Every now and again a website or magazine asks me to write an article. Last month, Dutch Website Onder Invloed celebrated it’s 5th birthday with a PDF magazine and asked me to write about a musical influence; I chose skiffle music. You can download the PDF of the magazine from the Onder Invloed website:
Here’s a slightly longer version of the article than appeared in the magazine:
Following on from the 12 bar blues post earlier this week, Here’s some blues backing tracks in 3 different keys to practise your chops against:
12 Bar Blues in E backing track
12 Bar Blues in A backing track
12 Bar Blues in G backing track
Chord Sequences – All tracks have a 2 bar intro
E: E/E/E/E A: A/A/A/A G: G/G/G/G
A/ A/ E/E D/ D/ A/A C/ C/ G/G
B7/A/E/B7 E7/D/A/E7 D7/C/G/D7
This is a beginners guide to blues guitar. There are many forms of blues including the 8 bar (Key to the Hughway, Trouble in Mind), and 16 bar formats (Summertime, I’m your Hoochie Coochie Man), and the 12 bar blues. The 12 bar blues is almost certainly the most common form of blues, a music form that can be traced back to the late 19th century. Blues has its roots in Africa, although it is a quinticensually American music form which has many regional variations including, but not limited to Chicago blues, piedmont blues and mississippi delta blues. Musicians best known for piedmont blues include blind boy fuller, blind willie mctell, and possibly the best known sonny terry and brownie McGhee, with the style characterised by syncopated (meaning the emphasis is moved to between the beats) melody produced by playing the melody with the right and fingers while the right hand thumb keeps the beat.
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As well as guitar, I also play mandolin and 5 string banjo, and, from guitarists, these often inspire a question along the lines of….how easy / hard is it to play the banjo / mandolin compared to the guitar. This isn’t actually that easy to answer as there are a couple of different things involved, but the bottom line is that if you can play the guitar a bit, then the finger movements needed to play banjo or mandolin shouldn’t be too difficult. What might be more tricky is to try not to play them like a guitar.
There are a lot of good resources out there on the web just now which make the job of learning a new song or technique a lot easier than in days gone by where you would have the song on a cassette (remember those) and rewind a 5 second section over and over or keep dropping the needle onto a section of a record trying to decode what was being played.
As it says on the tin…..my favourite sites either dedicated to or featuring a lot f content about mandolin playing and technique. I think anyone interested in the mandolin will enjoy these sites. The internet is a big place, so please let me know of ay other great sites out there that I may have missed:
Nigel Gatherer – www.nigelgatherer/mando.html
A good couple of years ago, I blogged about a couple of banjo websites that I’d found really useful and entertaining. The plan at the time was to do an overview of the music sites that I’ve found most useful, and heres the first one. These are my favourite sites, and theres no criteria apart from I like them, but please let me know if i’ve left anything out. So in absoutely no particular order, here are my favourite banjo websites:
Having just been asked to transcribe a Christmas song I previously didnt know existed (Christmas Time by the Darkness), I was having a cup of coffee thinking about these songs. Most of the usual suspects had ceased to classed as music after many years of being shoved down our ears in supermarkets and shopping centres….so where are all the new Christmas songs? Well, I think there are a lot of them, but its very difficult for new songs to break through without advetising budgets equal to the size of a small countries economy.
Anyway, to redress to balance here’s one from the Porch Song Anthology:
The Musicians Guide – videos and guides on marketing, performing and other aspects of the music biz
Tremendous record…I’ve listened to it 5 times in 3 days. I cant even remember the last time I listened to a record this much, and I never thought I would do it again, but there you go! Anna Calvi’s website
