Music bits and pieces

I haven’t put a whole lot of time into the guitar lately, because I’ve been madly trying to finish Eli’s rug, but I got more into it over the weekend, just using a book I found in the pocket of the guitar case. It’s called A Tune a Day, and once upon a time I had A Tune a Day for the flute.

So I was busy working through all these exercises and learning notes and fingers and all. But then my flatmate, who is very musically talented (on keys), came home on Saturday evening and looked at me plucking out songs on the guitar and says “what are you doing?”, to which I replied that I was just trying to learn guitar from this book. So she takes a look at the book, shakes her head and says “my brother plays guitar for GH (think local Christian band) and he couldn’t play that”. Now I’m sure her brother could play it, but what she was referring to was the fact that I seemed to have set off on the path of trying to teach myself classical guitar, and was sitting there attempting to pluck out each note of a song. Then she says “church music isn’t like that” and goes to her room to get me a chord book. I have no real aspirations of playing in church, but am aiming for something more like a sing-a-long around the campfire, and I did know that most people who play guitar only play chords, I just thought I’d come to that when I’d learnt all these notes. But then I had a look at her chord music and thought “hallelujah – you mean I only have to move my fingers every bar or so and not for every note?”.

So now I don’t really know what I am doing. I quite like the classical method, and I’m pretty chuffed that I can play a few songs (very simple songs, very slowly and painfully) but I will probably veer off more into learning the chords at this point in time, though having only learnt woodwind in the past chords are actually less familiar to me.

For other things musical, I went to the launch of the album of Con Campbell’s new jazz group last night, a merging of Sydney and Melbourne jazz musicians, called Transit. I have to confess that, while I like jazz, it's not usually my favourite kind of music, because I find it’s often just not very melodious. But last night it was. You can look at the songs on their album, which actually includes a lot of hymns – some obvious, some a lot more subtle – here.