Improvisational Guitar Work – Nov 1st

Here’s the first audio sample for the blog, I will be recording my playing regularly and posting those pieces of music which I feel are probably worth listening to.

Smalltime Mosey – Nov 1st 2007 Improvisational Guitar

(It is 7Mb, so it will take a minute to download;  also, please let me know if there are any problems with playing this file, I created it in Ubuntu Linux with the program Audacity but it should be compatible with other systems.)

A quick note: It doesn’t really come together until :50 (it’s just over 7 minutes long), and there are a few parts where I repeated similar phrasing I think unnecessarily; I’ve enjoyed listening to it though. It’s a quiet recording, so you’ll need to turn up your speakers a bit.

This is my first time listening to my own stuff on a recording, and it’s quite interesting to listen to my stuff and sort of analyze it and assess the music without actually playing it at the time, I’m seeing that this will be very helpful for improving my playing.

Some historical background on my guitar experience: I played in a band in high school (10 years ago) as a bass player; I always knew I preferred regular guitar, and especially acoustic guitar, but at the time I wanted to play harder stuff (The Melvins, punk songs, others), and my friends’ band needed a bass player, so that’s what I played then.

I haven’t played an instrument since then, but I bought an $8 knockoff guitar at a garage sale last July (one of the local, seemingly well-versed luthiers knew about this model of guitar, said it was made in the 70s in San Francisco, was sold for about $100, and that it could be rated about 3 out of 10 in terms of quality/sound compared to other guitars.)

I bought it and fixed it up with $40 worth of parts. Since then I’ve been playing it maybe 8 hours per week, on and off. I also found a very, very good instructional book called “Fretboard Logic“, which I’ll make a future post about, which has helped me immensely in understanding the guitar.

Anyway, that’s the background on where I’m at, I’d be interested to hear what people think of the track, I realize that it may just sound like a guy plucking some strings, but I’d like to hear some impressions if anyone feels like it.

That’s all for now,

-Loosetoned

~ by loosetoned on November 3, 2007.