Cooking, Cutting & Comping

[waitingman]

What vertigo feels like...

Having resolved to cook at home more this week, we promptly went out for dinner last night... well, had take-away delivered to a friend's house, so kind of going out for dinner. I had a spicy miso ramen that had quite an accumulative burn, which meant I only got just over 3/4s of the way through before giving up, as I couldn't feel my tongue any more & my face had turned a noticeable shade of red. Another nail in the coffin for my heat tolerance! At this rate, I'll be reduced to toast & butter by the time I'm 60... probably low-salt butter too

So tonight, we cooked at home. We've also dusted off & busted out the 'new' knife set we were given for our wedding... in 2012. The knives are still sharp though - ask me how I know... I cut my right hand at the base of my thumb, right where it folds into the palm, so it'll be a bugger to heal. Fortunately, there was no blood on the chicken & I'm pretty sure I washed the cut thoroughly, so there's no salmonella on me!

I have a list of cover songs to learn guitar parts for this weekend, but am having trouble getting an old riff, from an old song of mine, out of my head, so I keep playing that, then playing rhythm parts for it, then pick up the bass & try to come up with a part for that... meanwhile 'Hold The Line', 'Ordinary World', 'Dreams' & a bunch of other songs, remain untried & unlearned... Other than a party band in the late 80s, I've always been in bands that wrote their own material, which suited my self-taught & non-standard tuning ways of playing - I can't actually play a lot of cover songs, as the chord shapes are completely different to the ones I've come up with on my own, using the tuning I devised when I first picked up a right-handed guitar & played it left-handed... so the strings are upside-down as well... On the plus side, I've developed a style of my own, with its own voicings & phrasing. On the down side, it makes playing other people's songs embarrassingly challenging for me. Which is possibly one of the reasons I've agreed to take this project on - to see how I can deal with it

Comments

[basefinder]

Is there any comraderie/sharing of techniques among other left-handed guitar players? Or do you just have to invent what you need to do, one song at a time?

'Hold the Line' has been a favorite of mine since it first hit the radio.

[waitingman]

I'm actually the only left-handed guitarist I know, so the only tips I've received have been from right-handers, which I've then inverted & tried to use in my different tuning. My favourite left-hander was Albert King, who also played the way I do - with the strings upside down, which was probably the reason he was the first to bend the s#%t out of them - it's easier to do that when you're pulling the string down, than pushing it up...

And yes, I've pretty much had to invent everything I do... but the positive side to that is, nobody else can do what I do... whereas anybody can do what John Lennon, for example, did...

I've only begun to appreciate 'Hold The Line' since learning the riff... which is a great one! Prior to that, it was always just another Toto song ruined by Bobby Kimble - their over-emoting, ego-maniac singer with short-man syndrome... in my humble opinion, of course!!

[basefinder]

I always thought the vocalist was the weak link in most of Toto's work.

Many decades ago when my little brother was showing me some guitar basics, he mentioned that .38 Special songs were hard to play properly, because of the complex chords they used. So he showed me how to fake along with the rhythm parts to some Joan Jett and Pat Benatar tunes.

[basefinder]

I guess I'm surprised there isn't a YouTube channel filled with guitar tips for left-handers playing right-handed instruments.

[waitingman]

You know... I've never looked! For all I know, there is one

Being born 'BC' - before computers - I keep forgetting about things like Youtube for guitar tutorials, recipes, repair & handyman tips... that sort of thing. My first thought is that it's full of music clips & people doing dumb stuff & that the only way to learn those things is to go take classes, or get an apprenticeship - very 1970s thinking!!

I'll let you know when my first video is up...