This afternoon was our fifth consecutive monthly session of the Downingtown Area Acoustic Jam group that we found out about through meetup.com. It felt like a long time between meetups, and looking at the calendar, it's been six weeks since the last one
You're encouraged to bring two new songs to every meetup (printed tabs enough for the group of 15 people.) We didn't have much time to think about this, so we brought one new song ("Amie", by the Pure Prairie League - which was very well received by the group, as it's an easy strumming song and fun to sing along to), and one song that we'd brought to a previous meetup (Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right".)
The songs we played, as best I can remember, are as follows. The songs we picked are marked with asterisks.
Knockin' on Heaven's Door (Bob Dylan)
Dirty Old Town (The Pogues)
It Don't Come Easy (Ringo Starr)
Rainy Day Women (Bob Dylan)
After the Goldrush (Neil Young)
Amie (Pure Prairie League) ***
Ring Around the Moon (Greg Brown)
Hey Good Lookin' (Hank Williams)
I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) (The Four Tops)
Steel Rail Blues (Gordon Lightfoot)
Country Roads (John Denver)
Wagon Wheel (Old Crow Medicine Show)
Help (The Beatles)
Red Clay (Gillian Welch)
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Bob Dylan) ***
Rooty Toot Toot for the Moon (Greg Brown)
California Stars (Wilco)
Let it Be (The Beatles)
Deportee (Woody Guthrie)
Makin' Whoopee (Eddie Cantor)
Good Luck John (Joe Crookston)
Another fun afternoon, and we're looking forward to next month's meetup.
There's a lot of Eddie Vedder in my house recently, as Darling Wife has discovered his solo music. There's a lot of finger-picking acoustic guitar (which I like a lot), and even a disc of ukelele songs (which I can take or leave.)
I thought I'd heard some of the acoustic guitar songs, and I finally figured out where - he did the soundtrack to the movie "Into the Wild", which I saw and liked. I stumbled on a YouTube guitar lesson for the song "Guaranteed", and I've been working on it ever since.
It's a simple and pretty song - acoustic guitar and vocals - and the chords turn out to be pretty straightforward:
G Bm G7 C
C G D
The finger-picking pattern is also pretty standard. But putting the two together at speed is *not* easy. And watching Eddie Vedder (in the clip below) play this live makes me appreciate that the man can seriously play the guitar.
I'm not sure I'll ever work up to full speed, but I'm giving it a lot of slow repetitions as a finger-picking exercise.
I don't remember exactly how I discovered Eric Johnson. It may have been through repeated glowing reviews of his playing on a guitar forum I sometimes browse...but however I learned of him, at one point I downloaded his Live from Austin, TX disc, which is a live performance from 1988 from the Austin City Limits TV show. It quickly became one of my very favorite discs, and I've listened to it countless times in the car or on the iPod.
I've shared my enthusiasm with brother Eric, and when Darling Wife saw that he was coming to the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, we decided that would be a good Christmas gift for Eric and me. We went on the theater's website in December and found that we could select the seats we wanted. Two seats in the 8th row a bit right of center sounded perfect.
The afternoon of the concert, I finally had time to do some research on what we could expect to see, and discovered that he has a new disc, Up Close. I downloaded it, and after a quick couple of listens I particularly liked the opening mood piece, which then launches into a guitar jam called "Fatdaddy."
Eric Johnson and his band (a bass player and a drummer) came on around 9:25, and launched into..."Fatdaddy." Great opening song, and the first thing I noticed is that he wasn't playing his signature Stratocaster, which is a sunburst body with a maple fretboard. Instead he was playing a black Strat with a maple fretboard. His amps were behind a black curtain, but it looked like there was a Marshall stack and a couple of Fender amps.
He went from one song to the next with very little stage banter (really nothing more than "thank you so much".) His playing was everything I expected from what I've heard and seen on YouTube - his tone is amazing, and pretty much unique. If I have my iPod on shuffle in the car, both my girls will call out "Eric Johnson" when a song of his comes on - even if they don't know the song, they know his sound. He can unleash a dizzying barrage of notes, flying up and down the fretboard - but he can also stay in the background laying down a groove during the vocals, or when the bass or drums are featured.
He didn't play songs from his new disc to the exclusion of everything else. He did some covers - The Beatles' "Dear Prudence" (which honestly didn't knock me out), a John Coltrane extended jazz jam (where he played a Gibson SG), and Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary". I was hoping that his Hendrix cover would be "Are You Experienced?", as I love his version from the '88 live disc. Songs that he did from that disc were "Zap" and "Cliffs of Dover".
I was impressed by the variety of styles of music he played. I was expecting the rock/blues jams, but the Coltrane jam surprised me, as did a country-style jam. The song is "On The Way" from his latest disc, and it's a fun kick-up-your-heels country picking song, and he called Andy McKee out to play on it. He even did a handful of solo acoustic guitar songs, including Paul Simon's "April Come She Will" (which is a gorgeous song that he played beautifully.)
One quibble - I'm sure it's too late to change his style of live playing at this point, but I wished he would have looked up from the guitar more. I'm not suggesting he become a showman - it's obviously not his style, and that's fine. But it seemed like he spent too much of the show hunched over the guitar looking at the fretboard while he played.
