Been waiting for a Trio, have you? Well, get prepared for a monster-sized new-guitar special: 8 songs & 30 minutes long! Witness me tear through “Bridge,” “A Long Time Since,” “Inadequacy Song,” “Punk,” “Almost,” “World In My Hand,” “Relief,” and the always sparkling “Under My Skin.” I make no promises as to the quality of this recording: i’ve been playing this guitar for under 24 hours, i’m sick and i can’t hear the sound of my own voice, i’m dealing with wacky amplifier distortion, i haven’t done a Trio in a month, and i’m sure i clipped the microphone at least three times in every song. But, anyway, if you’re the sort of person that cares about this sorta thing, it’ll be up for your listening pleasure come midnite. Enjoy.
While you’re waiting for me to upload the new Trio (almost 5megs, and still as low quality as ever), feel free to check out some other new audio: namely, the three ad-libbed love songs i wrote for the folks over at the SurvivorBlog2 PeanutGallery in a blatant attempt to win their affections earlier this week. “ErnDawg,”(Tony,) I Want More,” and “Revirginized Honey.” The first is on a bass played an octave high to simulate a guitar, the second is on an electric guitar missing a significant amount of strings, and the third is played just as bass-melody. Funky. Which is your favourite?
demos
I never wanna retune my guitar again. Ever. I don’t know what got into me, but last night after i got done chatting with Re i was listening to a solo recording of Peter Mulvey‘s “Grace,” and i suddenly decided that it would be fun to figure out how to play it. Of course, “Grace” occurs in the tuning CFCFAC, while a guitar starts off in EADGBE. So… that took about a half hour in and of itself, and after that i still had to figure out how to play the song. It was here that my semester of aural skills kicked in, and i easily found some basic notes that had been eluding me on all other occasions of toying with the song. However, the problem with Peter Mulvey is often not finding what notes he’s playing, but where he’s playing them. I’m quite sure i nailed down his pattern on the main riff, but past that i have all the right notes in all the wrong places. Compare: me vs. Peter.
Achieving that first relative victory, i decided to move on the the more impossible, “A Better Way to Go,” which i have seen Peter perform live sitting as close as i am to my computer without being able to play it afterwards. Happily, last night was one of my so-called “magic ear” nights, and the song was hardly even a challenge … i got much closer to the actual sound of it than i did on “Grace,” though i can’t hardly play the scales that he uses inbetween chords. Compare: me vs. Peter.
As a result of all of this fooling around, i think my legendary page of obscure guitar chords (Tori, Ani, Mulvey) is going to finally make its appearance on Uprush any day now, with some fun new additions. WheE!
Demo: Impact / Pay For It
My voice is so very tied to my guitar in that i can’t ever find any notes to sing other than ones contained within the chord i’m currently playing. Not only does this make my melodies rather predictable, it makes it entirely impossible for me to correctly sing most sparely acoustic Ani DiFranco songs since she doesn’t use normal chords. Want an example? Here’s a low version of To The Teeth, since i’m in the middle of changing strings on my guitar.