What's happening February 2014

Merry happy new year...hmm, okay that's all over and done with, I'm a bit late, apologies. Feels like I haven't said anything for a while. I had nearly 5 weeks off over the Chrissy holidays, did a lot around the house, and "general stuff". Not so much guitar. But that can only happen for so long... m u s t. . . p l a y. . .

In a completely out of character move (and dropping what I was working on) I have been arranging a brand spanking now song. As in, it was only aired for the first time LESS THAN SIX MONTHS AGO! In fact, when I started it, it had only been out THREE MONTHS! I know, I know, where is Jawmunji and what have you done with him!?

Sadly for 95% percent of my audience you will never have heard of Eskimo Joe, a band formed just down the road from me in Fremantle Western Australia. Quite a number of hits in the past decade, alternative rock style. In September 2013 they put out a new single "Got What You Need", a well crafted pop song, nearly synth pop but I'll give them a break. Singer Kavyen smashes it out in falsetto which is good fun and not normally their style. It got a bit of airplay around November and they were playing it as an acoustic number at seemingly every morning show/muso show that screens in Australia. Considering how hard it was pushed (as part of their new album) and that it is indeed a fine pop song, I'm surprised it didn't make much of a dent on the charts. Perhaps because it was crowd sourced and self-labeled...conspiracy detection!

Anyway, it jumped out of the radio and into my brain and onto the guitar. The falsetto fits nice and high above what is essentially just an E-A chord progression, so it made me do new interesting things. I kept to a fairly standard pattern, bass/flick, you've heard it all before. But flying up to the high notes off beat and returning to low E and A bass notes has proven challenging.  I like challenging

It's tabbed out, and mostly ready to record but it might be another month or two. So I just sat out the back then "in the cool of the evening time" (song lyrics :)) and played it nice'n'slow to the backdrop of crickets and occasional rumble of the wind in the mic (sorry).

Other stuff still happening, but for now let me leave you with the recording, go look for the official video clip on youtube if you are so inclined. My playing is mediocre, quite a few mistakes, but I think you'll get where I'm coming from. Must perfect my slides up to high notes! :)

Play to your own style/laziness

I have mentioned in the past that tabs are good for you where I talked about how to digest and play a tab.  I've seen a couple of YouTube messages recently asking me about my latest tabs, and if they are all there, that some notes seemed to be missing, that sort of thing. My answer - "play to your own style/laziness".

On the other end of the scale, some people ask me why I don't include chords.  Mostly I just forget to add them and really I should always remember to add them, they are pretty important.  Not so much that it shows you what chords to strum (you can get chord/lyric sheets anywhere, much easier for following) - but again it helps you to play to your own style/laziness.

What do I mean "play to your own style/laziness"?

If you had a note-for-note tab transcription of a really stylish player like say Tommy Emmanuel (and I've seen those types of tabs) then you will notice be a lot of notes.  And even as you try to follow timings, and picking patterns, an attempt to perfectly emulate his style, you will struggle and it will take a long time.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of hard work, but tabs should be a guide.  Your ear will hear the subtleties and inflections when you listen to the recording, trying to track it note for note is not a good use of your time.

Maybe there will be little sections that a really accurate tab is important, but generally, you only need enough notes (or chords!) to get a feel for what is going on, and then develop it into something that you can play.  That is, into your style.

And your style will be as lazy as you want it to be.  If you are note-for-note learning then you are pushing your style out to match the arrangers style.  That's fine but it would be better to find the happy medium between playing the piece note-for-note and how you would play it if you arranged it yourself...that is, make it as lazy as you want it to be!

Drop notes, add notes, do everything as a tremolo, convert it to alternating bass.  Only play the bass note on beat 1.  Play a one fifth down bass note before each in-chord bass note.  Flick chord fragments on the 2nd and 4th beat.  Make it your own, take it (only) as far as you like.  I still believe, as a hobbyist,  it is better to be able to play 10 good pieces of music than 1 excellent piece of music.  Life is short, perfection is bad.  But don't be too lazy, always challenge yourself just a little bit, always move forward.

