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New Year 2019! 

It's amazing how many different people you get to meet and work with on a given year. I have been grateful for the clients I have had over the years, and the amazing venues and locations I have been able to play. I often feel like a short order cook as a musician, given that I have to adjust my repertoire for different kinds of gigs. This has helped me play many different kinds of gigs, and broadened my horizons musically. I look back at last year and see all the new material I learned and feel I need to spend more time on working on my own original compositions. Given today's music environment, playing covers of well known pieces of music pays the bills, and I don't necessarily like to change a good thing. I think of all the arrangements I made, including recording many rhythm guitar parts in my looper pedal. The amount of work it takes to learn and keep up 7-8 hours of repertoire is truly incredible. With that said, I hope to at least start spending more time on original works. I will continue my thoughts in another blog. Excited for the new and existing clients that I will get to work with this year. Until than, have a happy 2019, and I hope to see you around town!

 

 

Memorizing music - no more flying sheet music!  

I have recently been working on new repertoire for my various gigs I have been playing and will continue to play this year. While I could spend my practice time writing new pieces, I find it not worth the effort lately when so many great pieces have been written. I recently discovered a work by a living guitar great Gary Ryan named "Hot Club Francais." It is truly a great work, which sounds like you are sitting in a café in Paris on a spring or summer afternoon. I received the transcription for my Birthday last week, and much to my surprise, I have the whole thing memorized. 
While I understand not everyone can memorize music so easily, for some reason I have never had a problem with the process. There are a lot of musicians who stick to reading sheet music, and never memorize anything. While there is certainly nothing wrong with this approach, I find it easiest to memorize as many pieces as possible, particularly during wedding season, when any gust over 10 miles per hour can wreak havoc on your sheet music. I remember one time I was playing a piece of music at a wedding that I had not yet memorized, and I was near the Mississippi river, when a gust of wind ripped the sheet music off and would have gone down the river if it wasn't for the braveness of someone attending the wedding that chased it down. Luckily for me, my memory kicked in, and I was able to continue uninterrupted. This was my primary reason for trying my best to memorize every piece, no matter how long it took. 
My approach is usually to listen to the piece of music as many times as possible to get a feel for what the composer had in mind, and start getting those notes stuck in my head (that is of course after I panic briefly looking at the notes, as is totally human and normal).  From there I look at the score, and start putting the notes on the page in my head, doing a mental preview. Usually after a while I then pick up the guitar and start slowly, finding sections of the piece, and putting an alphabetic letter next to the section and really getting it down, until I can play it 5 times in a row without mistake. Next, I simple start playing the sections and repeating. 
The brain needs rest to process what it has learned, so I usually do this for days at a time, depending on the difficulty of the piece, letting a few good nights sleep do the magic. I always make sure to listen to the piece of music and look at the sheet music again, until I'm confident I have every note down. The most rewarding part of this process is when you can play without the score anywhere near you. I'm sure everyone has a different approach, but this has worked wonders for me, as I have around 7 hours of repertoire memorized, and continue to add to the repertoire all the time. I like my approach, lest any wind gust ever take my sheet music for a ride!

Guitar Reveries CD Release Concert 

I have spent a considerable amount of time working on my newest album "Guitar Reveries." It is always difficult picking pieces to put on the album with such a large selection of pieces to choose from. My previous album's mostly focused on classical pieces that fit a specific geographic area (Sounds Of Europe, Latin American Guitar Legends). I wanted to create an album that combined classical pieces with contemporary pieces from many different areas ie Spain, Brazil, France, America, etc. The result is an album that will please many a listener.
The pieces on Guitar Reveries are connected by a deep nostalgia, and filled with romantic charm. 
A piece that I enjoyed recording was Dilermando Reis's "Valsa da Despedida" (Farewell Waltz). This is a piece he recorded for Brazilian radio, possibly in the late 60's. His arrangement was taken from the Scottish folk song "Auld Lang Syne" and is most often heard at the turn of the New Year around the world. This may be the first transcription and recording of Dilermando's arrangement. I remember learning the piece on an afternoon I had open before a wedding, which I would play later that same day as the bridal party wanted romantic Latin and Spanish music. The original recording by Dilermando sounds very poor, with a few sections briefly cut out. I think it may be the most beautiful piece ever played on guitar. 
 The combination of classical guitar favorites like Asturias, Capricho Catalan, Lagrima, Andaluza, with contemporary favorites like Can't Help Falling In Love, La Vie en Rose, What A Wonderful World, to a modern day acoustic guitar arrangement of Baby, I Love Your Way, the album is truly diverse.

Many of the pieces I have included have become popular staples in my gigging repertoire, and it will be a real pleasure to play these pieces at my next concert at Studio Z  in St. Paul on Friday, November 4th. I hope to see you there to celebrate the release of this album!

Concert info - Get your tickets here!

Purchase Cd's/Mp3's through my website here!

Album also available on I-Tunes

Back to the Future day -10/21/15 (worlds collide) 

Alright, I just started this makeshift blog a few weeks ago, so I thought I would post something important from a month ago. My favorite movie as a kid was "Back to the Future Two" and obviously the first and third edition's were close behind. I actually started playing guitar because I thought Michael J. Fox as "Marty" from Back to The Future was really cool. Riding around town on his skateboard, and hanging out with "The Doc" while discovering how to travel through time without disrupting the "space time continuum"  while jamming on guitar from time to time seemed like a great way to live your life!
As a guitarist nowadays, if I were to put "inspired to learn guitar from Marty McFly from Back to The Future" in a bio, I  would probably be laughed at and  would struggle to be taken even remotely seriously. In my defense, kids are highly impressionable, and I couldn't help but have a "hip" role model to look up to.  With that said, that's why I have this blog, so I can keep it real with you all. 
On a side note, while I initially wanted to learn how to play Chopin tunes as a classical pianist, the guitar was a more interesting option, as all my favorite bands had at the time (Nirvana, Metallica, The Beatles, Oasis, etc) had guitar's blaring out of both ends of the headphones on their recordings. Of course Marty McFly was pretty hip as well, so I just HAD to learn how to play the guitar. 
I basically listened to the radio from the age of 5 though-out my childhood and adolescence non-stop. Hits from the 50-70's on the old "Kool 108" were a favorite of mine, as well as the alternative music of the 90's that I really miss hearing on today's radio. Needless to say, radio and Back to the Future have always had a special place in my heart. 
For those of you who are not aware of what "Back to the Future Day" entails, it is the day that Doc, Marty, and Jennifer traveled to October 21st, 2015  from the year 1985. 
With that said, it was a great day on "Back to the Future" day this year (10/21/15) when both of my past world's collided. 99.5 Classical MPR played my recording of "Julia Florida" by Agustin Barrios from my newest album "Latin American Guitar Legends." I had a concert on the 22nd of October, so MPR sent some loving by playing the track! I have had my recordings played on MPR before, and it's always a pleasure, even though I've only heard myself on there while my music was being played twice. If I could time travel back to the year 1995 when I first picked up a guitar and told my "1995 self" that I would have my music played on high frequency FM radio on "Back to the Future Day" I would have probably said something along the lines of "wow, that's heavy." 

First blog 11/10/15 

Thought it would be a nice addition to the website to start a blog. Here I will find time to talk about music, life, and ideas. Feel free to chip in, and send good vibrations across the inter-webs and google machines.