Greg's Music And Geek Blog

Mon, 09 Oct 2006

The Auburn Bluegrass Festival

I’ll be participating at the Auburn Bluegrass Festival on October 14th. First, I’m the musical director for the kids bluegrass band which we’re calling the "Placer County Porch Pickers" The PCPP consist of :

• Sean Robinson, Mandolin (Age 15)
• Alexus Lyons, Vocals (Age 16)
• Ben Anderson, Guitar (Age 16)
• Mehgan Lange, Vocals and Fiddle (Age 10)
• Josh Matthews, Guitar (Age 8)

I’ll be playing guitar to support the kids but I’m really proud to say that this is their show, not mine. We had our next to last rehearsal today and it was sounding like a bluegrass band! Pretty cool.

I’m also going to be doing a guitar clinic at 1:00. The clinic is called "How to increase your bluegrass vocabulary" The title comes from something that John Moore said in a clinic I went to. He said "When I’m playing I’m not thinking of every single note that I’m playing just as when I’m talking I don’t have to think of every word in the sentence. I just have a concept of what I want to say and then I say it. When I’m soloing it’s sort of the same thing. I know where I want the solo to go and I play it but I’m not planning out every single note."

So I thought "Well that’s great John, we would all like to solo as easily as we speak. But how do you get to that point?"

Well I ended up developing a practice technique where I think of individual licks and phrases as my vocabulary words. I then specifially practice moving from one riff to another in a completly composed fashion (Not at all improvised) and from that I end up increasing my vocabulary enough that when I’m actually soloing I have this vast selection of "words" of riffs to pull from.

In my clinic I’ll be providing handouts with examples of riffs and how to build solos from them. I hope to see you there.

AND THEN, as if I’m not busy enough, I’ll be leading a slow jam at 5:00 at the bluegrass festival.

And speaking of slow jam. We’ll be having a slow jam at Music & More at 7:30pm this Tuesday. It should be fun.

This story is from the [/music/playing] department
permanent link

---

Wed, 12 Jul 2006

Oh my gosh, I’m a jazz musician (again)

After the Mandolin Symposium frustration and the subsequent fallout I’ve actually found myself not even wanting to play the instrument. So I found myself playing guitar this week.

Actually, I play guitar quite a bit, but mostly as a music teacher. While I love teaching music and watching my students improve I find that I’m not playing the things that I want to play. Also, after teaching all day I really don’t feel like going home to practice. So my students are getting better but my personal chops are getting rusty.

In any case I picked up my old Ibanez MC300 (a truly wonderful instrument) and an ancient copy of “Modern Chord Progressions” and went out on the patio and started to woodshed. I don’t know what happened but these new, weird chords were just making sense today. All of a sudden I was playing the Allan Holdsworth version of a I VI II V progression. It was wonderful.

It’s been a while since playing music has pulled me out of a blue funk. But boy, am I glad that the music is still there in my when I need it.

By the way, many years ago when I was just a young guitar player my teacher and I use to freak out over Ted Green’s books “Chord Chemistry” and “Modern Chord Progressions”. We always referred to them as “Chord Catastrophe” and “Modern Chord Obsessions”.

Hey, it was hilarious at the time. Oh yeah, that was the 70’s. Never Mind.

By The Way My brother Kevin has a blog as well. There are a couple of mp3’s he’s made of fake news reports that are hilarious. Go check it out.

This story is from the [/music/playing] department
permanent link

---