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The title of this tune was inspired by a banjo video that Jonas Friddle recently published on Youtube. I didn’t have an empty pickle jar to put a lager in, so I opted to include a jar of pickles. Here is Lager in a Pickle Jar!
And here is the video that inspired the title.
I don’t know about you, but as the social distancing continues, I sure am missing eating lunch with my friends.
That made me think of this song that I wrote with some 3rd graders at Hibbard Elementary a few years ago.
It’s rockin!
Here is a recording of the song and a lyric and chord sheet that you can download to help you learn the song. Let me know if you learn to play and sing it!
I spent the day working on “social distance sound”; both my own and others’. I run in a community of educators and teachers who, like many people in the country, have been thrown into a world of having to have what amounts to a television studio in their apartments. We’re all grabbing all the equipment we’ve gathered over the years and we’re trying to make a go of it as best as we can. It’s been a couple weeks of experimenting with mic placement, charging and recharging our phones, moving lamps around our apartments, turning off radiators and covering windows with bedsheets to gain some control of the audio and visual of online music education and concerts.
All this work has got my mind on all of the sound engineers that I’ve worked with over the years, including one in particular; my friend Dave Unger.
About four years into our journey, the Young Stracke All-Stars (my youth folk band) was really cookin’ and we started to get some high profile gigs. And the people that were asking us to play, wanted to hear our music! We’d spent four years cutting our teeth playing small venues like the Lincoln Restaurant where we didn’t need amplification.
But, with the introduction of better gigs came the need to use a sound system properly.
With that in mind the great Chicago sound engineer ,Dave Unger, to lend us a hand. I made a vocabulary list (with a crossword puzzle!) and some drawings, the band invited some friends and Dave spent the afternoon helping us understand how mics, amplifiers and mixing boards work.
It was a very fruitful day! Over the next 7 years of the band’s travels we never had another proper Live Sound workshop, the band members who received this training were able to train the following generation. And those members were able to pass it along to the next members and on we went!
So, I write all of this just to say cheers to Dave and cheers to all the sound engineers who also got the rug pulled out from under them in this challenging situation. Us musicians already knew that you had a big job and a lot of expertise and now it’s even more clear. We’re stuck at home without you, and our sound suffers for it. I think I can speak for pretty much every musician I know when I say that we’ll all be too happy to put some of this work back in your capable hands.
Imaginary World Podcast is one of my very favorite podcasts.
This week’s episode, Fighting a Virtual Pandemic (embedded at the bottom), is all our actual pandemic as it relates to a video game called World of Warcraft.
I don’t really play video games, but I still find the episodes about video games so interesting.
There is a moment at about 17:80 when the interviewee, Virginia Wilkerson, talks about the different reasons people play video games. She says,
People live life for different reasons and people play video games for many different reasons. I’m sort of like a skill and achievement-based player. I want to be the best in my class that I can be. And then there are people who play purely for social reasons that aren’t interested in going to the high level raids and really maxing out their characters. And then you have a small subset of people who play just for the economics of the auction house in World of Warcraft. And then you have lots of people who play for the roll playing. Like it’s Dungeons and Dragons or something similar to that.
Here description of the 4 reasons people play video games caught my attention.
I see those four facets in my own reasons for playing music. It made me pause and think about how I relate to those aspects of playing.
If I had to put a number on these aspects of my interest in music it would be something like 30% skill, 30% social, 15% money, 25% character.
Those numbers are very different than my drawing work. That is more like 50% skill, 25% social, 5% money, 20% emotion.
What about you? Why do you do things like play music or video games? Or dance, draw, play sports, write poetry, ride a skateboard? I would be interested in knowing. I’ll leave the comments open. Thank you for sharing.
It’s Saturday and for many people that means pizza!
Here’s a fun song to go along with your pizza party.
Some second graders from Hibbard Elementary and I wrote this song in 2018.
Here is a lyric and chord sheet that you can download to learn to play the song yourself!
For someone who is relatively new at playing music, learning a new tune, or a bunch of new tunes can be overwhelming.
Because of this, I thought I would share my process for learning tunes. Maybe you’ll find it helpful to see how I do it. In this video I learn the tune Nancy on my harmonica. I learn an arrangement from my good friend, Jonas Friddle. I highly recommend checking out more of his music at jonasfriddle.com
Enter your email address here to receive a free .pdf that accompanies this video essay.
Here is a quick guitar lesson for total beginners. This is my usual first lesson for both youth and adult musicians. If you can do this, you can do anything on the guitar! This will get you started.
If you do get started with this lesson and are looking for some more in depth study, let me know! I’ve moved all of my teaching online for the time being and would love to meet with you. We’ll have you playing in no time!
Here’s the Rain, Rain Go Away video lesson and here is a free download of the lyric and melody sheet.
During this challenging time of life I’ve been inspired by the Marquette Makers’ Project to keep busy with some creative work.
I’ve made a lot of lessons like this, but this is the first one where I used a virtual whiteboard and recorded my voice along with the drawings I made on the whiteboard. It turned out pretty well and I learned a lot!
In the video I mention two songs that use the minor 2 chord. Here are lyric and chord sheet for those to songs
Old Devil Time by Pete Seeger
Hungry Heart by Bruce Springsteen
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/400364601]
Here is the weekly schedule for Marquette Makers’ Projects during the physical separation from our communities. Cool stuff. I’m excited to see what people are working on.
Thank you to Huxley and Theo for their help making this music video for my song, Juice Box! This song was written with young students like them in mind.
I you’d like to learn the song yourself, you can listen to just the audio recording and download a FREE handout to help you learn the song, here.
The handout has the chords, standard notation, and harmonica notation.
It also has the chords, standard notation and harmonica notation for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!
Now presenting JUICE BOX!
[vimeo 392866503 w=640 h=360]
Photos and video by Susan Rutter Divine, Katy Divine and Sue Demel.
[vimeo 392247139 w=640 h=1138]
