Ten Song September

Social media is full of people doing challenges. Sometimes these are for charity or to promote some cause, but some are just a form of motivation to achieve a personal goal. Some of my friends on Tsu were doing some for September and I decided to do a musical one to get me playing more guitar. I've done a few music videos before, but I have been wanting to do them more often.

My target was to do at least ten of these during the month. I wasn't going to worry too much about production quality as I'm concentrating more on just playing these days.

About a Girl is a song I've played a lot at pub sessions, so it was an easy one to kick things off. Recorded in the bedroom on my phone as my kids take over the study these days.

Another personal goal has been to write my own songs. I've had a few ideas, but never seem to get around to developing them. I wrote a post on Tsu a while back that ended with the line "I came for the money, but stayed for the people". That seemed to resonate with people and I was inspired to try writing a song around it. It quickly evolved into The Tsu Song. I used a fairly standard set of chords to keep it simple and got it recorded. That took longer than planned as I kept messing up. Even this take went wrong, hence the cussing at the end.

Skullcrusher Mountain is a song by the great Jonathan Coulton that I enjoy playing. This was a spur of the moment recording as I wanted to get another one done that day after having issues doing another. Another bedroom phone recording.

There are lots of on-line guitar tutorials around these days. They are a great way to get you playing something new. I like this series on Premier Guitar. They have a neat web player than show the music as it plays the backing track. I'd just been to see Foo Fighters, so this seemed appropriate. I had tried it before.

Sometimes I'll be listening to music and think 'I could play that!' Holiday by Green Day was one such song. It is fairly easy, but I looked up some tab anyway to speed things up. My daughter plays bass and had played this, so we decided to do it together.

I was sharing my posts about this challenge with some fellow Tsuvians. I put out a call for requests and someone asked for some Billy Joel. Still Rock and Roll to me is an old favourite of mine. It didn't take long to learn.

A lot of my early guitar experience was having classical lessons. I don't play it much these days, but I still try it now and again. I find it a completely different challenge to playing rock. This is a piece called Alman from my old Grade 5 book.

On a trip into London I decided to treat myself to some new effects pedal. I don't have very many and want to learn how to use them properly. I got an overdrive and a wah. I decided to jam a little demo to show them off.

Many years ago, before we had a web full of cool free guitar lessons I used to buy guitar magazines. Some of these came with a CD of backing tracks. One of those was for the Paul Weller song Sunflower. I'd tried it a few times, but never recorded it before. I used my new overdrive on this.

The final song of the month was Porcupine Tree's Lazarus. This was done the day I saw the band's Steven Wilson play an amazing show at the Royal Albert Hall. He did this song, but much better of course. He also played another, Open Car, that I've also covered.

I consider this challenge to be a success. I had hoped to do more new songs, but limited time prevented that. However, I did write my first song! I'm thinking I should do another challenge that will involve writing more songs.

For October I'm challenging myself to just learn some more classic riffs to expand my musical vocabulary. There are certain tunes that every guitarist ought to be able to play, but that I just have never learned. I don't know if I will record these. We shall see.

Guitaring

Although I've been playing guitar for about 35 years I don't consider myself to be that good a player in various areas. I've mostly been a bedroom player and just learnt songs, or parts of songs that took my fancy. I've also done lots of tutorials, initially from magazines, and later on-line. I've not done much actual performance where I need to bring it all together. I have played in a couple of band line-ups, mostly playing rhythm. I have improved at that, but could do with expanding my chord vocabulary.

I've recorded a few songs where I played several parts, but those are invariably built up from lots of small sections and I've not done much soloing.

Soloing is probably my weakest area. I know lots of licks, but when I try to string them together it all sounds terribly clichéd. My recent jazz improvisation course showed up some of my limitations, but may have been too advanced or the wrong approach for me. Perhaps my mindset of being analytical rather than spontaneous is part of the issue.

I'm thinking of ways to move forward. One is to find a good teacher who can guide me to a new approach. I have some leads on that to follow up. My other thought is to try learning more full songs, complete with the original solo. I have quite a few of those in magazines, with backing tracks. I'd aim to play the song 'live' as if performing it. I really want to do some gigs at some point, but just don't feel quite ready yet.

This post is an incentive to actually get on with achieving my goals, so that I need to update you later. Stay tuned.

