THE CAT KILLED THE CURIOSITY

I'm afraid that I'm pretty much a ballad guy as a limitation of talent and skill.  I'm not able to "rock it" with guitar yet.  When I feel the need to "rock out" with an instrument, I put some Stevie Ray Vaughan in my bass trainer and strap on my Ovation Magnum bass.  That thing is a mahagony rock machine. 

But straight guitar, ballads.

Some of my favorites -
My 20th wedding anniversary coming up this fall and I've been learning a fingerpick arrangement of Randy Travis' "Forever and Ever Amen" for my wife.

Some friends are adopting a child from China and I've put together a Country Waltz arrangement of John McCutcheon's "Happy Adoption Day."   It was already in 3/4 time.  I put it into Country instead of Folk so that I could get chords I could play, and Country Waltz so that I wouldn't have to do all that fancy picking Mr. McCutcheon plays so smoothly. 

My daughters like Loudoun Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road", which I play in a fingerpick style.

I've done a flamenco influenced fingerpick arrangement on Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night."

To be able to rock out to something on guitar, I've been working on an aggressive fingerpick arrangement of "Crocodile Rock."  It's fun feeling like I'm going to break strings, but it still sounds very poor.  I need a lot of work on that one. 

For easy going strumming songs, I've been working some Jimmy Buffett, just doing a folksy/country strum and not trying to imitate note for note - "Tin Cup Chalice", "Distantly in Love", "A Pirate Looks at Forty".  I have also been doing "Never Cared Too Much For Hippies" that Selso posted in the Songwriting forum, and "Country Life" posted there by James McCorcmick.  A friend of mine is a Country/Campfire songwriter and has some humorous songs I've been trying to learn to no avail.  Same fellow has written a Christian-themed song about an outlaw cowboy coming to Jesus titled "Riding with the Man" that I want to learn.   Also Mel McDaniel's "Louisiana Saturday Night", which in the original is arpeggio picking and lends itself nicely to fingerpick, but for some reason I like strumming it.  Everybody of a certain age (such as my friends) knows "Take Me Home Country Roads" and so I've learned that in case someone shoves a guitar in front of me at a campfire.  It doesn't matter how I play it because everyone sings along to that one.  Wille Nelson's "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" is another in that vein. 

My current challange is to get good sounding barre chords.  After getting a decent sounding barre chord consistently and being able to do them in chord progressions smoothly, my next challange will be to include scales and arpeggios with and without pick.  Then after that, which may be a year from now considering how slow my progress, I will start trying to "cover" songs the way people know them from the radio and records. 

- Zurf