Unfortunately I had a photo shoot run long yesterday, so I pretty much missed most of my lesson (don’t you hate it when the real world interrupts your leisure time). It was a hectic day and showing up 40 minutes late to 45 minute lesson wasn’t what I was planning on. Luckily Kit had a little extra time before his next student and I got a whopping fifteen minutes in.
As I mentioned in my lesson post last Friday, my instructor gave me Day Tripper by The Beatles as my homework. The song is pretty straight forward, nothing very difficult really. I can play all the bits and pieces, but for some reason, I had the toughest time playing the song straight through without constant screw ups. It took more takes than I’d like to admit to get what’s in the final video.
For this weeks lesson we continued with the “circle of notes” diagram that I wrote about in my last lesson. My instructor Kit likes to call this his “Dr. Seuss” lesson since at first glance it doesn’t quite make sense and I need to trust that it’s going somewhere. This week I learned that this was more than just a memorization exercise to learn the notes backwards and forwards from any given note as I wrote last week. This time, Kit added two new circles (shown below) with different “note spacing” between the notes.
Ever since I first saw Crossroads when I was a kid, I thought the Pignose 7-100 amplifier was pretty cool and wanted one (along with a Fender Telecaster). I’m not sure why I never bought one since they aren’t exactly cost prohibitive. When I first tried to learn guitar when I was younger we didn’t have the internet (wow, I just felt really old saying that) so it wasn’t like I could go on ebay to find one. My gear selection was limited to the three guitar shops in town and none of them had the Pignose. Well here I am (many) years later and taking up the guitar again and the Pignose 7-100 popped back into my mind and I picked one up.
Read More…
I was sitting around reading the latest issue Of Guitar Aficionado and there was an article about the Gibson Sunburst Les Paul from 1958-1960. In it, they write how Eric Clapton was the first to really popularize the guitar for a lot of the 60’s British guitarists. Jimmy Page was quoted as saying “Eric was the first one to evolve the sound with the Les Paul and Marshall amps”. In the article Guitar Aficionado write about how the John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers albums shows off what Clapton was doing with the Les Paul Sunburst, in particular the song Hide Away (a Freddie King remake).