But that's a minor quibble - it was an amazing show. The man's technical ability is off the charts, and watching him lead his trio through so many musical styles was a treat. Eric Johnson alone would have been a memorable night - throw in Andy McKee as the opening act, and you have a night of guitar playing to remember.
Looking at YouTube, I see a number of clips from his show the previous night at BB King's in NYC. Here are a few:
One of our Christmas gifts to Eric was a ticket to the Eric Johnson concert last Saturday night at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville. I also got a ticket, and we've both been looking forward to the show, as we're both fans of Eric Johnson's music and his guitar playing. We knew the show was at 8pm, and that was really the only detail we knew.
On Saturday afternoon, I did a little web research, and discovered that there was an opening act - Andy McKee. The name rang a bell, and I thought it was a guy I had heard on WMMR's morning show a few years back. If it was the guy I was thinking of, he did some amazing things with an acoustic guitar in the studio that morning - not only strumming it, but drumming it at the same time and making some amazing sounds. A quick visit to YouTube confirmed that it was the same guy.
He came out to start the show around 8:20, played until shortly after 9:00, and knocked the socks off of Eric, me, and the rest of the house. He calls what he does "percussive guitar", and that describes it pretty well - but it still has to be seen and heard to be believed. He not only finger-picks and strums with his right hand, he taps and slaps the strings with either hand, fingers the fretboard with either hand, and also drums on the body of the guitar with either hand. I've never seen or heard anything like it.
He said he uses alternate tunings to get some of his sounds - and indeed he changed the tuning between almost every song (which is just one more thing that was boggling to me, as he did it effortlessly, and while chatting with the audience.)
His stage manner was warm and funny, and he would look out into the audience and raise an eyebrow as he was playing, as if to say "I can't believe how cool this is too!" He received a well-deserved standing ovation at the end of his set.
Another interesting note was the guitar he played. The frets were *not* parallel to each other. I've never seen a guitar laid out that way, and I don't understand. Is there a reason for it (it seems like there *must* be, even if I can't imagine it), or is he just trying to intentionally make it as difficult as possible? You can see the frets in the pic at right.
Rather than trying to describe any further what he does, I'll give some YouTube links. I would buy a ticket to see Andy McKee again any time, and I can't recommend him highly enough. "Unique" is probably an overused word, but he is truly unique. And while it is kind of like watching a magic act ("how in the world does he *do* that?!?"), the attraction isn't just that he's unique or that he's doing amazing things - it's also great music.
We decided to get together on New Year's Eve and have a potluck dinner party and jam session with the band and aikido folks. This seemed like a fun way to ring in the New Year, as the last dinner party/jam session last January is what prompted the formation of the band, which was definitely among the highlights of 2011.
We figured that we'd play our two sets as a trio (with me on bass), then if anyone else was there who played, we could jam to our heart's content. It turned out that the other folks who play couldn't make it, so we played two sets, then settled in to eat, drink, and be merry, while watching the New Year's coverage on TV.
Darling Wife had never seen us play as a band - she was at all the pre-band jam sessions, but wasn't at any of the parties we played. She said she was impressed at how much better we'd gotten, and that we sound pretty tight. So it was a fun night.
Gear-wise, I had my bass and bass amp - and also brought the Telecaster and the new Bugera amp. I brought the guitar in case we had enough people to jam (which we didn't), and I brought the new amp to show the guys (who were suitably impressed.)
We've also talked recently about personnel. I'm happy to play bass occasionally, or as a fill-in, but I want to play guitar. If we don't have a bass player, then we need to find one. And I think we have some options. I guess it's also a matter of our goals as a band. If we want to be a real gigging band, then we should find a wiz lead guitarist, and I'll be happy to play bass. But if (as I think) we want to be serious, but not too serious, and have fun rehearsing and play occasionally for parties of our friends, then I want to play guitar. So we'll see how things develop.
Either way, I'm happy to be playing, and hope to do as much as possible in 2012.
I've heard that one way to get better on guitar is to record yourself. It also sounds like fun, and I know that there are freeware software packages that can do fairly sophisticated multi-track recording. The audio recording and editing package that seems to be the standard is Audacity. I had downloaded and installed it, but never really learned how to use it. With some free time over Christmas week, that seemed like the time to learn.
I went through the basic tutorials on the Audacity website, and basic multi-track recording is very easy. So I thought I would try to create a three-track audio clip: bass and rhythm guitar playing a chord progression, and a solo guitar on top.
The first trick was how to capture the guitar or bass? Both my guitar amp and my bass amp have a "line out", and I can run a cord from there to the laptop's "microphone" port. That worked, but the input levels were way off - I had to turn the amp's volume to down below 1 for it to be anything but blaring static. But it did work, and I could get electric guitar and bass tracks that sounded okay, if a bit tinny.
I realized I had a very cheap and very old voice microphone that has to be years old. But I plugged it in and it worked, so I also decided to record an acoustic guitar track. That worked better than I thought, so I experimented with a three-track recording: acoustic (rhythm) guitar, bass, and lead guitar.
It actually worked okay, and I could export the Audacity project into an MP3 file, that if not professional-caliber, was recognizable as music. :-) It was a fun afternoon's project, but in the end it just made me want to figure out how to make better-sounding recordings. And that's where Eric and his family's very generous Christmas gift of a Guitar Center gift card comes in.
