Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

What songs are you folks currently working on to the betterment of your self?

I am starting to seriously put some effort into Song To John as a guitarist friend and I occasionally kind of screw around with this song.




You?

That's a great album Jeff. I am currently working on the score for the wizard of oz- playing bass in the pit band. I take these projects on to better my sight reading skills.

I am not a reader so I am using Transcribe! and listening and slowing down the song to pick up the details which go by pretty quickly in those runs between the verses. Figuring out ways to finger the runs are key but I am, mostly, coming up with something that is not too awkward for some of them.

Thanks for asking Jeff!

It's a tough question because there is repertoire to get together for up coming gigs, including a symphony concert, a musical, a jazz gig, and a folkloric Latin gig. These events all take place within the next three weeks. Not to mention mowing the lawn.

Listening to some of the great examples of original music elsewhere on this forum, it is so inspiring that my head is about to explode. I do have a couple of my own things to work out but I love and can't neglect this drive to play the above mentioned stuff that has been providing me a living for the past thirty years.

I'm pulling together a project for the community college where I teach. This will hopefully result in a video that will have me playing on the RIC, thereby allowing it to be permissible for posting elsewhere on this forum. We'll soon see how that shapes up. People are on board, but we all have busy schedules.

I turn 58 on Sunday. It's going to be a great year.

This Rickenbacker forum is a fantastic place.

Kiddwad57 wrote:I turn 58 on Sunday. It's going to be a great year.

The 13th?

Born on a Friday.

Thursday for me.

Tomorrow?

Say, is it possible to upload an mp4 video? On the music forum? I've got a nice one with a really wonderful singer, but it's jazz and I'm on the string bass. Maybe it isn't relevant for this particular world, and that's okay.

I have been spending a lot of time working on "What Was I Thinking" by 311. I'm really not a 311 fan, but a friend of mine likes them and I enjoy jamming with him no matter what we play.

It is taking time getting it down because I am having to learn to double-thumb for the first time. My thumb is all red sore.

Race With the Devil On Spanish Highway by Al Di Miola is a really good tune to work your left hand out on. It's played within the first four frets and requires some real dexterity to master due to the distance between frets.

A few Cover tunes my pop band are working up curently include "it gets better" by the Preatures, (Fun bass line in that one!),"Feeling OK" by Best Coast,"Medicine" by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.
These are all relatively simple,upbeat vocal pop songs. I'm trying to convince my bandmates to cover "smartest monkeys" by XTC,but that seems to be an uphill sell....

Over the past year, I've been getting my finger picking chops back up. All that work paid off when I took third in the Kansas State Fiddling & Picking Championship finger style guitar contest on August 23.

So now there's a CD that has been in the works for many months. It will feature some chiming Rickenbacker 12 string, of course. When that will be finished, I have no idea.

And then, I thought I'd do a one-off recording project as a Christmas present for my mom, who hasn't heard me play guitar in a long time.

Getty Township is coming off summer hiatus. So I gotta get that stuff back up. And then there's the usual round of weekly students and their lessons.

JimK

As an exercise in my transition to playing more fretless (or playing with less frets), I've been trying to get on top of "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes". The combination of the deceptively simple main riff, huge double stops slides, the fast mini-riff and the slap and pop chorus are providing quite a challenge. I'm finding the dead notes in the chorus a total bear to get down, and my accuracy on the double stops is probably less than stellar. More grist for the mill.....

Also accepted a dare from our sax player to double the horns for the last four bars of the main riff for Ornithology (which we play as an outro for How High the Moon), but, in one of my more idiotic moments, I decided to learn the entire riff. Getting the part down has been tough, but what worries me is that once I'm in "riff mode", the changes fly right out of my head - the riff comes to me as one big chunk of music with no regard to the harmonic context. Does anyone else have this problem?

Have any of you fretless people practiced using a drone? I've been getting into it with my string bass for a short while. Scales at this point, although I understand that some folks improvise against them which would also work well with the fretted. Working with the drone has really (quickly) helped my intonation on the string bass, which made me start thinking about doing the same with the ol' fretless.

Anyway, there're free sites that have your standard electronic sounding drones, but there is also a site called itablapro from which you can download apps with varying features. Those cost around $15, but I'm thinking it might be worth it.

For the fretless, to work with a drone, I'm pulling out a Berklee scale and arpeggio book by Viola and Applebaum (I think that's right) to start in on that again. I've got a student who seems up to the task, so I'd better get back into it!

For years I've been participating in a weekly jam session with some buddies. We have a list of standards we call from. I've been doing my best to memorize as many as possible. The chords, not the melodies, although I've gotten a few of those together as well. It provides a safe environment to work on my soloing too. That's what I'll be doing late Friday afternoon!

(Shameless plug...If you care to hear/see a bit of my jazz string bass playing tune to: Rodgers and Hart, Siri Vik, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9TkZ5nYPhI I Didn't Know What Time It Was, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUfQ7-fwn7o It Never Entered My Mind , and/or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTI4U9CuVFo You Took Advantage of Me. I'm proud to have been invited to work with the musicians involved with that project.)

aceonbass wrote:Race With the Devil On Spanish Highway by Al Di Miola is a really good tune to work your left hand out on. It's played within the first four frets and requires some real dexterity to master due to the distance between frets.

Oh good call Dane - Anthony Jackson on bass.