Stuck in the MIDI

I've now been using KXStudio in earnest for a couple of projects. A couple of those were just recording a few audio tracks in Ardour 3, but the latest has been a little more complex. I'm doing a song for the next Six String Bliss album. It's a cover and to make things easier I found a MIDI file of the song to use as a basis. I was able to load this into Ardour as a set of MIDI tracks and then link those to Qsynth using a free soundfont. I've been replacing those tracks I can play on guitar, bass and with vocals, but will keep the drums and some keyboards. Ardour has been very stable. I think it has only crashed a couple of times and I didn't lose much.

I still need to work out how to preserve session data so that I don't have to hook up the MIDI channels each time. I'm sure it's possible.

Once I have everything records I want to apply a few effects to make it all sound better. This is still a new area for me, so I'll be doing a bit of reading and experimenting. The album will be out early next year and I'll put my track up after the release.

In other news, I have joined a band! I was contacted earlier this year via Forming Bands by a bass player who wanted to put a blues band together. For various reasons we didn't actually get together until last month. We've now had 3 sessions and worked on about a dozen songs. I'm doing rhythm guitar and most of the singing. The hope is that we will be ready to gig in a few months and get out there and play to some people. This will be a new experience for me. I was with a band before, but we never got past rehearsals. I'm a little nervous, but I at least have some experience of performing in front of people from the pub sessions.

I'm using my Gordon Smith GS2 guitar and Roland Cube 80x amplifier. I'm considering getting some effects to give me more sound options. The Zoom G3X is very appealing with a low price and lots of sounds. I like the 'stompbox' layout that lets you tweak each effect easily. It may also be useful for recording. I have a few analogue pedals (Boss distortion, DOD compressor and a boost), but I think I need more options. The Cube has basic chorus, phaser etc that I have used when playing at home, but lack control for live use. The G3X also has a nice looper that can synchronise to the built-in drum machine. I ought to try one out some time. Part of me would like a nice set of pedals, but that could get expensive and it might take some time to establish what I need. A multi-effects unit may not sound quite the same, but it will let me experiment and I may later decide to add discrete pedals to the set-up as I see some others have done.

Cantina band

Although I've been playing guitar for over thirty years I have very little experience of playing live. It just hasn't happened. As I don't live in a city there may not be the opportunities you might get in a city to meet up with local musicians. Thankfully the internet makes finding them a bit easier than it was in the past.

I want to collaborate with other musicians as I'm not really inspired enough to be a solo artist. So I signed up to some 'muso wanted' sites including:

• Musofinder
• Bandmix
• Foming Bands

I've had some success with these. A couple of years back I got an audition with a classic rock covers band that I passed. I rehearsed with them for a while, but after we eventually did a private gig for a few friends it ground to a halt as a couple of people wanted to take a break. I've also met up with a local bassist and done a couple of jams. Just today I got contacted again by someone who wants to do some jam sessions soon. I hope something will happen with that, but it may be a couple of weeks while he finds enough people and a venue. I have had a couple of others, but they were either too far away or required too much commitment in rehearsals and gigs. They may also be beyond my abilities. I'm reasonable at rhythm, but not much good at lead.

After the band broke up I was looking into other possibilities and discovered an acoustic pub session via Lemonrock (a gig listings and general musicians services site). It's at a pub in the middle of nowhere, but I eventually went, totally unsure of what it would involve. It's a fairly informal session where people take it in turns to play songs, mostly to each other although there are generally a few regulars there. I really enjoyed it and it encouraged me to do some singing and to actually learn some new songs to play. It got me playing some new styles such as Irish hornpipes. I even took some singing lessons to see if I could improve things and learned a few things about what was possible for me. Some are biased towards folk music, but it seems you can get away with other styles. I did all sorts of pop and rock songs. I haven't been regularly to that session in a while, but there are several I could get to. Details of some of the local sessions can be found on The Mudcat Cafe notice board.

As I had got to know a few musicians in our small town via Facebook and other means I decided to start a session here. I approached a couple of pubs and have got something going at the one just across the road from me. Numbers are still small, but word is spreading and I hope it will grow. It's a great first step beyond playing at home if you can't face a big audience and just want to meet some supportive musicians. I can recommend it.

My session is at The White Horse in Arlesey, Bedfordshire. Details can be found on Google+ and Facebook.