The other side of my "is the tab all there?" question is when I've only included the skeleton of the song.  I've noticed some songs only have maybe 20 bars of actual "information".  It might be a 5 minute song, but it is the same 20 bars of information played over and over, in different orders, with perhaps some subtle differences (that your ear will notice and you can improvise).  All you need is that 20 bars of information and you can work out the rest!  Imagine, just one piece of paper for a whole song!  You can make your own structure of verse/chorus/verse/chorus once you know what they are.  A bridge or a solo adds more information, but perhaps you don't even want to weigh yourself down with that.
 
It annoys me to see two pages of a tab where there are maybe 4 notes difference between them.  That sort of over-tabbing looks daunting when you first pick it up, and really, it is making stuff more complex than it needs be.  I'm all about simplification, about giving enough to get you started along the road, and letting you choose your own destination.  There will be times when you need to be 100% spoon fed, (in fact some of my tabs are indeed like that), but sometimes I'm going to give you a rod and teach you how to fish.  And sometimes, you should go make your own fishing rod...

JAW

Youtube stats 2013

Ah YouTube, what a great platform. It has greatly helped my guitar enthusiasm and performance. Without it, I would probably still be like I was during my twenties - maybe play a few hours a month, when I could be bothered. If you aren't playing regularly for a reason - that is, for an audience, could be a gig, church, guitar teacher, something that forces you to play and practise regularly - then YouTube can fill that space.

I first posted a video on YouTube as part of a discussion on a forum about fingerstyle guitar. A guy inspired me to record a video. But how was I going to send a video - too big for email, too tedious with ftp! He said "Use that new YouTube thing". I'd never heard of it, it had only been around for nearly a year when I created an account.

It wasn't until Sept 2007 that they started recording proper statistics. I do love a good statistic. Here is a simplified lifetime statistic for my Jawmunji channel:

The graph shows number of views per month, each dot is a month. May 2010 was the all time high just short of 200,000 views in that month. All time highest day ever, 7,344.

But the graph shows a rise and fall. Currently I'm down to half of the views from where I started; and at 10% of my peak, and it looks like it is continuing to fall. Why? I have a few ideas:

1. In the early days, there weren't many fingerstyle guitarists on YouTube. Now every second fingerstyle guitarist has videos on YouTube, so the viewers have a lot more videos to choose from. Supply and demand.
2. You can see that more than a third of my views come from "Canon in D", so that one pretty much dictates my channel performance. Over the years, YouTube has featured that video, which drew far more views. None of my videos get featured anymore, see point 1.
3. Most of my views come from YouTube/Google searches, so as each time they update search algorithms, it can cause a lot more views, or a lot less.
4. I don't post as much now as did originally. YouTube "rewards" frequent posters, "engagement" is what's in, "social networking" is everything and that drives search results.
5. YouTube is changing. It's more like watching a TV station than watching random videos. Since people can now upload videos as long as they like, it means that the total amount of time spent by people watching is no longer 20 x 2 minute videos, it is 2 x 20 minute videos. Less clicks, less "channel surfing". This change will be to increase income through advertising. YouTube/Google model people's behaviour, and tailor YouTube to drive (and reward) what works best for them. After all, YouTube is a business, that Google paid a lot for.
6. YouTube isn't all there is. There are plenty of other places to find video. YouTube is the biggest (at 82% of the market Google tells me), so this probably isn't a major factor.

Getting views was never a big driver for me; I have watched it increase and decrease over the years with fascination, but the reality is that the conversations I have with just a few people are far more valuable to me than thousands of silent views. I did "monetise" my videos a while back, and I kind of regret it now. For the $20 a month I get, it's not worth making people watch advertising to see it. Too late now, I can't go back.

It's been an interesting project, and one that I will continue. I've got several songs I'm planning to record soon, watch this space.

I'm not exactly sure why I wrote article, perhaps it's just my love for statistics, and analysis of them :) But if you had ever wondered how my Jawmunji YouTube stats went over the years, now you know!

JAW

Jawmunji Wordle 2013

Since one of my readers did a Wordle for me a few years ago, every now and then I like to do another one. It's both interesting and amusing. I try to keep my writings here interesting and amusing - my aim is always that you will go away either entertained, or having learnt something, or even better, both :)

I love the "just play guitar" main words, particularly with a little "well" in front of it. Although, I use "just" too much in my writing...hmm...must remember to back off on that.

I'm obviously a positive sort of chap too: "good, great, right, well, like, really, much". You can tell what this blog is about: "play, guitar, playing, songs, sound, hear, bass, music, video." There's little phrase gems hidden about too: "still got years need songs"..."now music stuff really".

