Well here's my first entry to the Steemit Open Mic Challenge Week 67, and I'm really happy to join a thriving open mic community.
It's my own arrangement of an old blues song by Joe Callicott called "You Don't Know My Mind" AKA "Laughing To Keep From Crying".
The original is played in standard tuning, but the arrangement I came up with for it is in an open D tuning, enabling a lot of double string snaps and drones. In fact I only use 4 fingers for the entirety of this song, well one thumb an 3 fingers that is. I pick with my thumb and forefinger, and on the fretting hand I'm just using the middle two fingers to fret the strings. It allows me to get a hard driving rhythm going through out it.
Really sorry, I ramble on a bit at the start, so hit it 40secs in to get straight to the music!
I'm playing my favourite guitar, which I've had for many years now, a '65 Gibson LG5. She doesn't have tons of ringing overtones, but then a good blues guitar doesn't. What it does have is a lot of low end grunt which helps give a warm tone with plenty of punch. It has a nice broadness to the treble strings (guage13's) and its all held together with a nice round full bass
I'm going to set up a decent valve mic to my zoom4 for next week's open mic. The sound here isn't too bad for the camera's own microphone, but it could do with filling out around some frequencies. I know it's not all about the production here though, these are just my personal preferences when I'm leaving stuff for people to see, theoretically for ever. Haha.
I ran open mics in Nottingham for well over 15yrs finally handing the last one over to other good hands around 2014. I always loved the whole ethos of the open mic scene, and I can most certainly feel the same great spirit here. Scammers aside that is. You never used to get many people making a determined effort to scam there way on stage for a couple of pints, but even that wasn't unheard of! ;)
If you'd have told me we'd be doing online global open mics 10yrs I'd have thought it an interesting concept but that it was pie in the sky thinking.
Open mics are a fantastic opportunity to learn from performance playing, and a great place to try out new ideas and many a working musician have passed through open mics. The great thing is, that they're such good fun that many quality and often successful musicians still love to frequent the open mic, inspiring and often helping others.
Anyway I'm rambling along on a wave of open mic'edness excitedness, as I did at the start of the video... doh!
Please also check out my photography posts if you have any interests lie there. It's been a bit of a thankless task trying to get viewers there, but patience will be a virtue I'm sure. One of the problems with photography is plagiarism. I know it strikes almost every where, but photography is particularly prone to it. However I'm very verifiable, both visually and with posts to my facebook page, where I hold good respect in the photography communities, also curating and moderating for 2 respected Street Photography groups.
Please check out my introduce yourself post. @martinsandersuk/hi-steemians-please-allow-me-to-introduce-myself-i-m-a-man-of
I was lucky enough to be selected @mike74pm's 'The Fresh 5'. Amongst other stuff there is a youtube video of me recording the song "Cocaine, All Around My Brain" in the studio.