Wednesday, March 27, 2013

The Rumors of My Demise....

Quoting from Mark Twain "The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated" is true for me given my unexplained absence. Last month I was on travel status for a week. Upon returning from my business trip I had minor surgery to fix ingrown toenails that I have had since high school. Yes I know I am a procrastinator and more so I have an aversion to pain inflicted by surgery. Yet the daily pain became the driving influence to seek medical assistance. An hour after walking into the doctors office I was hobbling out. It has been four weeks and I am almost totally healed on one toe and about 80% healed on the other. During my initial recovery I could not play my steel guitar because I could not operate the pedals or the volume pedal. I could not set up or tear down my guitar. Since I have two guitars my instructor graciously let me bring one guitar to his studio and my instructor set up my guitar and allowed me too leave it in his studio. I have been back at it and have changed my schedule.  It has become increasingly difficult to work all day, get home and eat dinner and practice. I decided that I would increase my lessons from 3 times a week to 6 days a week. My reason for this approach is that lessons 6 one hour lessons a week, I get more out of it than practicing 2 or 3 hours a night on my own. Now I have completed Kansas City and am now almost done with Walking After Midnight. My instructor is setting one lesson per week dedicated to precision and the other lessons to learning a song, ride, turnaround or such. He is also slowing down and including phrasing and timing with each lesson. I am also learning to train my ear. My lesson here is when I use my tuner and tune my guitar, I pick E repeatedly and burn that pitch into my mind. My instructor tells me with the knowledge of the E pitch I can tune all other strings. While I do not understand yet, I will have faith and do it.

The other issue I had at this time was my Fender twin reverb amp developed problems. I took it in and it took 3 weeks to get repaired. During the absence of my beloved tube amp, I reinforced why I hate digital amps. Thank God my baby is back.

Some housekeeping, I said in an earlier post, I had figured out how to use Tabledit and would share my new found knowledge. I have not forgotten and I will add this post later. In learning Tabledit, I have been entering Steel Guitar Rag since I know the song. This leads me to the next piece of housekeeping.

I have always wanted to share how to play the steel guitar. I have scheduled time in a couple of months to record audio and video of learning the steel guitar. The plan is to record techniques needed for the song in question. I also need a video camera to record the lessons. In my opinion a cheap video camera is not an option. When I obtain the video camera of the quality I need I will record a lessons for Steel Guitar Rag to start. Other housekeeping I need to discuss are driven by you the reader.

I always review which of my posts get the most views as well as what searches are entered by you. The majority of what I have seen centers around learning, techniques, tablature, and equipment selection. So I will include posts on these topic areas and lessons will include these topic areas. Be patient as I need to do some research to back up what I share with you.