RIP John King

Mr. King resurrected a guitar technique from the time of Bach to play a piece that was almost certainly never before tried on a ukulele, Bach’s Partita No. 3, and went on to play other difficult classical works with dazzling mastery.
...
The foundation of Mr. King’s achievement was reviving a Baroque guitar technique and applying it to the ukulele. The technique involves playing each succeeding note in a melodic line on a different string. The ukulele — which is tuned so that the four strings go not from the lowest to the highest note but instead run G, C, E, A — turns out to be great for doing this. (An illustration of ukulele tuning can be found at theuke.com.) The result is a bell-like quality of sound in which individual notes over-ring one another, producing an effect that some compare to a harp or harpsichord.

from NY Times Obituary, By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: April 27, 2009

The Necessary becomes Magic

I've written about the Bach Lute prelude BWV999 before. It is a really nice piece, suitable for beginners yet has depth that suited Segovia and many other masters.
I have been playing it almost every day that I pick up the guitar, often more than once. It is a perfect warm up exercise. In the past, I used it for speed. Lately I play it more slowly, eliciting as nice a plucky tone as one can get from a 12-string.

Today I'd like to concentrate on one of the early difficulties in this piece, measure 15. As you can see below, it requires holding the lowest f while barring the top 3 courses of the 5th fret. This is difficult on a classical guitar, very difficult on a 12-string guitar, and now, for me with arthritis or something in my left hand, almost impossible.

New Internet Connection

The S.O. and I decided to upgrade our connection to teh Internets, so we ordered some giant T3 tubes. Like everything in life, there is both good and bad in the new high speed connections.

First, the Good:

Uploading and downloading is just incredibly fast. You can pirate music that won't be released until next year. And you can probably download more pørn than actually exists on the internets!