Friday, December 5, 2014

Flat Picking Valhalla

Yes, another sermon. How fucking pompous.  And about flat picks.  Cheap celluloid guitar accessories.  Big fucking deal, you snort, through your eight inches of head on your huge glass of expensive imported beer, from some posh micro-brewery.  Relax, I'm making no harsh judgement against you sucking beer foam while you downgrade the renaisance in my goddam living room.  I am learning to use a flat pick on the house guitars, including the older accoustic beater, and now the new candy apple red electric guitar I copped off the internet.


Before this, I had been using bare fingers to apply the 'claw hammer' technique, both on the Adam Levine First Act accoustic guitar, that was got at the Westview Kmart, and the Ktone banjo, that I got mail order from Ebay.com, as if it was House of Dior for winos, junkies and fools.  I buy a lot of gear from Ebay.  I love it.  It's a form of gambling.  Gaming against the quality of life and efficacy of your career.  Compare the dilemma to that of small business garments.  A cheap suit has some sort of impact on people's career.  So does your guitar playing.

I'm even using flat pick technique on the fairly new banjo.  Might have to change the strings on it, for the first time, using the brightly colored tuning peg crank I bought from Ebay, for eighty eight cents, which speeds up the process of changing strings.  Already tested it on the six string Levine, eager to see how long it takes me to restring a five string banjo, with trepidation in advance over that wierd friction peg that lives on it's lonesome five frets up the narrow rose wood neck.  Next online purchase will be a bulk load of strings for both the generic electric guitar and the student grade factory banjo, both of which were made in China, were little hands are ever busy copying our American industry standards, and selling back to you and me, cheap.  So fucking happy to be modern!

For way of reasons, I started using the flat pick when I started practicing on the newest, and prettiest, guitar in the house, the generic fake Statocaster, cost of ninety four dollars, past paid, delivered to the front door.  It appears to be a decent ax, and flat picking is a fine option.  The harmonics are good on my new sweet baby, which on other guitars, can be an achilles heel, such as on a bad accoustic ax.  In that case, bare finger tips help to buffer the poor sound.  Conversely, on a real good guitar, the flat pic can cut the beauty of the thing loose, with precision. I'm old, but am still improving.  My new ax helped me realize I am still able to learn and to aquire skill.  Better music helps like heck as the person playing the music gets uglier from old age.  Who would have imagined a twenty three cent guitar pick would be so much like the Picture of Dorian Gray?




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