Sunday 17 January 2016

It's sometimes the little pleasures.....

Like sitting down with a mug of gluhmost after an evening 'chilling out' with church people.

This evening 28 years ago I was at home while Chris was in hospital recovering from an event unique to women. The result of that event is still with us, I'm pleased to say.

Loved playing in the celebration in Oxford this morning, though I must be getting old because it left me tired and absolutely ravenous. It did feel like I could have carried on twice as long though, which is a novelty these days and also a good sign. I'm not much of a lead player any more, but can occasionally coax some interesting sounds from a guitar: was asked at least 3 times how I made it sound like a flute/trumpet (the answer is a big overdrive, longish delay and a volume pedal between the 2 for swells after plucking the note). My technique must be regressing, since someone mentioned sounding like Bruce Springsteen, when it's usually Fleetwood Mac instead.

It's so different playing with a band on a big stage and not being responsible for starting songs or holding the rhythm, just being able to add parts here or there. I almost never use dirty guitar tones in small church meetings, but in big meetings I'm running some kind of overdrive more than half the time. There's no need for clean guitar unless it's going to do something the acoustic cannot (like sound funky or groovy) and a mild crunchy drive tone adds muscle and fullness to an otherwise polite band sound. Really grateful to still get a chance to do this.

If there's a next time I'll have to take along the old washburn that I used to use in the cinema when the churches met together there 20+ years ago. That guitar encouraged a few who were kids at the time to start playing guitar themselves.

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