Monday, January 21, 2008

I'm trying to get rhythm



One of my elders is a guitar enthusiast. He got Carolina and I to go with him to see Pete Huttlinger (a national finger-style guitar champion). I was mesmerized by him. Steve (my elder) was kind enough to share a DVD and some guitar tabs with me from Pete. After church last night I spent 2 hours learning just this small first part of the song. It's given me something to work toward, because I've wanted for a long time to learn better finger-style guitar, but didn't who to learn it from. Some of Pete's other songs I hope to learn as well--partially because they're easier, but his arrangement of "I Got Rhythm" was by far my favorite. It is an absolute beast of a song; extremely complicated and extremely fast.

Along with this, as I've been reconnecting with old friends on Facebook, many of them are curious why I haven't been broadcasting more of my guitar stuff on Youtube. (Eventually I may get the old videos back out and import them) I thought it would be fun to record myself playing this with only 1 day of practice (and no warm up...just recorded it at the office during my lunch break). I hope to make later posts where I play more of it, and play it better. I'm currently only playing it at about 60% of the speed at which Pete plays it.

4 comments:

  1. Even though you are still learning this piece, I can still hear the lyrics playing in my head with the notes of your guitar:
    "I got rhythm,
    I got music,
    I got my man --
    Who could ask for anything more?"

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  2. I like this. I look forward to more Mark on guitar.

    I thought at first that this song was gonna be Johnny Cash's "Get Rhythm." I was confused for a second. That's not an unusual occurence, BTW ;)

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  3. Haha...hopefully I'll get it to the point that it will be instantly recognizable.

    I've been bragging on my profile for years now that I'm a "killer guitar player" so I figure I had better start trying to deliver. :-)

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  4. Nice, I look forward to more videos...I need to pick mine up more often.....

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