Little Martha - Both Guitars

Click here to hear my final product. I've simply taken the two guitar parts from Little Martha and spliced them together using Garage Band. The timing is a little off, which I think is due to the delay in my microphone-to-computer interface. I definitely hoping that the final product would sound much better, but maybe I can polish things over the summer. At least I can now say that I can kind of play a song from beginning to end. Even though I have picked around on the guitar since eighth grade, I think this is the first song that I've ever learned (if you can call it that) from beginning to end!

Little Martha - First Guitar

The deadline is here, and so despite the fact that I am not at all able to play the first guitar part in its entirety very cleanly, I had to record would I could play and move on. Although it may not sound like the result of hours and hours of practice, I can assure you that it is. Let's hope it sounds better when tracked with the second guitar part! Click here to listen.

Back from a Busy Spring Break

I hoped that over spring break I would have had plenty of time to practice my guitar and get caught up on this blog, but since I was out of town for most of the break, I ended up being guitarless. Now that I'm back, but without my wife's laptop for recording purposes, I decided that I would spend my time today practicing the first, and most difficult, guitar part to Little Martha.

Since high school, I've been pretty slack about practicing guitar, and the first guitar part to Little Martha is difficult because it requires the finger strength of someone who regularly plays the guitar. There are several sections in the song in which I have to barre all six strings at the fifth fret, which simply means that those sections of the song sound like the noises my little cousin got my guitar to make when he knocked it off the stand last time he came to visit.

I'm making progress, though, and hopefully next time I sit down to blog, I'll also have a recording to share.

The Ideal Practice Space

Today my wife and I headed up to Dahlonega to spend some time with our families, who both live there. Being a gorgeous day, and not caring to discuss Easter decorations with the ladies at my inlaw's house, I grabbed the old guitar from the living room, went out on the porch, and enjoyed the above view while strumming the guitar.

With this brilliant scenery, surely a brilliant idea would come into mind.

Nothing... so I decided I'd try to be semi-creative and play someone else's song in a unique way. After ten minutes of trying to play a slightly bluegrass instrumental version of I Will Follow You into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie I realized that such desecration was a bad idea. What's really sad is that I thought it sounded good until I suddenly realized it sounded like one of the awful Beatles covers I had recently heard while put on hold for a technical support call.

I wonder if a book on songwriting would be helpful, or maybe it's just a lost cause.

Little Martha - Second Guitar

Rather than having several recordings of the first few bars of different songs, I think it would be nice to have an entire song from beginning to end. This will never happen if my standards are too high, so I'm lowering them. I decided that no matter how bad the recording, after five takes, I'm keeping the best one. Here is my complete recording of the second guitar part (the easiest part) of Little Martha. There are plenty mistakes in the recording, but my hope is that the first guitar part will drown them out, if I can ever play it.

Loops!

I keep straying from my original goals for this blog. Rigid goals stifle creativity anyway, so I'm just going to throw them out the window. As long as I produce something with my instruments and Garage Band, I figure something creative will happen.

I heard the song Jimi Thing by the Dave Matthews Band yesterday for the first time in a very long while and I really liked the intro guitar riff. After I learned it, I recorded the four measures in Garage Band, recorded four measures of rhythm guitar and bass, then layered one of Apple's drum loops on top of it all. I looped the four measures a couple of times and was pretty pleased with the result. I then busted out some karaoke on top of it all, but unfortunately, even Apple's pitch correction technology and vocal effects couldn't make me sound like Dave. I guess I'll keep my day job. Click here if you'd like to hear my destruction of a perfectly good song.

Garage Band Has Effects Pedal Simulations!

Since I have a lot of grading to do and my wife is out of town and thus can't keep me on track, I decided I'd practice my guitar tonight. During my work from my last blog posting, I realized that I couldn't play the two parts to Little Martha well enough to record them, so I practiced for a while. The song is played in open E tuning, which means that unlike how a guitar is normally tuned, when you strum all of the strings without fretting them, you get a nice pretty chord.

After playing the song three or four times along with the album, I got bored and started playing around with the different sounds that come out naturally with an open E tuning. I then realized that although the noise I was making didn't sound like anything I, or anyone else, would ever want to listen to, it was somewhat creative in the sense that it wasn't me playing someone else's music. I fired up GarageBand and hit record, but lo and behold, I noticed something that I hadn't recognized before... and option to select guitar effects!

For those of you that don't realize the importance of this discovery, guitar effects serve primarily to mask a guitarist's lack of talent. You can crank up the distortion and no one ever knows that 50% of the notes you hit are the wrong notes. You can turn up echo and distortion, and it makes your scratchy mis-frettings sound like part of the rhythm. So I recorded myself playing with one of the effects settings on GarageBand in open E, and if you really have no life, you can listen to it here.