SSS collaboration! Blue2blue's music and video + my photos

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So a little while back, Blue2Blue made a video with my photos of Yosemite and Sequoia for his mother, who loves Yosemite. He also put his guitar playing to it. I really like what he did, including his guitar playing. I think it came out really well, and I wanted to share it with you.

If this link has a choice, please try and choose the 480px version since it looks much better.

These are the notes that he wrote (the video is actually in two locations on YouTube, as they are on Blue2blue's YouTube channel a well:

Very nice guys.

Breathtaking photos, and the music set the perfect mood.

Best,

Geoff

Love it.

Good stuff.

The guitar style reminds me of Ralph Towner.

NICE,

Lots of Mountains....speaking of Mountain(s)... It sounds like Blue2blue gave more than a passing nod to Leslie West's acoustic song 'To My Friend'....

VERY nicely done, pictures and music. Do I hear shades of Steve Tibbetts in there?

NICE, Lots of Mountains....speaking of Mountain(s)... It sounds like Blue2blue gave more than a passing nod to Leslie West's acoustic song 'To My Friend'....

I'll have to check that out. If it was a DADGAD guitar song, that could have something to do with it, since the tuning I was using for the guitar part (and of course the backwards guitar part which is the main guitar backwards and slipped around until it sounded 'right.' Obviously a highly scientific process with much advance planning ) was DADDAD, with the two 'middle' D's actually the same octave, which provides for some interesting interval work not usually possible but has the drone flavor of the closely related DADGAD.

It's interesting how a guitar tuning can affect so many choices going 'up' through the song's evolving creation. In the Songwriting Forum's most recent Friday Influences Thread (a now-venerable SW Forum institution started by Acoustic Guitar and SW forum stalwart, Stackabones, but recently taken over by Lee Knight, and open to songwriters and the songwriting-curious), I posted vids of five versions of "She Moved Through the Fair," (from Loreena McKennitt, Richard Thompson, Thompson's old band, Fairport Conevention, Bert Jansch, and a short documentary bit featuring UK 60s guitar legend (and widely heralded innovator in the evolution of 60s Anglo-Celtic folk), Davey Graham.

And one of the newer arrivals in the forum, SomeoneYouKnew, posted a link to a vid of Heart doing "Love Alive," a song where the guitar part has a similar modality saying something like, you guys will think I'm crazy but that folk song reminds me of this Heart song. But I could certainly hear why it did... and though I wasn't focused on it at the time, it almost surely used DADGAD, which would make sense, since guitarist Wilson was so influenced by Jimmy Page, who, himself was so deeply influenced by the Irish and UK folkies, even as he was establishing himself as an up and comer in the rock world...

I haven't been using DADDAD much lately, but I have been playing with DADGAD a lot. Even though I came up playing a lot of slide, mostly in open D, I never really got into DADGAD until the last year or so. It's a really interesting, thought provoking key. If that makes any sense at all.

What I mean is that it has really made me think about and be more aware of the relationship of the notes and partial chords I'm playing. I've often been a if-it-sounds-good-it-is-good player, with a moderately well developed sense of how things go together on an intuitive level... but that's meant that I haven't been pushed to really pay attention to what, harmonically, was going on.

DADGAD, perhaps because it's still a bit unfamiliar -- and not least because there are only three [closely related] note values spread across the three octaves.

With regard to the slide show, I keep telling people (including my mom, you can't lie to mom; and Ken, too, who has been quite complimentary) that my contribution was quite little, and that Ken did all the heavy lifting, doing all that traveling around that hellhole, Yosemite/Sequoia, braving the bears and vacationing Germans and generally putting in all the sweat... I just sat at the controls of Vegas, using its tools to create a basic (random) Ken Burns type slideshow vid and then redoing the timing and the animated crops that give the zoom and pan effects until they better fit the flow of the music and actually focused on the right things as Ken's already artfully cropped photos had to be essentially 'pan and scanned' to fill the 4:3 video window. (Why not use a wide screen? Because, in Yosemite, you end up shooting a lot of tall pictures, as well as wide panoramas... gotta split the diff.)

Anyhow, it was great fun, and, sorry to sound like a mutual admiration society, but it was especially cool working with such beautiful photos (or course, let's not neglect the contributions of nature/God/whatever, here -- Yosemite is pretty darn photogenic... even that old cat, Ansel Adams, could make it look good without even popping for color film. )

PS... Richard, you may well hear those echoes, but they may have bounced off of someone else or, perhaps, I've picked up some of the same influences as he... but, sadly I'm not directly familiar with Tibbets' work, though it's certainly likely I've heard it over the years, quite likely on one of my local college stations. I've heard his name on and off for years but never investigated him. I guess I'm gonna have to. Again, though, if he used DADGAD, DADDAD, or other droney tunings -- or backwards guitar, for that matter -- that can lay a heavy flavor across a work or set of works. I'll go check him out, though.

