I have seen this on Strat-o-Blogster, I don’t usually post things that other fellow bloggers have already posted but this is WILD!! I just couldn’t keep myself from posting this here! I watched it over and over again!!!

Later edit: I have thought about this kid singing here, I have seen a lot of children singing, it is our nature I guess and at that age we probably have little to no embarrassment constraints, so a lot of children sing, but this one has a ear for it.

Am I right? 

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This morning I have stumbled upon this video on YouTube, a video of Les Paul playing the guitar. Man, as one of the people commenting there said, he is so ahead of his time with those licks!! I can only imagine him with a distorted heavy sound and with long hair playing in a rock band!!

And this commercial here made my day…”it’s on your guitar”!!!

How cool is that?!

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Hi!

This is my second post in the series of my 6 months target of reaching 5000 visitors per day. The first one is here. Pretty bold, I know, but you need to aim high to reach high!

So, since yesterday it was February 18th, this is the big day of sharing my thoughts on how the first month has been and in the end of this post, the real stats. I must confess it was a fire and ice month, because I had ups and downs, I had days where my heart jumped with joy and boring days when nothing happened.

I have thought a bit about sharing the stats here, since if you are big and brave and share your stats, people will go wow!! But if you are small and just starting to grow and publish your stats, well, people may just find that they have higher traffic than you and may say, well, he’s not worth looking to, I have nothing to learn, he’s too small! Well, I will take my chances, I believe in being open and sharing information.

So…

What I have done this month

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I remember while in high school, our English teacher, a totally original and kind of rebel teacher used to try to teach us English in various ways. One of these ways was gathering us to watch a movie that had no subtitle, for ex I remember watching like this Dickens’ Great expectations. There were many ways she tried to teach some stubborn teenagers a language that will later serve us in so many unexpected ways.

So, once she brought a cassette player and she played 2 songs asking us to reproduce those songs after that hour. Nobody managed to reproduce those songs, if I well remember but those songs followed me to this day!

I didn’t know who was singing there and I couldn’t tell the lyrics either, I only remembered a few of them that didn’t make sense in English, the melody and the warm feeling they started in me each time they came to my mind.

It was I think 5 years later when I identified the first song, after searching it on the internet for those 2-3 verses I remembered and with a little help from some of my friends who listened me singing them. The song was Those were the days of Mary Hopkins, a song that will always hunt my memories and will always bring me back to high school, not for the meaning of the lyrics but because my history with this song started there.

The second song I hasn’t been able to identify..until today and this is the very reason for which I have started this post.I remembered a slow ballad on some acoustic guitar and some mirror lyrics kind of a “Jonny was the girl who lived next door/Jimmy was the boy…16/24″…well,that started the confusion…

I didn’t manage to find that song cause the name was not Johnny, even my ears seemed very convinced, something about that Johnny name who was supposed to be a girl told me I was going wrong…until today.

Searching again for those lyrics, I have actually found that the name is not Johnny, but…Joni and the song is Don’t cry,Joni of Conway Twitty and seems to have been a hit around Philippines at one moment. Well, I haven’t been there so I hope to be excused for not knowing it.

I just want to say I feel like I have conquered my personal Himalaya peak today, after I have found and listened again this song that brings back so many memories and feelings. Here’s the song and I hope you will enjoy it, even it may not mean anything to you.

By the way, Steluta Istratescu is the name of my high school English teacher and I feel that I owe her a lot.Beside the English language, back then I didn’t have a proper guitar but I was involved in a lot of musical things there, so she gave me an acoustic guitar that was my acoustic instrument of choice for more than 10 years.She is a Lady and a great teacher and if by any chance she’ll get to read this blog, PLEASE EXCUSE MY ENGLISH!!!

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This weekend I was invited by Costin, long time friend and lead singer in the same band as me (he comments from time to time here on this blog under the name of axlfuckingrose), to a private party with some of his friends. I didn’t know what to expect, but he told me it involves playing the guitar so I brought my acoustic guitar with me, in case I would need it.

Well, seems that it was some kind of getting together of old friends that didn’t see each other for some time now. Everything happened at the headquarters of a private company that one of his friends owns. This friend had the pleasure of throwing this party for his friends in this building he arranged so they could spend the weekends there: gym upstairs and table tennis and offices downstairs.

To my surprise, he had also the pleasure of buying some instruments so they could all jam there during weekends: one electric guitar, one bass guitar, 2 combos, 2 microphones, 2 bongos and a mini PA system(with mixer, power speakers, etc), so, beside a drum kit, you had there everything you wanted in order to jam along!!