"Song fingerstyle something good!"

JAW

Hey man, tune your guitar!

I get that every couple of months.  Someone on my youtube channel will tell me my guitar is out of tune.  I listen back, umm, yeah, maybe?  Ever so slightly?  One or two of my videos are indeed slightly out of tune, but the recent ones are not.

Here's my thoughts on the matter.

Some people have an _amazing_ ear for pitch.  A _really amazing_ ear.  My ear is pretty bad so I tune using a pretty accurate digital tuner, and always tune in very carefully before recording.  However, the intonation on the guitar is only so good.  In fact when I was hunting for my Esteve, that was high on my list of what I was looking for in a guitar - good intonation.  I used my tuner to check the intonation on many guitars, and the Esteve is pretty good.  But generally, if you are playing up the fretboard, she's gonna be a bit out of intonation (tune).

Furthermore, when I fret a chord, I'm usually bending the strings out of "the correct place" a small amount.  On unusual shaped stretchy chords I'm bending the strings quite a lot out of the place where they should be to sound in tune.  Even the simple act of fretting distorts the intonation slightly (but guitars do compensate for an amount of fretting intonation).  Not that you or I could hear fretting intonation distortion, but some people can.  It's especially noticeable on nylon because they have lower tension strings.

Even the guitar heating up slightly after me playing it will put it out of tune - you should be constantly adjusting your tuning while playing.  But since I don't have an amazing ear, by the time I notice, my pitch perfect mates were already wincing in pain five minutes ago.

I have developed a very healthy respect for fretless stringed instrument players.  They have to hear the intonation and play to it.  They train their ear.  Us guitarist, well, duh, we ain't so bright, see, we don't need to hear intonation, duh, the frets dun do that for us.  Okay, I'm being a bit harsh there, slide guitarists, even pulling bends, you need to have an ear for pitch, but I think you get what I mean.

The bottom line - no matter how hard I try to have good tuning, there will be a percentage of the population who will cry out at my "terrible tuning".  And they are right.  Luckily, the other percentage of the population and I won't hear it.

(It's all relative though, I have been known in the past to very politely and with great tact mention to players on youtube that perhaps their guitar was a bit out of tune.  For me to notice - that's got to be a long way out of tune.  With that said, my ear for pitch is now a lot better than it used to be.)

JAW

What's happening September 2013

I ran another poll a month or two ago, this time I asked "If Jawmunji made a product it would have to be..." Here are the results, from 37 responses:

54% a music DVD of songs with interesting booklet, tab data and other cool stuff
27% an instructional DVD, c'mon man!
10% an Audio CD of songs with an interesting insert
8%  just high quality 99c downloadable mp3s

There weren't nearly as many voters I would normally have for a monthly poll, less than half. Either the traffic to the site was down, it was a boring question, or a Jawmunji product is not really called for. But hey, I liked the results! A video DVD with cool stuff appeals to me the most and it was the most voted. It would be a large amount of work, but not as large amount of work as an instructional DVD. I didn't mind the idea of an Audio CD, but, they seem to have passed their use-by date. Thanks for confirming the 99c downloadable mp3s though - I don't like that either. One song might be a cash cow for an artist, but the amount of art you are buying might be the tip of the iceberg from that artist. They might have so much to offer, good stuff you'd enjoy, but all you did was download "the most popular song".  Buy the album!

I'm still working away a lot - 2 weeks on site, 1 week in Perth. While in Perth I get the weekends off and only work a 40 hour week, but up here on site I work a 12 hour day 7 days a week. Sure, all my meals are catered for in the mess, my room is regularly cleaned, all I do is work...but I get weary. Hence I haven't been doing as much writing to you as I thought. I'm still playing the '74 Yammy a heap, it's just not "productive" playing. Generally I will sit and just play my regular tunes, most nights with the lads over a few beers. I've done a little bit of working out new tunes - in the pipe I've got "Without You", "Lean On Me", "Bright Side of Life", "Something So Strong", "Bad Moon Rising" all basically ready to record. But I'm not recording while I'm here, and when I'm back in Perth I don't set aside the time to do it either.

