The Dood Plays the Blues

It's been some time since I posted to the guitar community. There's a few reasons for that. #1 I need to improve my sound recording capabilities. #2 I'm just not comfortable with my playing yet. So in this video I decided to have some fun and throw on the blues brothers hat and shades :) I kind of look like a fatter, balder Jake Blues 🤣

After a 20 year break from playing guitar I'm just getting back to almost where I was when I stopped playing. It's been about 2 years now since I started playing again. I'm currently focusing mainly on fingerstyle blues guitar and just starting to try some classical pieces. I've wanted to learn fingerstyle guitar for a really long time and promised myself if I ever started playing again that would be the style I'd learn. Over the winter I've been pretty much dedicated to playing fingerstyle and nothing else.

This is Internet Blues by Rick Payne.

I actually may start posting more. Another reason I haven't been posting much is because I've been doing mostly exercises and learning theory. I'm nowhere near capable of writing my own music yet. Well some, but nothing I'd share and not fingerstyle. This book is awesome though. I found it on Amazon the other day and it's just filled with all kinds of great fingerstyle blues pieces. I may start posting some progress videos as I continue learning them. This was the first song I learned from the book, I've been practicing it for a few weeks now. I'm still not loving the ending yet but I'm starting to like the sound I'm getting.

The book is pretty much right at my skill level and I really love this style of fingerstyle blues. So I'll try and post more as I learn them. I find most of the pieces challenging but I'm FINALLY getting comfortable finger picking. Pun fully intended, I was all thumbs! It really took me some time to get that thumb bassline thing down. I just found it confusing as hell. Now, once I get into a rhythm I can usually keep it going. It feels much more natural now.

On a side note, I spent the day getting my action cams out and messing around with that stuff. I should have a lot more video content coming regularly again. Thank the gods warmer weather has finally arrived! I also have some different microphone options I can experiment with to get better guitar sound. That might be a project for this week. If I can get better sound quality I'll post more of this stuff.

About The Guitar

On a final note, I wanted to talk a little about the guitar I'm playing. I've owned it for about 6 months now and I'm really loving it. It's an Ibanez AEG50N. It was my cousin's, she barely played it and then sold it to me. It was pretty much like a brand new guitar when I got it.

It's my first nylon string guitar and I really love it. It's much easier on the finger tips and I love the deep sound. It's much deeper than my steel string guitar. IMHO it's the perfect guitar to learn fingerstyle on. I'm really enjoying it a lot. It also has a built in tuner which is really nice and comes in handy. For a 6 month review, I don't really have a negative thing to say about it. The more I play it, the more I love it. The action is much different on a nylon string guitar. So I tend to bounce between my Jasmine steel string guitar and the Ibanez nylong string guitar depending on what I'm playing.