, and other days, they just don't seem to work for me.

On the day I recorded this piece, they weren't working as well as I would have liked, but I persevered anyway. The other thing that I found I needed to work on was the timing of this piece. There is a dance like pace that needs to be maintained even though there are those trills and several syncopated notes to break the melody up.

I also decided to go a little overboard on recording this one, and used 4(!) different mics to capture the guitar sound. I will post more on the details of that in another post, I think.

This was played on my Taylor BTO custom acoustic. I had recently put pure Bronze strings on it to see how they sounded. While I like the wamer, softer sound, they didn't seem as smooth under my fingers, and string squeak was a big problem, but I am relatively happy with the end tone that I got.

Here is "The Fisherman". Enjoy.