Will

Nice piece. I'd like to hear it on solo piano. I would put some more thought into the name though.

There was a girl who played piano at my church when I was a kid who my dad used to refer to as "Elbows". Tis all I'm saying on the subject.

A simple underwear joke has you bothered? Really? Now that's what I call "suspect".

If any of you young guys never saw Johnny Hodges play sax, let me just say that NOBODY could play a ballad like Johnny could. This man didn't play notes, he caressed them. I learned so much from this guy. It doesn't matter what instrument you play., you can learn something from Johnny Hodges. He was mesmerizing to me when I was young and still is.

Yeah, I saw her on YT videos a few years ago and thought she was great. Having said that, I don't care for many UK comedians. According to my Ancestry DNA test (which I just got the results of yesterday), I'm 56% British and 19% Scots-Irish (blimey I'm a limey!), but I guess the gene that makes you like UK comedy skipped me. Most of my favorite writers are from the British Isles--GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, Arthur C Clarke, Susanna Clarke, on and on, and I like their subtle humor, but the stand-up guys just don't do it for me. With Americans, Steven Wright is still my favorite.

I hate that activation crap that's so common nowadays. For one thing, it forces you to have an internet connection to use the software. That's like forcing you to own a refrigerator and pay an electric bill before you can buy cold cuts. If I want to keep my cold cuts in a spring house out back instead, that should be my business. Also, look at video guys who have to do location recording in jungles or anyplace away from civilization where even cell phones won't work. If they're editing dailies on a laptop that craps out and they have to reinstall their backup, how are they going to get their software reactivated if they can't even get a satellite signal? This activation garbage should be outlawed. It never should have been allowed to begin with. I blame Microsoft. They were the first to require software activation widespread I believe.

I agree. I'm just saying that tone makes you play a certain way quite often. People may love it or hate it, but if they love it, they'll grow to expect it. It can be an opportunity or a curse. Did you ever see that video of Hank Williams Sn & Jn singing "Tear In My Beer"? That's one of the few old / new video / song combos I've seen that worked well in my opinion.

Dat was good too!

My grandma had a canal that ran behind her house when I was a kid, and she lived across the street from us. Whenever one of her many cats started acting up and ticked me off, I'd toss it in the canal. Behavior modification ghetto style.

Sober ain't no way to listen to my singing son.

See, I knew this would work for you. There must be a hundred different ways to arrange this song, all of them equally good. I don't think any of us will ever beat Bernadette's version though. It was perfection. I cam only hope to do one that won't get me boo'ed off the stage. There were always four verses in this song. Some people take one out when they sing it. I don't know why. I think all the verses are beautiful. Word is that Williams bought them from some guy in Kentucky though.

Sounds fine Pete. You're a great player.

I used a pair of Oktava MK 012 mics in a simple X pattern aimed at the neck-body joint. I just went through a cheap Behringer mixer and into my ancient Echo MIA sound card. The reverb was added at the mixer during recording using an old Alesis Microverb. I never use compression on nylon string guitars. They just don't benefit from it. I may have done some EQ'ing. If I did, it wasn't very much. These old Yamaha classical guitars from the 70's just record great no matter what mic you use. I read somewhere that James Burton, despite having tons of guitars, still uses an old 70's Yamaha steel string in the studio because it records so darn well. I can believe it.

Yeah, that was very good. Great mixing chops.

Did Steve Vai guest on that track, or are you just that good?

If we were going to have another song forum, I would rather it be focused on live singer-songwriter stuff where people play live whether in the studio or at a gig and maybe post a video or something. Let's face it, the only way 99% of are ever going to make money in music these days is by playing live, even if it's just live on YouTube. Look at fretkillrlives. He's got 16,000 subscribers just from playing on YouTube. (He had an older channel that had considerably more!) So I'm thinking that a forum based on live playing might be a good idea and good practice for most of us. It would also be good for us to focus on helping each other out by promoting one another's channels. Just a thought. And yes, we could do it all from the same forum, but I think it would be easier to keep posts in perspective if there was another forum.

By the way, I heard Bernadette Peters do a beautiful slow version of this song on the Tonight Show decades ago, and all these years I never forgot it. It's what made me want to try and do something with the song. Someone uploaded her singing it at YT. If you haven't heard it, it's a treat.

I almost PM'ed you to see if you'd want to sing it. I knew I couldn't get it right in this key, and your high lonesome voice would be perfect for this song. You should come up with a rendition of it yourself sometime.

