NAMM Show 2015
Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
The 8 Laws of Guitar Etiquette
If someone is checking out a guitar, don’t sit next to them and play louder and faster. Find your own space and let them have theirs. If you must go nuts, wait until they’re gone. Take a deep breath. Feel that nagging sense of entitlement and one-upmanship slip away. Good. There you go.
If people would just observe this one rule my days at Guitars, Etc. would be a whole lot quieter….
Should you need it, here’s a chart for Morning Has Broken with chords and the melody in bass clef. Handy for guitar and bass or cello duets.
Legato (Italian for “tied together”)
Bound together. Performance of music so that there is no perceptible pause between notes, i.e. in a smooth manner, the opposite of staccato.
The Oxford Dictionary of Music
Ligado (Spanish for “connected”)
A guitar technique in which a note is sounded either by pulling sideways or by hammering down on a string on the fingerboard using a finger of the fretting hand.
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd edition
So, guitarists often use ligado technique as part of legato phrasing. We can also pick legato phrases and use ligado to play staccato.
Asteroid Blues: The Lasting Legacy of Cowboy Bebop
First-time solo director Watanabe had created a gorgeous tale of morality, romance, and violence–a dark look at the lives of outlaws that’s shot like an independent film. It was unlike anything the genre had seen before. It even approached its music differently. The show kicked off with a wormhole of a theme song, and the soundtrack moves so seamlessly through genres, from rock to country to pop to jazz to funk, it’s shocking to learn that one set of musicians is behind it all.
Alex Suskin’s piece is dead-on, although the soundtrack’s diversity and quality is not so shocking when you realize it’s Yoko Kanno composing and that “one set of musicians” includes members of Tipographica and Sex Mob along with some of New York’s heaviest hitters like Bobby Previte and Chris Potter.