If this hits your dash, go ahead and drop your top 5 bands/artists

1. Linkin Park

2. Bring Me the Horizon

3. Architects

4. Thrice

5. Rob Scallon

Maroon5 - Memories

Solo Acoustic Guitar Cover

Joseph Allred — Folk Guitar (Feeding Tube)

Where does Joseph Allred reside? Musically or geographically, that question has had many answers, none of them wrong. They were born and raised in Tennessee, and currently live in Crawford TN, but if you know them through the records they have made, you’re also acquainted with the extracurricular efforts of a Bostonian graduate student of philosophy and theology. Although Allred is most commonly connected to American primitive guitar, a title they’ve accepted when others have shunned, they are actually a multi-instrumentalist and singer whose records have also tapped into veins of rural mysticism, internationally oriented inquisitiveness and idiosyncratically reinterpreted shoegazing. Their last two LPs were virtual and actual ensemble efforts loaded up with electric instrumentation, but Folk Guitar returns the art of the solo acoustic guitar.

But what kind of folk is Allred talking about here? Not the stuff they might have heard so described on the radio when they were growing up during the last couple decades of the 20th century, nor the actual folk traditions of rural Tennessee. Waltz rhythms present repeatedly, so maybe Allred’s playing for folks who like to dance? The precise, delicate picking on the first tune, “Lord Lucy’s Protector,” sounds like a tribute to John Renbourn. “Hesperis” is named for a flower that blooms in Anatolian regions, but it is likewise filtered through a consciousness of the idiosyncratic directions that the musicians associated with the British folk revival pursued after the boom went bust. The 12-string piece “The Star Against Heaven” uses the tremolo studies once essayed by James Blackshaw, a Briton of a subsequent generation, as a push-off point for more winding explorations. And the unhurried reverie of “Their Silvery Light” feels like a hymn of quiet praise to the vibrations of steel strings, wood and the air that moves around them.

So, maybe Folk Guitar is just a coverall term, an explanation Allred might give to someone who saw them toting their instrument case down the street and asks them what they play. After all, what you call it doesn’t matter as much as what it does for you. Reflective but not overburdened with darkness, purposeful in its perambulations, this music is centering stuff. Put it on and be where you need to be.

Bill Meyer

If you need to learn, let me know if this helps.. I’m going to start making guitar lesson videos, and I need to know if what I’ve done helps, and what I need to do to fix anything that isn’t working. Thanks, and I hope this helps.

November rain, slash solo art

solo acoustic guitar primitive

I wanted to post this video so much!

I just want you to see how he plays the guitar thats the coolest thing I've ever heard!

It's been years since I've posted my own stuff here.

My mister with one of his specialties: building a beautiful improvised loop. Hope you enjoy 🎶

The Smiths - Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others (1986)

Jumping late in the bandwagon, didn’t get to watch stranger things before the end of August. Couldn’t go without creating a piece with Eddie and his solo guitar. ✨IT WAS BADASS!!!! ✨🔥

And I’m not ok 😭

David Torn – Only Sky. 2015 :  ECM 2433.

Bust out em' guitars today

Henry Kaiser — Mahalo Nui (Metalanguage)

John Fahey was 27 years old when he recorded Requia. While parts of it play as a sincere ceremony of remembrance for people who meant something to him, it was nonetheless the work of an ornery young man. That provenance showed, especially on the spectacularly trollish, side-long musique concrete composition, “Requiem For Molly.” Henry Kaiser knows all about Fahey, guitars experimental music, and Requia in particular. He’s recorded a couple albums of his own using that title, and posed for one of them in a visual homage to Fahey’s record. But Kaiser’s also managed to live a longer life than Fahey, very different but no less astounding. He has been able to carry on a career as a boundary-straddling guitarist who gets to play whatever he wants with pretty much whoever he wants and also to work as a research diver with a specialty in under-ice video work.

Several tracks from this projectstarted out as a COVID-era project, when Kaiser included among the regular YouTube videos that he posted from lockdown with shout-outs to recently passed musicians, such as Steffen Basho-Junghans and David Lindley. Over time, the partings tend to proliferate. Kaiser found himself with ten mostly-solo tracks that shared two criteria: they memorialized fellow travelers who adventured with him upon or under the ice, or who made music, films or musical instruments; and they continued Kaiser’s decades-long determination to do more with the guitar than it previously had been able to do. These became Mahalo Nui.

Born in 1951, Kaiser has now lived long enough to know loss in ways that Fahey could not when he recorded Requia in 1967. Across its two sides, Fahey dug deep into sorrow and respect, and also let fly some ill-focused antagonism. You’ll some sorrow on Mahalo Nui, particularly on the sole non-solo performance, a slide guitar trio in honor of David Lindley. But you’ll hear a lot more joy and gratitude; the album’s title translates from Hawaiian as Thank You Very Much. “Hard Time Killin’ Spoonful Requiem For Paul Hostetter” mashes up Derek Bailey and Skip James gestures with more glee than rue; perhaps Kaiser assembled the performances from licks that the late luthier loved? The glistening tones and complex timbres of “Antarctic Requiem For Liz Sutter & Bija Sass,” which is named after two of his fellow Antarctic travelers, evoke a state of drifting wonder and weightless solace.

In 1990, I caught a Kaiser solo concert and came away as impressed with the looming height of his effects rack as I was with his music. He’s never been afraid to indulge the possibilities of technology and technique, and there have certainly been times when they have gotten the better of him. That never happens on Mahalo Nui. The occasions when he foregrounds technical interventions, such as the school of psychedelic blurs on “Mysterious Requiem For Paul Plimley” and the real-time combination of scything slide guitar and MIDI-controlled piano notes on “Some Of The Great Ancestors Inside My Guitar,” pay off real musical dividends. This record makes a strong case for both the technical and emotional aspects of Kaiser’s art. One caveat for those who prefer physical formats; if you go to Kaiser’s Bandcamp page, this title is only offered as a download. However, it is also available as a CD if you’re willing to search a bit.

Bill Meyer

soni. - them changes.

November Rain - Guns N Roses solo guitar cover.