dr_dave
Forum Replies Created
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Freight Train is a great challenge. I’m sure you’ll do fine. It’s one of the few finger style tunes from the Vault that I ever learned (easy version, but I embellish it a little bit) and I still play it once in a while. I guess I’ll need to chip away at some more of those finger style tunes.
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Great win! Can you share more details about the song and the chord?
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One compelling feature of these fiddle tunes like Whiskey Before Breakfast is that they lend to so many variations on the theme. They’ve been around so long and have touched so many artists (and listeners) lives. Many artists have put their own spin on them or improvised over them. There seems to be no end to what some talented players and arrangers are able to do with them. In that regard, they are a lot like jazz.
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Aargh! Frustrating site. It either posts 2 copies of the photo or none at all.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by dr_dave.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by
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Thanks Guy. Great to see you yesterday at the VWA. Thanks for all you do with the hosting and for noticing I was playing a different box than I usually use. The reason I was using the travel guitar and the reason I was late getting to the VWA is the little guy in the photo – our youngest grandson, Dominic. (Oops – not strictly guitar-related, but still very important.)
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Wow!! I really admires Marty’s guitar work, but with Beth’s vocals, this really rocks. I have to confess, though, that every time I see the title of this post, I think of a completely different song that I actually use for my phone’s ring tone:
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Sorry you had to compose it a second time. I also lost a couple posts, but fortunately I had composed it elsewhere and therefore it wasn’t so onerous re-creating my post. Several others had that same experience, and that’s probably what inspired me to compose my story in an app where I was less likely to lose it.
Congrats on getting it posted.
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It does look like everyone is having a good time! Great win.
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That’s such a great story, Carol!
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Thanks! To be fair, I was about 95% done with this when I set it as one of my goals for the next 90 days. I was pretty familiar with all but one of the songs already, and that last one “came under the fingers” pretty quickly, most likely because of all the small wins I had learning the other songs over the last 3-1/2 years. The goal therefore sounds bigger than it really is, but it certainly is a nice milestone in my journey.
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Thanks Michelle. I guess every one of the songs is a small win in a way. You’re right that collectively it seems like a lot, but really it’s just a series of small wins. I attribute it to being in TAC for nearly 4 years.
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Thanks Fly. I don’t do anything to memorize them other than play them a lot when I’m first learning them. I need to play them so many times to get fluid that I just reach a point where I don’t need the music anymore. When I get away from a particular arrangement for a while, I need to refresh a bit but it comes back pretty quickly. The muscle memory is deep-rooted, I guess.
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Thanks J.Humble. I must have played Red Haired Boy thousands of times. I have an interesting story about that tune. I went to a beginner bluegrass jam one time and that was one of the pieces the leaders were teaching. I think it was my first exposure to it, and although I had been learning guitar for a while, I played it miserably – way below what I believe my ability level was. I think a big part of it was being nervous in a new group of people – “outsider” syndrome, if you will. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to ever go to that jam again. I played that song so many times over the next two or four weeks (can’t remember if they met bi-weekly or monthly), and I still was not able to play it a whole lot better the next time I went. That was a piece that I played many times almost every night for months. I still don’t play it as well as I want.
That baritone uke sounds like fun. I have only a soprano uke. Some day maybe I’ll get some other voices – a concert, a tenor and a baritone, not necessarily in that order.
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I think memorization really comes from repetition. I played every one of these songs many times over and over until I got to the point where I know the melodies well. At some point, the fingers just seem to know where to find the notes without any conscious thought.
Marquita, you’re definitely doing great. You probably realize I was playing for a few years before I joined TAC. Even so, the first few flat-picking tunes took me quite a while to learn. I learned them in sections, “chunking them down” as Tony calls it. After about 6 or 8 months of that, I found I was able to learn new songs much more quickly. In fact, there were several of these Song Vault tunes that I recorded and posted with an hour or two of the first time I looked at them. I’m pretty good at reading music and the tabs really help me learn quickly.
I have noticed some other people learn finger-picking tunes much faster than I do. My time with them will hopefully come. Overall, I’m really pleased with the progress I’ve made at TAC, but as for just about everyone else I know, it comes one small win at a time. Being retired, I spend a lot more time on the guitar than many people can. I am very lucky in that regard, but others are fortunate in the regard that they have started their guitar journeys long before they reached retirement age. Hopefully they will be lucky enough to enjoy as much string time as I do when they reach that point.
Keep workin those open mics. They are helping me tremendously, and that’s probably true for you too.