The Garden

A picture of part of our garden taken last week.

Right now I'm jammin' on O'ahu-boy, "Jammin' Jake Shimabukuro" - ukulele artist extraordinaire. He plays mostly instrumental ukulele-ized arrangements of some older types of popular secular tunes. Funny - on some of his tunes, Yngwie Malmsteen's influence is very apparent. Early on, Yngwie was one of my influences, too. That is, until I changed somewhere along the road of style. Changed into what? I don't know. Certainly, I've slowed down. But I don't play anything anymore. Haven't played guitar for over a year and a half. But I still think about it a lot, tho. Usually that's when the change of style takes place - after an absence and then a re-approach from a different perspective. I was entering the realm of jazz & differing modalities when I left off. Just knocking on the door, actually. Not exactly true jazz, but some of its theory & I wanted to add some of that to bits of my music.

Tempting is the idea of going back & taking a Nugent approach to making new music. To me that's when you throw the idea of applying something you've learned out the door & go forward with what you already know so well, as simple as it may be. Rather than impress the listener with theoretical novelties, it's all just simple shit played with feel and an "in your face" attitude. But ANYBODY can play that way and to me it's redundant and not very appealing. Nah, that's not for me. It's fun to jam that way sometimes but I feel I'm not moving forward if I'm not learning something new to get me a step ahead of the next guy. I guess I could still be pretty good.

Funny how some of the best stuff to listen to is really simply arranged with simple chords & structure. I guess that's why the poppy stuff is so poppy. It's simple. People get the melody in their head & it's happy & easy to enjoy.

Shania Twain's husband, Mutt Lange, also wrote most of Def Leppard's songs & a lot of tunes for other artists & he basically fools around, comes up with a neat little "hooky" progression (usually a chorus) & creatively fits everything around that catchy little thing that hooks right into the listener.

Maybe, if I ever get back to playing again, I'll do a little bit of everything.