Someone commented last month "you should do a Tame Impala cover"...and I youtubed a song of theirs or two, discovered they are a local band, and my favourite genre - psychedelic rock.  Closest sound would be early Beatles and Pink Floyd.  I enjoyed them so much I bought the album and I have listened to it a lot.  I might cover "Only Going Backwards" or "Mind Mischief" to pay homage, it would be lost on 99% of my listeners, so it would have to be a quick and easy cover.  But alongside Dark Side of the Moon (I listen to it about once or twice a month, to keep inspired...as well as "Dub Side of the Moon") it is what I'm listening to.

In fact, what do I listen to?  Kinda nothing.  I'm totally out of touch with modern music, and I don't feel the need to constantly relive the past either.  I'm not a headphones-all-day sort of guy, it just makes me further deaf. I do listen for 70's and 80's music if I'm driving somewhere, songs that I might be able to cover, and I do listen to other fingerstyle guitarist covers, but I'm just not a regular listener.  Does that sound strange?  It does seem a bit rude of me to not pay attention to new music!

Well a quiet What's Happening this time, I do have some stuff in the bag waiting, I just need to get some long term rest so it can come out in flying colours :)

JAW

How have you kept playing guitar for so long?

A good question.  Although it doesn't surprise me when beginners give up playing guitar (another topic), it does surprise me that players who play well, and have done for a long time, give up.  Does it come down to character traits - applicable to more than just playing the guitar - commitment, and persistence?  I think it is more than just that.

There are many things in life that people will do passionately and they won't enjoy it in the slightest, it will be hard work, expensive, painful, but they carry on.  Why?  The satisfaction of completing something challenging.  Doing something not because it is easy, but because it is hard.  There's your commitment and persistence right there.  But hey, those guys who did play for ten years and then stopped, they must have had the commitment and persistence to get that far, right?

Habit.  Ah but aren't we all just creatures of habit?  Once you form a habit, it's hard to break it.  If you have a habit of playing the guitar, then you basically never stop.  And yet, they still do.

Priorities.  For sure, as life progresses you travel through different phases.  Some things are very important, then they aren't so important.  Apparently it takes six weeks to form a habit.  Well, when priorities change, it only takes six weeks to un-form a habit.

I'm going to throw opportunity into the mix.  If playing the guitar is a privilege - it's rare, you don't get to play as much as you would like - for whatever reason - then playing is a tantilising treat you eagerly wait for.  Being able to play as much as you want whenever you want will increase the risk of losing the sense of satisfaction...changing your priorities...and breaking the habit.

I think all these things play a part while traversing your guitar life, but there is something else.  And look, I believe once you are a player, and you've had a taste of all this, you will always be a player.  You might go a few years without playing, but something will come up again and you'll get back into it. That something is...delight.

Yeah, delight.  In all your opportunity, priorities, satisfaction and formed habit, it is delight that rises above it all.  Just when you think you've done it all, you've climbed every mountain, overcome every obsticle, something comes along and blows your mind.  You can't believe you could have possibly missed the song, the technique, the concept, the something - something that simply delights you and you just can't get enough.  You can't stop.  Shifting from delight to delight.

If you are constantly exposing yourself to new avenues of delight, the passion will stay with you.  This is with everything in life.  Seek out delight.  And delight doesn't mean amazement or awesomeness or some huge gratification.  It can mean a hammer-on where you used to to pluck the next note.  I could mean slipping in a 7th on the last beat of the bar instead of staying in the major chord.  Just enjoying a new song that you never even thought about before.

I think I may have just gone all new age hippy on you just then, but The World seems dissatisfied with you just smelling roses.  You aren't living if it's not Bigger and Better.  Well, bugger that :)

Speaking of which, here is my current delight.  Naudo played it years ago, I heard it on the radio last week, decided to transcribe (more or less) Naudo's version, and I'm delighted.  So many "Oh wow!" things that happens in this song, can't believe I didn't tackle it when I first heard Naudo play it.  It's a window into his playing (I can see how he has re-used phrases from other works I have transcribed before) and it's just a really nice song.

Badfinger's "Without You", made famous by Harry Nilssen, and later by Mariah Carey, but let's just stick with Naudos version :)

Apologies about the recording, it was made via my smartphone. And I'm still developing the song, I haven't committed it to muscle memory, and I'm not playing on my normal guitar, and blah blah blah...JAW "warts and all" Munji strikes again, enjoy.