Music

Those words paint such a visual image for me. One thing I have really gotten into in the last couple of years is playing guitar. I first started playing around Thanksgiving of 2005. The Christmas before we bought our son a drum set. He rarely played it, but when his friends visited, they all played it with much gusto. I also bought an inexpensive violin for them to play (off Ebay) and then bought a cheap Mexican guitar, again, off Ebay. It came with steel strings, was hard to fret and I just stuck it in the corner near the drum set.

Now, I started playing violin in the sixth grade, but stopped in the 10th grade, sometime in 1978. I wanted to play sports (should have stuck with violin). After that, I never played anything until November 2005.

Then one day, I heard "Wish You Were Here" playing on the radio and thought, "You know, I want to learn how to play that." That album is my favorite. I got that little guitar, went up to H&H music (now bankrupt and gone), bought some nylon strings, a tuner, some picks, came home and Googled "guitar lessons". I found a great beginner site at guitar.about.com, hosted by Dan Cross. I was off to the races. So it had some fret buzz? No problem.

"Wish You Were Here" was a bit to hard for me at first. While looking for easy to play and learn stuff, I came across "Welcome to the Machine". Much easier. Four chords and you are playing. I listened to the song and strumed along. The hard part was the sliding run up the D string about midway through the song. I still have not perfected it, but you can sure tell what I am playing.

Learning the strings was hard for me. I have trouble with guitar theory (well, music theory in general). I made up the line Every Angry Dog Gets Bit Eventually to help me remember the strings, from top to bottom.

I absolutely love playing - very relaxing, soothing and just fun. I particularly like the style of David Gilmour from the group "Pink Floyd".

Making My First Music

Here are some of my early attempts at recording and mixing some music. These were recorded sometime in September of 2006 in my studio (well, our computer room / office). I used Audacity to record and mix the music and did it all very high-tech. I plugged a 40 year old microphone I had from my childhood into my cheap sound card mic jack, ran Audacity, messed with the mic settings, laid the mic on the desktop and hit record and played. I found some inexpensive sound effects on the web and downloaded them, using them for ambience.

For Windows™ Media Player™ (click here for For QuickTime™ versions)

Wish You Were Here - my first attempt at recording music

The Little Lone Wolf - recorded with my son