In honor of the new Wolfmother album Cosmic Egg, I’m doing a cover of their song Dimension found on their self titled debut album. I actually saw Wolfmother live this weekend at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit concert. It was an all acoustic set, which is a bit different than you’d expect from Wolfmother (the entire concert is acoustic). I’m also going to be seeing them next month at the amazing Oakland Fox Theater (if you haven’t been there, its a great venue).
As I learn my scales, chords and try to learn a some easier sounding songs that I like, I start to wonder if you either have it or you don’t when it comes to playing the guitar. Just when I think I’m starting to make some progress I head over to youtube and see a 12 year old belting out some amazing guitar. Clearly, that kid has it. Then I look at my videos and think, clearly I don’t.
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.
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).
Being new to guitar I need to figure out my likes and dislikes. So far when making decisions on things like strings, picks, guitar setup, and just about any other decision that need to be made (outside of which guitar and amp to buy), I’ve always asked “what do you recommend” since I couldn’t really make an informed decision. But that’s a bad way to go about things. I need to figure out what **I** like. That’s why I like to do A/B comparrisons like this one and the one I did on my recent string comparison post. Read More…
