Musical Influences

I play the guitar. Almost every week, I can be found at Elim Baptist Church with a friendly bunch of other musicians, smiling big and doing something I absolutely enjoy.

I also love to listen to all kinds of music. I listen to film scores, bluegrass, classic rock, folk, electronic, classical, pop, blues, zydeco, gospel, jazz, and on and on and on. It’s all so interesting and fascinating to listen to, and I love the variety.

Of course, my listening tends to flow naturally into my playing. And there are also other people and things that influence what I do on my guitar. This post is about as many of those influences as I can think of.

Of Music and Juggling

I’ve been plugging away at juggling tricks. Not necessarily the ones I listed in the previous post, but I’ve been learning some neat new things. That includes the very exciting fact that I have very nearly done a five-ball cascade! I’ll keep working on it and see what happens.

And in the music world, I’ve been learning new chords for my guitar playing. I’ve also taken up the dulcimer again after letting it lie in disuse for several weeks. Yesterday I started learning the French-Canadian reel called Over the Waterfall. I’ll put in a link to the sheet music also in case some of my musically inclined readers want to give it a go.

Various Bits

To start with, I just added another book to my library map. But I won’t tell you which one!

I did some hammered dulcimer today, and I’m getting pretty good at Ash Grove.

My brothers and I discovered that we missed some less-important sections of Myst 4 the first time ’round. We only discovered them because we thought it’d be funny to play it again with a walkthrough.

I get to take my first ever DANTES test on Tuesday! It’s on World Religions, and if I pass I will have another 3 credits. Hopefully I’ll do just that.

We’re doing a song I don’t know in church tomorrow. It’ll be fun to wing it for a change.

More Hammered Dulcimer

My plan of playing Soldier’s Joy quickly went away. Although I have the idea of the tune down pretty well, I don’t know how it goes, making it nigh on impossible to learn.

Instead, I started learning Ash Grove, which you may know better as Let All Things Now Living. I fiddled around with How Firm a Foundation, too, since I was playing it on guitar. Now that works out rather well. I play something for church on guitar, and then step over to the hammered dulcimer and plunk it out there!

Speaking of guitar… Did you know it’s quite difficult to play hymns properly if you want to rock and roll?