Tips, Techniques, Examples about my favorite musical instrument, the Twelve-String Guitar.

If you play guitar check out Playing Technique, or Strings / Setup. There are also some interesting posts about guitars at, you guessed it, Guitars.

If you want to spread your musical talents around, you will find some good info at Recording.

Marketing - meh - I'm probably the world's best bad example. Although you could find funny stuff there.

I've made some music videos through the years, and you can find them and other interesting music at Music I Like, Music I Play.

Monday, November 30, 2009

12-string Christmas Tunes

dadgadjohn has a nice one; Scottish lilt and all capoed up.

Update: Pachelbel's Canon sounds beautiful on a 12-string guitar. Allan Alexander's arrangement is awesome, and totally playable in D-tuning. It's hidden here as "Canon in D" in The Baroque Gig Book for Guitar

Lilypond - parallel music


Lilypond remains my preferred method for generating scores. It has tons of features, most of which I don't need, but I overlooked this one that goes back at least to version 2.8 - an easy way to notate multiple voices.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

More Lightnin'

I think a Lightnin' Hopkins album was the first blues record I ever purchased. The collection of songs, unavailable now, remains one of the strongest blues statements I have ever heard. I must admit to stealing a lot of the licks in those songs.

This summer I found a 5 CD set of his Dallas recordings from 1946 to 1952. Most of the tunes from that old album were in this set, and it's been enjoyable listening to these pieces again. He is a powerful artist and poet. Some of his pieces send chills down my spine: Mr. Tom Moore's Farm and Penitentiary Blues in particular.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Karmic Ubuntu

The latest Linux distributed by Ubuntu - 9.10 was released a few days ago, and like an idiot that never learns caution, I upgraded. It was so easy...just click the upgrade button...too hard to resist.

But after a day or two trying to get sound working correctly, I've back ported to the previous version. Support for M-Audio Delta and Audiophile card is broken, at least for my setup, in the new distro. Some people have gotten things working, but their fixes don't work for me, and even if they did, the mods to config files seem to go beyond what a simple music person should have to do. It's a shame that the sound support seems to be worse. Sound problems were the reason I switched to Ubuntu from Fedora.