Thursdays are when I like to talk about matters of taste. However, today's intended topic is still being researched so you'll have to a wait a week. Instead today I want to talk more about music.
During the past few months I've been trying to get better at playing the blues and boogie woogie. As an idea of what I'm thinking of, two of my five random songs are blues from Dr. John. Just keep refreshing the page until they come up. Right now I find the blues hard, and boogie woogie to be impossible played fast. A part of the problem is just trying to find some sheet music to play. The local music stores and library do not have blues books and while you can find them easily enough online, I don't like buying new books without getting to see them first. Then I resorted to youtube, where there are a ton of vidoes of people playing blues and boogie and woogie, and some have tutorials. One day I came across a twelve year old who was bangin' away and joy of joys he gave the name of the book he learned from. Having heard the music and liking it I bought the book, which is printed in Germany. The language is in German, but musical tabulature is international so I can still play the songs even though I can't read anything.
When I got the book I found it to be great. It has 13 songs, and, if I could read it, a bunch of explanatory pages that give some tutorials on how to play the songs. What I find hard about this type of music are the triplets. Triplets are hard because they don't follow the beat of the rest of the song. So if you have to play some triplets in your right hand, your left hand will also be playing notes that don't fall inline with them. I just can't do it. One tutorial I read said in order to get used to playing triplets first get your left hand to the point where you can no longer think about it and then juggle two balls in your right hand. I guess it's saying that you need to have the left hand be all muscle memory so that you can entirely focus on the triplets of the right hand. Linus and Lucy actually does this (see Angelica Houston in 3D), but I can only do it because I've been playing it since elementary school. And yes, that left hand is all muscle memory. Well that's great, but I'm old now and have no patience to learn. I want to be good and I want to be good now.
Anyway, like I said, I like the book despite the triplets. As I was practicing though, I found that I didn't know a lot of the techniques. Blues and boogie woogie make use of a lot of trills and other things that I'm not too familiar with and I was having difficultly knowing if I was playing them correctly. Fortunately the book came with a CD that has the all the songs played in full. The nice thing about this is that you can play the CD and read along with the sheet music. But I found that the music is played so quick that I couldn't keep up! My brain couldn't process it all quick enough. Sort of like this crazy asian guy. Speaking of which, I'd like to see one of those 'Guitar Hero' stars try that out. Anyway, listening to this CD I had to figure out where the author was by hearing him start to play the high notes. Then I could say "oh, he must be overhere now." In fact on one of the songs, when I just sit and listen, I have a hard time believing only two hands are being used. After awhile I got better at it, but I realized I had a lot of work cut out for me.
Nevertheless, I thought it would be fun to post another video of my latest attempts at blues. It's just a small lick I found from a book that I tried to embellish with some trills and other neat sounding things. It'd be cool if I could incorporate it into a song, but it sort of just stands alone as is. Maybe it'd be good a introduction to get people's attention. Anyway, it's short but sweet and fun to play. I also decided to dress up a bit, to try and create the blusey look.
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