@clayville - blog

Roots and Threads - @clayville

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:08:20 -0400

I've been thinking, as always, about pulling the threads, digging down to the roots of my own musical interests and passions, prompted most recently by some of Vesa's terrific style recombinations and Rapster's evident fidelity to being open to new styles, genres, and tools. These guys and a host of others have wildly ecclectic tastes and a fearless drive to experiment. They're also blessed with a broad knowledge of what music is and can be -- art, self-expression, emotional amplifier, medicine, metaphor, inspiration... and a few hundred other functions and rewards that may suit a particular time or place or person better that those. They've cultivated what I think of as Great Ears, which I'm betting grew out of a lifetime of listening carefully to everything they can get their hands on, seeing the connections, filing the sounds away consciously and unconsciously.

I'm not trying to get all mystical here really... my own love of making music came out of a desire to sound as much as I could like the Rolling Stones as a teenager. Noticing that someone named Willie Dixon wrote Little Red Rooster, i started pulling my first threads more than thirty years ago and ever since have dug down through the roots of rock to the blues and beyond. Eventually I dug back to the very earliest recordings, where the lines between between traditions blur. Blues and Jazz are one. Blues and Country are one. Cajun, Acadian, Celtic and more are one. Skip James, Hank Williams and hard labor chain gang hollers on the Alan Lomax field recordings are one. Hopi drummers and Highlanders in New Guinea banging on logs. Joni and Mingus. Johnny Cash and Beck. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello -- not just collaborators, but soul mates deep inside. Heck, Forest Pygmy singing sounds a whole lot like Tuvan throat singers. And on and on...

It truly is a wonderfful thing that the music of solitary musicians, crafting alone for personal enjoyment and fulfillment -- alongside the music of humanity's heritage -- can be heard and enjoyed on a global basis from right there where you're sitting.

Pull the threads. Listen up, ya'll.

Open G tuning is a blast - @clayville

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:08:35 -0400

After faking Stones tunes in standard tuning for most of my life I've finally spent a few weeks woodshedding in Open G tuning. Taking off the 6th string so the root is on the bottom for these simple fingerings is a key component of the Keith Richards sound. A capo on the 4th fret is pretty typical too. Tumbling Dice has to be one of the most fun guitar tunes to play off all time (at least for me) once you get the hang of it. But once you take Keith's advice that "all you need is five strings, three fingers and one arsehole" dozens of Stones riffs practically fall out of the guitar. A song I've posted, "Black-n-Blue" uses a very basic Open g riff.

I get around - @clayville

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:15:09 -0500

I've been adding guitar to backing tracks created by friends or to my own online for about four years now. Haven't played in a band in 30 years -- the road not taken, way back when.

I think of myself as a mostly self-taught blues player, but tackle almost anything that catches my interest: blues, blues rock, funk, folk or jazz (though I don't really have the chops or the theory knowledge to be very sophisticated about it).

My strengths, to the extent that there are any, are in knowing what NOT to play, more than what TO play -- and a fair amount of experience now getting my guitar to sound the way I want it to.

Anyway...