I’ve been away from this blog for an extended hiatus. Since I’ve been away I have been practicing the guitar regularly. Below is a rough (incomplete) outline of a section of Van Eps’s Harmonic Mechanisms I am working on. My impression is that the end result...

You know, if I had to do it all over again I would have focused on playing the bass rather than the guitar. I think I am more temperamentally suited to the bass, and after all these years I am still just an intermediate-level guitar player. Bass, piano, and...

I hate having to write a title before writing the essay. I suppose I could simply re-write the title after writing the essay, but since this is a freewriting blog I am reticent to go back and edit anything. Hence the stupid title I’ve given to this post.

I’ve been in a funk for the past few days as it truly dawns on me that Berklee is not going to call me back about the job I interviewed for. I had a really good Skype interview, and one of the interviewers began talking to me about multiple sections of the ...

I don’t have anything in particular to say, but I just feel like writing more. Maybe I’m keyed up about writing because I took a little hiatus from blogging - I went 11 days between posts on my Wordpress blog and six days between posts on this blog. Since o...

I don’t really want to write about nonsense, I just couldn’t think of a better title off the top of my head. It’s a little weird to title an essay before actually writing it, but I guess, in the best of circumstances, the title would help to focus the essay...

Wordpress doesn’t seem to be working today. This is a big problem for my other blog since I can’t access either the blog or its admin functions. I have been trying to blog about a short documentary on Mississippi Fred McDowell, but it doesn’t work. Here is ...

I’ve added to my repertoire and begun to divide up the songs by their specific tunings. For performance with one guitar, though, the tunings should be organized according to similarity:

My title is a bit vague, but it is more indicative of how I learn to play music than anything else I can come up with at the moment. When I learn from a musician’s recordings I also like to read about the musician, the musical style, learn the lyrics, copy...

Lately I have been writing about my musical repertoire and practice. Let me write some more on music, but stick with prose. I have been writing too many lists lately, and I need to get back to freewriting prose. The lists have been very useful, though, help...

Let me write out a complete list of the bottleneck tunes I’m working on and/or should be working on. Print out this list and use it for reminding me of the extent of my repertoire. Learn to sing the tunes as well as playing the guitar parts

I can’t pay my rent this month, and I’m not sure I will be able to pay it next month. I’m not currently working, though I had a good interview with Berklee a couple of weeks ago. Damn it, I’m really stuck. I wish I wasn’t as depressed as I am since this is ...

Over the years I have priced out various recording rigs, from a simple composer’s setup to a full-on studio. Let me loop a bit on this.

Let me loop a bit on composition, especially given that I have two degrees in composition.

I don’t know particularly what I am back at today, but I figured I would write a bit to figure it out. I’m not back at it as in back in the saddle, but rather…no, wait, I guess back in the saddle may be appropriate since I am back in my office chair (my bro...

Let me layout the four aspects of music and muse a little bit on practice.

For years I have played bottleneck on my old National Duolian, so my bottleneck technique is all about the old beast. Somehow, in making the transition to electric slide, I need to change my technique and my entire approach to the instrument. I can’t bang o...

I don’t mean to imply that I have not been writing, but for the past few days I have been writing list-style entries having to do with my musical practice. This has been greatly helpful, but it has not necessarily been freewriting. I suppose I can write any...

Vestopol tuning (open-D/E: DADF#AD/EBEG#BE): work out heads and background riffs; move beyond the Elmore James riff, but pay attention to his music.

the acoustic instrument: every electric instrument is also an acoustic instrument, though solid body guitars don’t resonate very well by themselves; the acoustic instrument causes me to focus on the technique of playing, this being where I work on my scale ...