A New Guitar Toy
I like finding new ways to play guitar, especially when they're something I can do with my existing guitars without spending $$. This time it's the Harmonic Capo from Weaseltrap, which I learned about from a Guitar Player newsletter. It's a cool little dealie with six rubber feet that you position over the 12th fret to give you harmonics on selected strings.
The Harmonic Capo
It was a little hard to position properly on my old Seagull Artist acoustic (the neck heel gets in the way) but once I had it on there the musical possibilities quickly became obvious. I quickly came up with a little ditty that I recorded (below) and may work into a full song at some point.
I'm totally in favor of anything that makes my playing sound more impressive. In this case, I'm using the capo to give me an octave touch harmonic on the D, G, B, and high E strings, with the low E string tuned to dropped-D. When I fret a note it plays at the normal pitch, so playing open and fretted notes creates a nice contrast.
If you're a guitarist and are interested, you can find out more at Bob Kilgore's website. It's $34.95, making it the most expensive capo I've ever purchased, but it gives you effects you can't get any other way. Cool.
Spiritual Underground
Except for the fact that my vocal chords were messed up we laid down some pretty good grooves last week. Here's our song Spiritual Underground for your listening and downloading pleasure. SU was originally a more afro-beat track inspired by the late, great Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who's always been a hero of mine.
If you've never listened to Fela, here's a good place to start.
If I had 17 musicians that I could jam with (and afford to pay) that is exactly how we would roll.
Anyway, we just re-worked the bass line to be more soul-oriented so that we could groove more smoothly in our trio format live and this is what it sounds like.
>> Spiritual Underground (live)
Normal caveats apply; Firefox users need to right-click and Save-As to save to their hard drive to listen properly. Listen, share, and promote the track as you will for your own non-commercial use.
The best way to stream Beat Concrete tracks is at our MySpace page (www.myspace.com/beatconcreteband) where we have a selection of tracks including Spiritual Underground.
Peace out.
