Clearly, I'm a little rusty. Not only did this morning's Letter not go out to everyone; when it did, the new video was not visible yet on Youtube. Hence this correction. If you missed the earlier message, here it is in its entirety, complete with links to the lesson and the tab:
Casa Fretboard did not venture beyond the city limits over the holidays. Well, that's not entirely true; after nearly two weeks on the home front, everyone but yours truly decamped to Houston for a little highbrow/lowbrow action: a day at the Impressionists exhibit, followed by a trip to the Galveston Island amusement park. Left to my own devices, I opted to travel inward, literally and metaphorically – to the heart of darkness that is the Fretboard family garage, which, if it had a Native American name, would be "the structure whose roof is faulty and whose floor cannot be seen, much less traversed by human feet." As I've noted elsewhere, you can fit a lot of stuff in the back of a minivan with the seats folded down, and at least two such rounds of junkola made its way from our cracked and pitted driveway to the local Goodwill. And that's not counting what wound up in the trash and recycling.
You want to know, I'm sure, what prized oddities I turned up on my voyage, what forgotten rarities emerged from the primordial chaos. Highlights: at least three crates of great cds, each begging the question: to be played on what, exactly? A pretty excellent MIT hat, which washed up nicely before I discovered the inner band was completely discolored, hopefully only by mold. A completely intact book of matches from La Boca, the Mexican joint I used to go see my college guitar teacher Tom Ross play at, and which my graduate-student second cousin once archly dismissed as "possibly the least cool place east of the Mississippi."
So, quite a haul. Which I'm hoping at least begins to justify my unannounced and only somewhat intentional month-long communication hiatus. The break was not without its musical pleasures, but I'll elaborate on those in the near future. Meanwhile, I know it's the style to kick off the new year with some kind of razor-sharp advice about practicing and playing your guitar, but, to quote Horace Silver, "I like to be different." So I've decided to keep things understated, and simply point out that I've got a new Youtube lesson posted, which you can of course check out at the link below:
E Blues Chord HitsAs a subscriber, you can download the accompanying tab here:
Get the Tab (no email address required!)More soon,
David