PS 2, also to Richard King... I'm listening to "Ur" right now... totally see what you mean except for one thing... he seems to be really good while I, on the other hand, am more like occasionally somewhat lucky. Also... now that I'm hearing his music, and seeing the titles, I realize that, indeed, I have heard his music before and it, and other music built around the influences of world music and acoustic finger style guitar certainly have fed in as influences. So, I'm thinking the answer, to the original question is, yes. [EDIT: And, the more I hear, the more I realize, in particular that the old music director of that aforementioned, formerly eclectic college station was apparently a big Tibbets fan.]

I just hear a bunch of Bert Jansch, one of my favorite guitarists. Tasty.

whatever, if was a great collaboration and the sights and sounds were really soothing on a Sunday morn.

On youtube there is a young cat (Fender61) doing a passible cover of 'to a friend'.by Mountain.

I gigged that song at least 100 xs 'back in the day' and still love to play it...I last played it out in Feb. of this year and a cupla old fogeys remembered it from Leslie's second LP.

Your 'compo' had a lot of the nuances but of course , as you will hear if you check it out, your song stands alone.

Kudos to you and Ken.

And yes, I used the ol' 'DAD-GAD' tuning when I gigged it.

I am a huge Pentangle fan (yet they are one band I've never seen all together in the same place except in videos -- although I've seen all of them in different combinations (and all, come to think of it in the same place, the famous McCabe's Guitar Shop, in Santa Monica, which has a tiny, folding chair concert room). Jansch and his old buddy/rival John Renbourn were big aspirational influences on me. (That is to say, they inspired me to aspire to strive to play like them... ha. But a guy has to try. )

___________

And, thanks, Lukenskywalker, and everyone else for the kind words!

Weezer, are you havin' fun yet with that Rogue Mandolin?

I can't seem to get any PM'S out of the box. so I haven't gotten in touch.

Well, you and most everyone already know that three of my most important influences are Neil Young, Jimmy Page and Nick Drake... and since all of those guys listed Bert as their primary influence on acoustic guitar, I got into Jansch through a degree of separation. But I heard immediately what they heard: Jansch is a master. I've done a bunch of DADGAD (and related) {censored} as a result.

"Fun": yes. "Making music I can be proud of": not yet.

But it's a serviceable instrument. Like anything else with a floating bridge, getting that sucker positioned right for proper intonation is a game of trial and error. But overall, it's absolutely impressive for being as cheap as it was.

"Fun": yes. "Making music I can be proud of": not yet. But it's a serviceable instrument. Like anything else with a floating bridge, getting that sucker positioned right for proper intonation is a game of trial and error. But overall, it's absolutely impressive for being as cheap as it was.

I've got a shiny little black Rogue mando, too. There's a funkily intoned fret on the fourth pair at the 2nd fret (and it's the same on the same model that one of my buddy's owns) but other than that, it's pretty decent. I was lucky in that I had it in the car with me when I went to pick up a couple packs of strings from World of Strings (here in the LBC). I told the luthier who was helping me at the counter that I just got it and it was my first mandolin when he asked some question, and I mentioned it was in the car. He said bring it on on and then offered to put the strings on and set up the bridge... (At that point I said, you know, why don't I buy an extra set of strings, too. He said, you don't have to and I said, uh, yes, I think I do. )

Of course, they sell multi-thousand dollar mandolins (and guitars, violins, cellos, double basses, etc) there, but he allowed as how it was pretty amazing to just be able to get a mandolin for $50 and how it was amazingly decent, considering.

One tip my buddy gave me: if you think of the mando (in a very limited sense) as being strung sort of like an 'upside down guitar' it can help you figure out chord fingerings (shapes, if you will) pretty quickly. (Since the mando is tuned in fifths instead of fourths, the note relationships are like those of the bass 4 strings on a standard tuned guitar, only upside down on the neck. It helps to have a mandolin in your hands, when you're pondering that...

I was gonna pop in here and say thank you to everyone for their positive comments....but I'm singling this one out because I looooooove Steve Tibbetts' guitar playing, particularly his work with Choying Drolma.

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B2B, I love what you did with the video, and I love your guitar playing and the way that you recorded it. I like backwards guitar treatments, and feel that you did it really tastefully.