So much easier now (guitar not fishing)

Saturday night got to bed a 2:00 am (I guess that would be Sunday morning) and I got up at 4:00 am to go fishing. Again fishing sucked, but I did get to test out my new color GPS/Fish finder. What an awesome piece of equipment. I almost smashed into another boat as I was driving around on the lake looking at it.

Things are weird on the Chain these days.....almost every weed bed is gone and it's almost like fishing the dead sea. I spoke with 6 or 7 guys who were also fishing Musky and nobody was moving anything. Of course I will be heading out this weekend to give it another go.

As for Guitar playing, my guitar teacher turned me onto a CD of backing tracks. They are just as you would expect, Rhythm Guitar, Bass and Drums. The CD has about 10 tracks ranging from blues, rock, heavy metal etc., some of the tracks in the style of Led Zep, Metallica. The tracks are in different keys. They are a blast to play along with. I almost sound good jamming to them.

It got me thinking about all the tools that are available to young learning guitarists these days. Back in the mid 80's when I was first learning you had limited choices. But now you have affordable home recording, computerized drum machines, more guitar tab free on the internet than you could ever want, devices that slow down a CD but keep the pitch the same so you can learn songs slowly and work them up to speed.

Guitar lessons back in the 80's for me consisted of sitting with my teacher, watching him listen to whatever song I wanted to learn and writing it down in my lesson book. This would take the majority of the 30 minutes, so there wasn't much in terms of "lessons." If you couldn't figure songs out on your own listening to the album or tape, you had to hope that one of the guitar magazines would print the music or have your teacher figure it out for you. Now if you are learing a song, you bring the tab in, pop in the CD and start working on the techniques required. So you spend the entire 30 minutes working not listening.

With a decent computer and a device like the M-Audio Black Box you can record on your computer, with various drum beats, using various simulated amps and effects. I remember jamming with my buddies, trying to remember some of the "awesome" riffs we came up with (at least we thought they were awesome) but not being able to remember them the next day. No all you have to do is flip on the computer and record it for future use.

I look through the Musician's Friend magazine and I amazed at what is available these days. My wish list is long and expensive.