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I’ve been enjoying Joe Jackson’s The Duke, an album of music written by the great Duke Ellington, since 2015 or so. I was listening to it recently and decided I wanted to learn the guitar part for the song Sharon Jones sang, “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But The Blues / Do Nothin’ ‘Til You Hear From Me.” The guitar part is simple enough that once I figure out what’s being played, it should be easy to get under my fingers. But first, I have to work out what “Captain” Kirk Douglas played.
My music work area
Since I’ve been playing the piano off and on for well over half of my life and I’ve only been a guitar player for a few years, it’s easier to work out the music on a keyboard. That means setting up my musical workspace, and since I was doing that I figured I’d get a picture. Please pardon the mess around my desk. The song is loaded into VLC on my laptop with my Artek Bluetooth keyboard and staff paper ready for action. My Carry-On 49-Key Folding Piano & MIDI Controller is ready to plunk out notes, and both Clara the Strat and my Type 10 TARDIS (my amp) are close by.
Why so familiar?
I say it feels familiar because it takes me back to the days when I would spend hours writing new songs or classical compositions. When I was a singer/songwriter I’d have a legal pad at the piano so I could write chord progressions for lyrics I’d written, and when I was studying classical composition I kept a pad of staff paper close by to notate what I was composing. That was years ago, and it feels like another lifetime.
I have a nice mug of Tazo Zen tea and a plate of cookies for while I work. Before anyone fusses at my eating cookies while on the Mediterranean diet, they’re sugar-free cookies from The Swiss Colony. As you can see, I only took three cookies, which the tin says is one serving. Of course, as my family likes to say, they definitely taste like more.
Get working, you!
I need to get to work, but I wanted to share a picture of my musical workspace. The picture serving as my laptop’s wallpaper is the Palestinian (Not Hamas) Lives Matter flag I made for Second Life. You can see the three signs I made in the Nanci’s Naughties store on the Second Life Marketplace. And before anyone bitches that it’s anti-Semitic, it isn’t. If Black Lives Matter, so should the lives of Palestinian civilians.