Since they were all bought from Harley Benton, it looked kind in a promotional party: the brand could have been seen everywhere and the instruments had the price stamp still hanging on. I remember at one moment somebody came with a cutter to cut down the price stamps (while I was playing) and I couldn’t understand in the beginning why is he coming with that cutter to me?!

During a lot of hours, we sang, played the guitar and bass, ate grilled steaks, drank beer and had a good time, considering that we stopped seeing like this since a while.

At the end of the party I could tell you the following:

• I’m rusty!
• Rocking with the band is way harder than solo rehearsing, doh!
• Nothing removes stress better than jamming and a beer
• Too much Vodka is bad for music! (one guy there put one microphone inside his mouth while singing so you can imagine…)

I remember we played a lot of Romanian rock songs and also songs like Wonderful tonight, Don’t cry, Knocking on heavens doors, some Take that, etc. One thing I can’t understand is why it is so hard to remember songs you used to know by heart. We used to sing these songs at almost every party and they came so naturally to us. Not this time…Well, time goes by, right?

After getting home I have payed some thinking about the party and what lies behind it. You know, I would also love to afford the luxury of arranging a private club for my friends to meet them there every weekend. It would be great! Don’t you think?

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Today, Jon posted on his blog a review of a Doolin guitar, a very beautiful one, that I really liked. So I followed the link in order to see more. To my surprise, I have seen an other acoustic guitar that made me very curious, due to the particular design. I am speaking about Justin King’s Double-Neck Doolin acoustic guitar (kind of a long name for a strange guitar).

So, my first reaction was WTF? How can you play such a guitar? Is it for an ambidextrous guitar player? I thought that he’ll turn the guitar around and play it the other side, cause I couldn’t see any other possibility of playing it since the distance between the two necks is so small so you could never slip your hand between those 2 necks! I didn’t know Justin King plays both hands (you know what I mean)!!

Well, the video here cleared it all and revealed an other extreme playing technique of an amazing guitar player on a strange guitar!

Enjoy!

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Of course, I had to say it!

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you guitar geeks out there!!!

I hope you have prepared a good, lovely tune for your wife/girlfriend to impress her this evening, after she supported you in so many long hours rehearsing/repeating the same senseless licks over and over again!!!

Later edit: I think I won’t post anything else for today, I have decided to forget about my computer until tomorrow morning. At least for one night! It’s Valentine’s day, right?

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What I am going to say now stayed in my head for a lot of years, even it may seem of low importance for some. Acoustic guitar players, however, may know better what I mean.

I happen to  see a very good electric guitar player playing the acoustic guitar in an one on one session. Very good electric guitar player, classy shredder, out of my reach, he took the acoustic guitar, (a large and beautiful sounding box) and started playing.

You know what? Something didn’t sound right, he was playing it like an electric guitar!

Even perfectly played from a technical point of view, the notes were too sharp and sparky, taking away exactly the feeling that acoustic guitars give. The guitar didn’t sound the way it should, the notes didn’t work well  together.

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Until today I didn’t know about Jet Lag Gemini but I have seen an article in the local newspaper about them and I got curious.

The reason is that the bass and the guitar players are Romanians, they are brothers, and sons of a quite famous Romanian writer(for some political reasons also), Paul Gheorghiu, who is now established in USA from 1990 I think.

I didn’t know this part(with the rock-and-roll brothers) but I must admit I love to find out such news, they make me feel proud I am Romanian. Our government promotion strategy to the “outside world” for the last 18-19 years was to complain, show what we don’t have and show dark “realities” of Romania, “realities” that exist worldwide in a more extreme way, without making a big fuss about them. But we do. It’s our country branding strategy. We are stupid.

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I was writing a post about moods in playing the guitar but suddenly a question hit me: what is more difficult to do from the point of view of transmitting emotions?

1) (To transmit emotions to the public) playing some predefined notes in a classical piece of music?

2) Or (to transmit emotions to the public in) solo improvisations?

To argument a bit my problem, I have started stating that improvising is way harder than playing predefined notes(as in classical guitar) because you need to find those particular notes, licks that touch audience’s soul. When you play classical music, well, somebody has already told you which are the notes!!

But then I have thought about how difficult it must be for a classical guitar player to not be able to break the constraints of the imposed form of music he/she is playing and still create his own style and transmit emotions….

I think that classical musicians need to be way more creative in finding nuances, subtle variations to the music EVERY OTHER classical musician play in order to transmit. That somehow turned upside down my belief that mine is bigger than yours…whatever that means…

Your call?

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