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SeilerBird

SeilerBird

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Joined
Feb 25, 2012
Posts
18,156
Location
St Cloud Florida USA
For the last two years I have been on a campaign to replace all my musical instruments. I sold both of my guitars last year because I really did not like them. I have had my eye on a Koa Les Paul for a long time but I finally settled on a Haze Les Paul copy that was $500 cheaper and just as nice. It was shipped to me from Australia but I am sure it is a Chinese made guitar. There is no nation listed on the guitar. I have had it for a week now and I am very happy with my purchase. It looks stunning and plays like a dream. The best part is that it stays in tune real well and I have yet to do anything to increase it's ability to stay in tune.

I bought my first ukulele in 2016 and I basically stopped playing guitar at that time. So when I got the guitar and tried to play it it felt like a live snake in my hands, very foreign. I thought it would take me at least a week to have the guitar start to feel natural in my hands. Fortunately it felt just fine the second day. The only real problem is my muscle memory has gone to hell. I am actually having to relearn Stairway to Heaven, which used to be my party piece. I learned it when it first came out and played it a million times. No thinking was involved. Then I decided to learn it on the ukulele and I had to unlearn the muscle memory I had for the song and relearn it. Now I must relearn the guitar part. Hopefully I will be able to learn it good enough on both instruments to make a multi-track video.
 

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Congratulations Tom. You played guitar for so many years that I'm sure muscle memory will return quickly for you, and I'm looking forward to watching that video.

I wasn't familiar with the history, but found this interesting Wiki article:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson_Les_Paul
 
Yes, the Les Paul guitar has an amazing history. It was not the first solid body electric guitar as so many have claimed. The Broadcaster was released in 1950 and quickly changed to the Telecaster in 1951. The LP came out in 1952 and the Stratocaster was released in 1954. The Stratocaster and the Les Paul are the two standard guitars in the industry. Fender was aimed at the mass market and the LP was aimed at the high end market which did not exist in the 50s. So the LP was discontinued in the late 50s and redesigned into the SG. Then guitar gods like Eric Clapton discovered that a 50s LP plugged into a Marshall stack provided incredible tone. By the end of the 60s there was so much demand for 50s LPs that Gibson started making them again. What I find hard to believe is how heavy this thing is. It feels like it is filled with cement.

BTW Tom, it was your post about a Martin 12 string last month that got me looking at guitars again. I soon realized I am getting old and better get one now before my muscle memory leaves me completely.
 
realized I am getting old and better get one now before my muscle memory leaves me completely.
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:) That's how I felt when I bought the Martin, and when I previously bought my Sage fly rod.
 
Stairway to Heaven?  Nooooooooooooo!  Tell me it isn?t so!

Everybody knows Free Bird is THE most requested song ever.  Followed by Sweet Home Alabama.  ;D

I?ve got my hands full remembering how to play stuff I composed.  I lost Stairway a long time ago.  Now all I need to do is get Lawrence Juber to play some of my stuff. ;)

Maybe I could learn Baby Shark?  All 3 notes of it. ( if you?re not familiar with Baby Shark I urge you to not look it up and especially not to listen to it!)
 
I can just about manage to climb the stairway, but not play it  :(
 
I played Free Bird in the last band I was in. But it is not a very good song to play all by yourself whereas Stairway sounds great with one player. I know a lot of people groan over Stairway but I am not playing it for them. I love the song and I love playing it. We played a mashup of Stairway and the Gilligan's Island Theme.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_vZF6_ChElTQUNZSzBhTDZsS0E/view?usp=sharing
 
Some friends of mine, ?The Quitters? mash it up with that and the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore show.  Great fun watching the audience reactions.

I was in a band that mashed it up with The Days of ?49.  As I recall it was a perfect fit.
 
Yep, I loved the mashup for the audience reaction. We usually only played bars so many people were three sheets to the wind. Stairway would start and they would get all excited listening to this long introduction and then when the singer starts singing 'Sit right down and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip.." and they get all confused.
 
I got a real shock today. For the past two weeks I have been practicing And I Love Her by the Beatles every morning. It is one of the first songs I learned to play as a kid because it is so slow and so easy and it contains a lead guitar part I can actually play. But the high point of the song for me is the arpeggios George plays in three different sections. I could play the first one perfectly but the second and the third one was giving me fits. I always screwed up the beginning of each one. I was assuming I was just too lackadaisical since I wasn't watching my fingers. Well this morning I decided to watch my fingers and see why I was screwing it up. I played it over and over and kept getting it wrong. I checked out several videos on how to play the song and they showed the first arpeggios but not the last two. So I checked out some tabs and most tabs only showed the first arpeggio and not the last two. Further searching I finally found a tab that shows all three arpeggios written out and what a shock. I had been playing it wrong all this time. The second and third arpeggios start out on a different chord and are not the same length. The first one is 10 bars long, the second one is 9 bars and the third one is 8 bars. The first one starts on an F#m and then goes to C#m, F#m, C#m, F#m, C#m, A, B7, C#m. The second time it starts on C#m then goes F#m, C#m, F#m, C#m, A, B7, C#m. The third time he goes up one half step and starts on Dm then goes Gm, Dm, Gm, Dm, A#, C7, Dm. They sound very close to each other and since I had no sheet music back then I was just assuming that the second and third time through that he played exactly the same thing. That will teach me not to assume. Now I can't wait to learn the song properly after playing it wrong for so long.

https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/the-beatles-and-i-love-her-tab-s2692t1
 
That's a great song. Haven't tried to play it but, like so many Beatles songs, I can't tighten my pants sufficiently to get my voice up there  :( Thanks for the tab though. 

A couple of months ago I transposed a bunch of songs so I could play them on guitar and have some prayer of singing. A few days ago, I was talking to neighbors in the street and one guy said "hey Tom, you need to sing in a higher register". Duh, I haven't been able to do that since puberty arrived. Meanwhile, given the damage to my vocal chords from surgery a year ago, I'm lucky to be able to talk.
 
8Muddypaws said:
I?ve been intubated  three times in the last few years, that I know of.  No change in my voice that I can attribute to that.  Just age.  It was none too good to begin with.

Seiler, try ?My Valentine? as played by Paul and Eric Clapton.  Interesting modal changes.
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That is beautiful. When Paul started writing songs as a teenager his goal was not to write rock and roll, but to write for the likes of Sinatra. I can easily hear old blue eyes singing this. And the guitar work is awesome. Thanks Mud.
 
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