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Like I said on the Main Page, my main influences are Nick Drake, Bert Jansch
and other such folk artists.
I've only really been into folk for a few years now, but then again, it's
not exactly the easiest of music genres to get into because of the serious lack of folk records in the majority of high-street
stores. I would love to be able to walk down my local high street and pick up the Laurence Juber tuition DVD's and a couple
of Alex De Grassi CD's, but unfortunately it doesn't look as though that's too likely to happen any time soon.
Anyhow, enough of my complaining...
Me and Guitar...
Like I said before, I've been playing guitar for just over 4 years. I started
on a Yamaha Pacifica (electric) because originally all I wanted to play was Jimi Hendrix, Red Hot Chili Peppers, yadda yadda.
Fortunately (I think), I've moved on from there, and now play pretty much exclusively acoustic guitar.
I don't use a flatpick at all, purely my fingernails, which as a result are rather disgustingly long.
I also tune quite... Alternatively. I've always hated the tension of the strings on an acoustic that is tuned to standard
(ie E-A-D-G-B-E from low to high), and so my altered standard is C-G-C-F-G-C. Some people have a problem with the way this
sounds, but I can't, and wouldn't want to, play any other way. I recently had my main guitar (a Garrison G50) set up so that
it sounds better and plays better tuned this low, and I love it.
I'd say my favourite tunings were C-G-C-F-G-C, C-G-Bb-F-A-C and C-G-C-D-G-C. As you can see, there
isn't a huge amount of difference between these, but that helps when retuning between songs!
I'm not the tightest of players, which I'm sure is down to never practising technical exercises. I
would quite like to be a bit tighter, but as it is, if I did technical exercises instead of my usual daily 2-3 hours of just
playing, I wouldn't be as passionate about guitar as I am. I've just never liked technicality in music.
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