Forgive me Father, for I have sinned: it has been over a year since I changed the strings on my guitars…

I used to change strings almost religiously after every third gig or so. I just didn’t want the hassle of suddenly having one let go, particularly because my main guitar has a floating trem, so if one does go ping! all the others are pulled sharp by the balance springs.  Actually it was worse than that: I used to carefully wipe the strings after playing in order to make them last longer.  Then somehow I grew less and less bothered… I blame playing bass, with strings as thick as bridge cables there’s relatively little chance of one letting go, and if it did it would probably take a finger off with it at the same time, which would be of more immediate concern.  I’ve been meaning to change my strings all week, then suddenly it came to this evening and time to pack my stuff up and head out to the gig, and no string-changing had happened.  Also since I changed to using 10s (guitar speak for a pack of strings that have a high E string with a diameter of 10 thousandths of an inch) I simply don’t break strings as often as when I used 9s.  I can’t imagine how prone to breaking a set of 8s are, I assume they’re like some mysterious high energy sub-atomic particle that only exists for fractions of a second before vapourising.

Of course, the longer I go without breaking a string, the less likely I am to change them (it ain’t broke…)

So, being back on guitar in Casa has a few surprises in store for me, namely the tunes that I’d learnt the bass part for but hadn’t had to play “up the octave.”  Stevie’s version of For Once In My Life gave me a headache trying to play Jamerson’s bass part (which frankly I never managed to get under my fingers), and now the chords are giving me some problems, though they are also quite an interesting piece of harmonisation.  Stevie plays the song in F, but we prefer C, so for us it goes C, C+, C6, C#dim, Dm, Dm(maj 7), Dm7, Dm6.  This looks like a jazz road accident but is just harmonies around a chromatically ascending then descending line: G, G#, A, A#, D, C#, C, B.  It became particularly obvious when I played the chords:

E -0-0-0---5-5-5-5--
B -1-1-1-5-6-6-6-6--
G -0-1-2-3-7-6-5-4--
D -2-2-2-5-7-7-7-7--
A -3-3-3-4-5-5-5-5--
E ------------------

Nice.  I don’t play it down there normally, I came up with that while messing around on an acoustic guitar post-rehearsal  I really like it when you get this kind of pattern where there are stable notes in a chord contrasting with other mobile notes; an example from the busker’s real book is Oasis’ Wonderwall.  Another example I’ve seen is a I7-iim7b5 change, something like:

E ------
B -5-5--
G -3-4--
D -5-5--
A -3-4--
E ------

Never having had any formal musical education, the thing I have no experience with is coming up with a melody and harmonising it in different ways.  If I sit around trying to come up with song ideas I usually start from the chords and see what melody fits over them, rather than the other way around.  It’s certainly another thing to work on!

I just got back from a gig with Acuphuncture.  This is what I learned this gig:

1. It takes a non-zero amount of time to load my gear into the car.  (Though I learn this every gig and forget by morning.)
2. Effects pedals have little red lights on them to tell you when they’re on.  These are rendered useless by a fuck-off huge red stage light pointing at them.
3. Grappa, whilst MANKY, is the only spirit left in the house.