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!
Personal
Now there’s two of them… i mean who stands in front of a window for twenty minutes having a conversation? I at least sit down in front of the window half nude, rather than standing (and if you were wondering about the logistics of it, we have lower ceilings than the houses across the street, so my third floor apartment is lower than theirs (thus they can see into mine)).
Obviously i returned to my apartment in a slightly soaked state of dress, so i wasted no time in stripping down to my so-called ‘gay pride’ unionbay tee and some undies. I was actually about to lose one of the two (i’ll leave it to your imagination) since they were both damp when i looked out my window and saw someone standing directly in the window of the apartment across the street from mine. He wasn’t turned totally in my direction, but the cross-bar of the window-frame blocked out his eyes exactly so i really couldn’t tell whether he was leering at me or not. After scratching myself to see if i could get a reaction out of him, i grabbed my multi-coloured afgan (stolen from home) and wrapped it around myself so that it looked like some sorta of crunchy hippy dress. I figure, if someone’s gonna be watching me the least i could do would be cross-dress a little…
The majority of that prolonged absence was taken up by a lot of traipsing around with Amy & Liz that involved one snowed in basketball court, two trips to 7-11, three slip and fall accidents, and a host of other fun events like Amy kicking snow in my face after i fell on the ground. Afterwards we repaired to Amy’s to eat nachos and watch her Ben Folds Five video, which we do every time i’m over there. There’s so much liquor lying around in her kitchen waiting for tomorrow night i almost got drunk looking at it. She bought this enormous jug of SkyVodka just for us to do shots of, or something. Obviously i won’t be blogging much tomorrow night…