May 17th-23rd: Sam Should Be At DelFest Right Now…
If it weren’t for Corona Virus, I’d have been making the 2 ½ hour trip down into Cumberland, Maryland for my 3rd year of DelFest, and my 4th year of Academy. But, alas, I sit here, writing up this weeks blog on the porch swing in the beautiful late spring weather. If this is what the rest of the year is gonna look like, it’s going to be a long summer.
This week, I was able to post up my newest Acapella video, featuring my friend Katelynn Casper, from the Baltimore area. She is the fiddle player on my EP I released in January. She responded to a post I made on social media about song requests, and I said “we should do this as an Acapella video!” She was down, and I’m so happy she was-this was probably my favorite thus far. If you haven’t heard the Conway Twitty/Loretta Lynn song “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly,” then there’s a very important part of your life you’re missing. Take the time this week to find it and listen! Thanks again Katelynn-hope we can do it again soon!
While I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, a live video caught my eye-it was a young man, streaming an Artist Takeover session from the Preston-Thompson Guitars page. It was Luke Lovejoy, an Indiana native who competes in a lot of the bigger flat picking comps in the nation. I only caught snippets of the whole video, but from what I saw, I was really impressed. I thought for sure that he had most of his song arrangements worked out-come to find that he actually doesn’t really work up much of the tunes. A lot of them are improvised as he’s playing. Really wicked stuff. So much that I REALLY wanted to know how he plays some of his licks (I heard some diminished stuff, some key change things, chromatic runs, etc. that I’d really like to have.) Therefore, one of my major projects in the coming weeks (probably most of the summer) is to transcribe the songs he played in the video onto paper. Now normally, I don’t transcribe whole songs- it’s overly time-consuming, and if it’s an easy lick that I know where I can place in a song lead of my own, then there’s no need to write it out-just memorize it and move on. Not in this case; some of his runs have very intricate notes, and so there’s a need here to transcribe. I won’t be posting any of my transcripts, because, well, they’re really not my songs to give out. HOWEVER, if you’re feeling like you’re in a bit of a rut, and need something to work on, I’d be happy to give you something wicked to play. Right now, I have a total of two songs worked out on paper, and I’m going to try to extract some phrases I think are really neat, and then continue on with the process. I’ll do my best to keep up with it here!
Finally, as I try to mention every week, I’m still doing Acapella vids and live streams, and I’m always looking for requests, so if you’ve had a certain song stuck in your head that you want to hear, I’d be more than thrilled to give it a whirl-even if I butcher it! 😂 Throw your song requests in the comments below!
Next week is Memorial Day-hopefully, I’ll have something special for y’all! See you then!!