But it's still a grand piano. Try switching him to an upright and see how much he still sounds like himself. Roy Buchanan switched to Les Pauls briefly. People actually boo'ed him. There are certain sounds you can coax from a Tele that you can't get with any other guitar. No one ever played a Tele because of it's great sustain. Far from it. It's got a strangled pizzicato sort of sound, almost banjo-like in a way. I'm a guitar player. I can tell you that when you pick up certain guitars, their distinctive sounds will make you play in different ways. You approach each of them differently. Well, maybe not all of them, but many of them. But a Les Paul is a Les Paul is a Les Paul. There will be subtle differences between them, but you won't approach one differently than another providing they each have the same hardware etc. When Buchanan went to the Les Paul, he may have played the same notes, but it didn't have the same effect. He just didn't sound like himself anymore. If you're in a bar band where people may want you to sound like the records you're covering, then you gotta do what you gotta do. Sure. One thing I've learned from playing at fingerpicking festivals is that there's a terrific guitar player in every town, almost every neighborhood. Then you're gonna hate this:

Some of it is, yes.

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry Unfortunately, there are a lot of open chords on guitar that you just can't do in a different key, so I couldn't play this in a lower key, and it's really too high for me to sing. One day I'd like to get a baritone guitar just for these situations. So just consider this a rehearsal recording to get the arrangement down. It's a bit sloppy, but it gets the thought across, and that's all that matters right now. When I get a baritone guitar, I'll worry then about doing a proper recording. And I'll probably do away that solo guitar part. It's just not working. The acoustic guitar is straight to the board with an LR Baggs Anthem pickup system. Doesn't sound quite as nice as my external mics, but it's not bad at all.

Did anybody see that film--The Legend of 1900? I saw it when someone posted it on YT. It may still be there if you search for it. Anyhow, it was about a guy who was reported to be the world's greatest pianist, but in order to see or hear him you had to buy a ticket to ride the cruise ship he worked on. He grew-up on the ship and never left it even when it docked. He refused to make records (actually he did make one single begrudgingly, but only a couple of people ever heard it) or play on the radio. His reasoning was, why should people want to come to his gigs if they can hear him at home? But what was really intriguing was the fact that he was a great improviser, making up whole tunes on the spot, great tunes that left people in awe, but unless you were on-board the ship the night he played them, you would never hear them, and they were of course only played once. Kind of cool when you think about it. Who needs records? What a novel attitude. Here's a neat scene where Jelly Roll Morton comes to the ship and challenges him to a piano duel:

Actually, he did go the Synclavier route for a while during the 80's along with various synth guitars such as the Synthaxe. His main point was that he thought people shouldn't be using synths to emulate other instruments so much as they should be focusing on creating new sounds altogether like Allan Holdsworth did. Personally, I think Pat Metheny is still the only synth guitarist to do anything worthwhile, and there are two reasons for that. 1) He stuck to using the Roland G-303/GR-300, which in my opinion is still the only guitar synth system that truly tracks just as if you were playing a regular guitar. It's basically glitch free. 2) He took one sound (a synth horn patch) and made it his own much the way Stevie Wonder took the Clavinet and made it his signature sound. Some rockabilly drummers are famous for playing a certain old model of Gretsch drums. Look at Tommy Emanuel and that maple back Maton. That's his sound. You see the same thing the way some electric guitarists are known for a certain sound like Hendrix, Trower, and Eric Johnson playing Strats through Marshalls, and Phil Keaggy and Joe Walsh playing Les Pauls through Fender Twins, or Roy Buchanan playing a Telecaster through a Vibrolux. They used other gear on occasion, but they took those sounds and made them their own. I think the majority of synth players would be better off doing the same--taking just one or two synth sounds, make them their signature sound, and learn to play the devil out of them. That's something people won't forget. If you just play a bunch of generic synth sounds, especially if all they do is emulate other instruments, I won't say you can't get famous that way, but I think it's obviously much harder to do. PS, I realize some guys are using synths and samplers to emulate real instruments in the studio in order to fake a classical orchestra simply because they can't afford to hire a real one. That's a whole different thing. Anyway, I'm not downing what other people do. I'm just offering another perspective because I don't hear anyone else mentioning it.

I have. CDBaby was the best back then. They had a good brick & mortar distribution deal. Don't know who people use nowadays though. Anyway, there were very few sales online when I used them. You could sell a bunch more CD's at your gigs than anywhere else. However, I understand that young people don't buy many CD's these days. About the only way to make money now is through the gigs themselves, which thankfully, pay much better than they used to. You still need to have albums for sale though just so you can get reviews and some good press. I haven't done this in a long time though, so I'm looking forward to the answers you get here because I hope to be playing out again in the spring or summer. I should say that one thing I didn't like about CDBaby is that they had no way to actually remove product once you had it for sale. That is, you can stop selling a CD, but it's still listed at places like Amazon even though it may not be for sale anymore. Why they don't pull the listings is beyond me.

Believe me, if you dedicate a song to her, she'll make herself known with a loud "Who-hoo!" She may even lift her skirt and clear up that little mystery if she's had a few drinks. (You're welcome.)