rigorousintuition.ca

Anyone else spend a lot of time picking on porches and fretting in fields? If you're looking for a socially acceptable way to withdraw from boring conversations, I highly recommend picking up the guitar! Not that I need to pitch it, though: I'm sure there's more than a few of y'all. (If not, better still, I can make this into a data dump thread for great youtube lessons and technical insights I stumble across.)

Personally, most of the youtubage I'll be posting will be links...my NSA-compromised CPU is always wary of video-packed threads here on RI, I don't think the forum code executes the video packages very well blah blah anyways here's the one exception.

It's one of my personal favorite players, in terms of taste and technique, David Rawlings. He's talking about the process of learning the instrument and finding his sound and his enthusiasm is so pure it's very contagious. Enjoy.

Not a very good teacher but funny:
Guitar Lessons with Abbath from Immortal
If ever you're feeling a bit down watch it in its entirety, it will make you laugh ("someone will figure it out")

Best free tutorials i've come across are from Jusin Sandercoe: http://www.justinguitar.com/ i'm still practicing the folk fingerstyle module

Fingerstyle is my main muse, too, although I've been doing a lot of Albert King style crosspicking stuff, just for the sake of re-learning scales with those crazy cascading open voices. A couple of Kottke tunes for the backyard was my main motivation at really learning guitar, a project that came many years after I started playing guitar for the purpose of picking up womenses. You don't need to really learn much in order to do that, and that is exactly how much I learned prior to attempting stuff like Brain of Purple Mountain -- a puzzle box I am still learning in 2012.

My main muse this summer has been Canon in D, which I re-transcribed from some sheet music a few weeks back. I kept tinkering and re-writing it with my own voicings and minor shadings because the straight piano was not doing justice to what I heard in my head. Then a couple days ago I checked out George Winston's "variations" version of the song and realized: I geeked out on LSD to that song for an entire winter back in 03 and his version is in the key of C! That explained the weird hybrid version I've been hearing in my frontal lobes, something I'm still working on because there's so much theory for a neophyte like me to chew on.

Pachelbel's piece is not a simple chord progression, there are many subtle changes but the overall harmony is so flexible you can do all sorts of slippery shit. I have definitely been trying to pull it from that solemn funeral tempo and either give it some Mississippi John Hurt bounce or....slow it down even further, like Gillian Welch would. I mean, like I think she would...I haven't asked.

Here's a great tabulature version, by far the best: Noda's Canon in D

It's in "drop D" tuning, something I've usually got the guitar set to anyways due to my proclivity for Tool, Meshuggah and Radiohead. Enjoy. Also, here's a terrifyingly good (and apparently effortless) version from a young Korean prodigy:: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRIp0r6xto8

Simples..

though I never got the hang of it myself

I was reduced to tears of LULZ by that Abbath video -- and funniest of all, learned 2 great metal riffs quickly and easily, despite his protestations about being a terrible teacher! That was one of the funniest and most honest instructional videos I've seen in ages, watched it front to back, thank you.

I just got a fairly massive collection of .avi rips from old VHS and DVD instructional videos so that should be keeping me busy for awhile -- especially "Acoustic Fingerstyle with Rick Ruskin" which is chock full of ideas and very focused on the process of arrangement vs. performance technique. I go through a lot and it's a pretty exceptional piece of work, if anyone is interested, I can figure out how to share it despite the file size.

Edit: some Ruskin info
http://www.liondogmusic.com/
An excerpt from the VHS in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxSJCb1gOd8
One of his signature teaching pieces, "The 6 String Conspiracy" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMTeyAJqRY

Definitely check out that last video: the piece is played in standard tuning but it's written to take advantage of pretty much every possible open string chord voicing imaginable, while still being fairly easy to play -- coordinating all the subtle variations is the tricky part.

One of my fave guitarists...a great interview.

Wombaticus, I also am enamored of finger-picking...I'm not too great at it, but I'm getting there...and I love that you're playing Canon in D. I played violin for many of my younger years (age 8-17) and always loved playing that piece. I still have a violin, but I RARELY play it. But forget that! This is the GUITAR CLUB! I fucking love playing the guitar. (you knew that it was inevitable that someone would throw that smiliey up...)

Edit: Oh, and thank you Pierre for the fingerstlye link..checking that out for sure.

I posted this in the What are you listening to thread a while ago, but it's worth a repost, as Jeff Skunk(works) Baxter is a uniquely RI guitarist.



I do play a bit of guitar, but I really don't enjoy it very much, and I never practice. To me, the guitar is really just a tool, like a hammer, or a screwdriver. In fact, the only time I ever even pick one up any more is when I have a song idea to record, and I spend the first 30 minutes rebuilding my callouses...

Drumming, on the other hand, is something I love doing, but that's a separate thread.

marycarnival wrote:One of my fave guitarists...a great interview.

I LOVE that Partridge is using a dirt cheap Squire Tele in this vid.

Partridge and Baxter are both utterly new to me, loving these videos.

And wondering what kind of lunatic instructional videos I'll be making at their age.

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Guitar Club, oh boy!

Any serious energy I have these days goes toward guitar music.

Bruce, that Jeff Baxter video really spoke to me. In my 20s (I'm in my 50s now) I was so worried about technique that I largely forgot about music. After garage bands in high school, classical lessons, then jazz in college and experimental multitrack home recording, I put it all away for a few years. When I came back to it, those experiences, which individually didn't go far, all contributed to my current guitar shtick where maybe I found a "style". In any case I'm having joy.

Elvis wrote:

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Guitar Club, oh boy!

Any serious energy I have these days goes toward guitar music.

Bruce, that Jeff Baxter video really spoke to me. In my 20s (I'm in my 50s now) I was so worried about technique that I largely forgot about music.

Absolutely.

My goal has always been to never learn "proper" technique, because whenever I like someone's guitar playing, it's always because of the individuality of their style, often at the expense of technique.

Bernard Sumner is someone who, for most of his early career, was a technically AWFUL guitar player, but that mother fucker's music kept me alive in high school because guitar playing and music in general is about so much more than chops and technique.

Here's a perfect example of music transcending the technical limitations of the musicians:

.....strictly a tennis racquet in front of the bedroom mirror merchant myself but this bloke...( I mean I know Tony Iommi lost the tip of a finger but this is riddickerless ...)

/\/\/\/\ Nice /\/\/\/\

BTW, here's Skunk Baxter in context, Wombat.



Oh, and I don't want to seem like I'm hating on technique in my previous post.

I adore all types of music, and I absolutely DO appreciate technical virtuosity, and I love the beginning of the Baxter video where he plays off-the-cuff versions of country, hair metal, and jazz. That kind of well-roundedness is awesome, and completely necessary for a session player like him.

On the other hand, I also love that if you asked Will Sergeant to do a demonstration like that, he'd likely look at you like you had two heads, and then just play a great minimalist, one string melodic hook like this.



It's all good, yo!