{"id":100,"date":"2014-10-17T17:22:12","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T17:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/martinphilipsmith.wordpress.com\/?p=100"},"modified":"2014-10-17T17:22:12","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T17:22:12","slug":"an-update-and-some-music-i-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/?p=100","title":{"rendered":"An update &#8211; and some music I like!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi everyone!<\/p>\n<p>I thought I&#8217;d post an update and let everyone know what I&#8217;m up to. \u00a0 I&#8217;ll divide it into 3 areas : stuff I&#8217;m listening to for inspiration, material I&#8217;m working on and a bit of musical learning I&#8217;m doing&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In terms of listening, first I&#8217;ve been maxing-out on singer-songwriters &#8211; partly for pure enjoyment, partly for inspiration and partly for possible material to cover in my new set. \u00a0Here&#8217;s a Spotify playlist I&#8217;ve been putting together. Hope you enjoy&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Spotify Embed: Great Singer Songwriters\" width=\"300\" height=\"380\" allowtransparency=\"true\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/playlist\/4zYsnKUYXTaxQUcBCOY3zE\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also been listening to quite a bit of\u00a0solo acoustic guitar. \u00a0I&#8217;m including solo guitar played on archtop semi-acoustics by the likes of Martin Taylor. Too good and too inspiring too exclude! Here&#8217;s another playlist:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Spotify Embed: Acoustic and solo guitar\" width=\"300\" height=\"380\" allowtransparency=\"true\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/playlist\/1l0BScyLr59lh1X7uzoUtq\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Both these playlist will be evolving over coming weeks. \u00a0So please do check back or follow them on Spotify if you&#8217;re interested.<\/p>\n<p>Material I&#8217;m working on really falls into 3 categories: new songs I&#8217;m writing, old self-penned songs I&#8217;m adapting (or re-writing) and covers I&#8217;m looking at doing.<\/p>\n<p>I have 6 new songs\u00a0\u00a0on the go. I hope to finish a couple of these in the next couple of days. \u00a0I&#8217;ll post rough recordings in due course.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also &#8220;finished&#8221; adapting two of my old SkyHunter songs: &#8220;More To Life Than Rock &amp; Roll&#8221; and &#8220;Need Another Shot&#8221;. There should be recordings of these up online next week if things go to plan.<\/p>\n<p>This brings me to cover material &#8211; and another playlist. You will notice a lot of the material on the playlist isn&#8217;t obvious solo acoustic stuff &#8211; although there is also a lot there that is. It is also eclectic, which reflects how my thinking is going at the moment. To my mind a good song is a good song &#8211; and I don&#8217;t want to be bound by genres. So you will find folksy ballads, country, blues, jazz standards and more all rubbing shoulders. Not sure how many of these I&#8217;ll end up actually doing&#8230; again, I hope to make some recordings of me performing and post them for your feedback. In the meantime, enjoy these versions!<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Spotify Embed: Possible solo acoustic covers\" width=\"300\" height=\"380\" allowtransparency=\"true\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"encrypted-media\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/playlist\/56mcdn0ayE53r6rHV9DuZY\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This brings me finally to the learning I&#8217;ve been doing. \u00a0 I wanted to radically improve my fingerstyle guitar chops. When I found that Martin Taylor was offering online tuition I could think of no finer teacher! Any guitar players who want to learn fingerstyle guitar from a true master could do a lot worse than check-out <a href=\"http:\/\/artistworks.com\/guitar-lessons-martin-taylor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">this site<\/a>! \u00a0By the way, don&#8217;t take this as a sign I am planning to become a full-on &#8220;jazzer&#8221;. I just figured if I can manage this stuff surely my all-round playing will be that much better!<\/p>\n<p>Feedback on any of this, as always, very much welcomed.<\/p>\n<p>Catch up again soon!<\/p>\n<p>Martin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi everyone! I thought I&#8217;d post an update and let everyone know what I&#8217;m up to. \u00a0 I&#8217;ll divide it into 3 areas : stuff&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[2,3,4,6,8],"tags":[11,29],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/ovation1.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alterativus.com\/martinphilipsmith\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}