David Hodge

Just for juxtaposition, here’s what we’ve looked like the past week or so…

This past weekend, we had some friends over to play music and work out arrangements of songs and Helena was kind enough to take this photo. And we got another five inches the night after she shot this! 

Only eighteen days until spring…

Peace 

We were honored, this past year, to have good friends from Chicago and New Jersey and Canada and Connecticut visit our home. Fortunately the weather cooperated too, at least for the most part, which isn’t always the case. So, for instance, this is the view our visitors had from our back porch last October…

Right now, the view is dramatically different (and I really should get myself a digital camera sometime in the near future) - ice and snow and only the pine trees still have their green needles, so there are more bare trees than you can shake a stick at. But in its own way it’s still beautiful and breath taking.

And even when the landscape is cold and frozen, it’s hard not to know that it’s always changing. That spring will be back in less time than it takes to think about it and then summer and autumn again will come and go. This is the start of my fifth year here at my not-so-new-anymore home and I can’t always work that fact, that that much time has passed already, into my head.

Maybe because it’s so much easier to just look out my backdoor and get lost in the moment…

Peace

It’s been a long time coming, but we’re finally launching a series of Guitar Noise Podcasts - half-hour lessons hosted by yours truly. We’re hoping, schedule-wise, to have a new one every other Monday.

You can find the first Podcast up online at the  Guitar Noise Blog. This initial series of lessons will focus on strumming and all the various aspects of it from the very basics to simple ways to spice up your strumming patterns to tips of ways to play rhythm when you’ve multiple guitarists. GN Podcast #1 introduces the very basics of strumming. Next time out we’ll explore more with alternating bass lines and also start adding very simple hammer-ons and pull-offs to liven up any basic strumming pattern.

In the near future, we’ll also be looking at “missing” downstroke beats during our strumming patterns. This may sound easy, but usually gives many beginners a bit of a fit. But once you can get this under your belt, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting any strumming pattern at all, with a bit of practice of course! Down the line we’ll  have lessons on cross-picking, partial chord strumming, palm muting and percussive strumming, how to figure out complex strumming patterns and strumming with an ear towards voice leading and chord melody playing.

So drop over to the Guitar Noise Blog and give our first lesson a listen. Hope you find all the GN Podcasts as helpful as this one.

As always, feel free to drop me a line with any questions, comments, concerns and/or suggestions. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 Peace