New Post Tomorrow And New Stuff Today!

It’s not the planet…

Tomorrow we’re going to return to some of the basics of entry (if you dare!) into the music business: copyrights, publishing administration, distribution, record labels, etc. and finish up our initial look at the subject, though I’m sure we’ll return many times in the future.

I talked a little previously about how I wanted this newsletter to go in the future, with more interviews and guest writers along with our regular topics. Right on time, the folks at SubStack helped out with some suggestions for writers, and some of those were so good I’m putting them into practice starting today. I’ll leave the “Link To An Expert” feature on the Friday main post, but since this teaser Thursday post is generally shorter, I’ll include some new features. These may vary or rotate among different weeks’ posts, but for today I’m adding 1. A link to a YouTube music video with a brief analysis of what I see, 2. A link to an interesting background article or video, usually of an influential band or individual relative to acoustic guitar music, the instrument itself or playing acoustic guitar, 3. Other interesting, fun and especially offbeat or obscure “stuff”. Hope you enjoy and let me know in the comments if there’s something in particular you’d like to see.

For today:

Mark Bryan on acoustic - this YouTube video is a live performance by Hootie and The Blowfish from 2005 covering Tom Waits’ fabulous “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You”. I focused on Mark Bryan, one of the founding members of Hootie and the fabulous acoustic he plays in the solo intro. It looks like a custom Guild maple quilt top. Absolutely gorgeous. A couple of notes: Tom Waits original version was written in DMaj, and used only 3 chords, DMaj, GMaj, and AMaj - the I-IV -V progression of the key of DMaj. Mark Bryan is playing the chords CMaj, FMaj, GMaj - the I-IV-V of the key of CMaj. Since that key is 2 semitones lower in pitch than DMaj, it’s not practical to use a capo (you’d have to capo waaay down the fretboard). So, the song is just transposed to CMaj - basically a different root chord, but with the same I-IV-V intervals. Why? Probably because vocalist Darius Rucker preferred to sing in CMaj, as a better fit for his voice. Remember, playing as an instrumentalist in a band, our job is to play well and support the vocalist! Note also that he doesn’t play the FMaj as a barre chord, and he can do that because he’s fingerpicking the arpeggio of that chord rather than strumming across the strings. That requires knowing exactly where your picking hand is over the strings to avoid the B and high E strings.

Next is a YouTube video by my favorite of all time guitarist/singer/songwriter/performer Mark Knopfler - very cool - talking about guitars!! It speaks for itself, and I only note that not once does he barre a chord, even though he plays a lot of them!!!

Finally, for fun (and reader Mike - you know who you are!) - a Rolling Stone article on how the band Led Zeppelin came to be!!

Bonus Round: A lovely cover for St. Patrick’s Day, by a female singer with a beautiful voice who recently passed away - a sad loss for us all!

See you tomorrow!!

Cheers and keep playing!!

Michael Acoustic