Playing Ukes With The Ladies For Valentines Day

I love getting together to play ukuleles with this group of fun people. For Valentines Day we met as we usually do at our local toy store and sang torch songs together. Bella loves going there too, especially since the place doubles as an ice cream shop (she's fond of vanilla). Look for her. She's partially obscured. I'm in the santa hat. (For Valentines Day ???)

Dog On It at the DB

 

We're Dog On It, Johny McDonald, Ken Cawley, and myself. And we've been asked to play at the Drunk Brush on Fridays recently. Some good ol' fun going on! Trying new stuff, new sounds as well as some old ones, of course. Why Dog On It? Because between Johny and I, we own 7 dogs.

The illustration I got from DALL-E, after a lot of prompting: Illustration of an Australian Shepherd dog sitting on a pile of broken instruments, including drums, guitars, fiddles, etc.

Barky's World at PHAF '22

 It's been 3 long years since the last Plumas Homegrown Americana Festival. One year was canceled due to Covid, the next due to the Dixie Fire. This year it was hot but we pulled it off and it was fun! I have my own section of the festival with a stage as well as several pop-up tents for work/play shops.

Rickety Bridge on Barky's Stage

Barky's Jam-O-Rama

Guitar fretboard

Must ... not ... let ... this ... go!

I haven't been working on learning the fretboard for months. Probably gone backward as a result. 

Arrrrgh - can't let that happen.

What Is Music?

We know that sound results from the vibrations of air molecules moving through the air to our eardrums, that the speed of those vibrations is referred to as frequency, measured in Hertz, and that pitch is the relative highness or lowness of a sound. But what is music?

I love this quote by T Bone Burnett, who I admire in spades. It’s a beautiful and elemental way to think about music.


“I view all instruments as drums and all music-making as tribal. A violin is just a drum with some strings attached, but it’s still a resonating chamber you attack with a bow or your fingers. A flute is a drum with holes in it that you blow through to make different pitches with that resonating chamber you attack with your breath. A band is, ‘Okay, we’re a tribe now. We’re going to be in this village right now and we’re going to tell people in the next village what’s happening over here.’ That’s all it is, really.”

Search for:

Church Modes (DPL - MAL)

Learning the names of the modes (why are they sometimes called the church modes?).

So weird.

Making a smart flashcard deck. DPLMAL is a mnemonic.

Project #8 (Part One): Scales on guitar

Again, weird that I haven't learned this by now. So, here we go. First I want to learn the Pentatonic Scales all over the neck.

7/14/18
Another long term project! Rather than pentatonic, I'm thinking of learning the major scale first, reasoning that all other scales can be derived from it. So many different approaches CAGED, 3 notes per string, etc.