Well, here I go again - just playing my guitar and trying to pass it off as art - a music video. This time it's my twelve-string and I end up out near the duck pond behind my house. That's about it. (2 min. 23 sec.)

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G-string Strut is a jazzy vamp featured on the album "The Nowhere Men Play the Music of Gary Peterson."

http://soundclick.com/share?songid=2698870

The video below, on the other hand, is just me messin'round in my toolroom, a nuts & bolts rendition of that same tune but I'll call it Pipe Wrench Blues for your amusement.

Listen to a trippy raga I made up on the spot as I show you around my living room and then a jazzy guitar riff that I'll just call Prelude for now (an original chord progression that ends where a Stevie Wonder tune begins).

Here's a link to my latest (ha! - second) video. This is the chord progression of a song I'm writing - so far just an acoustic guitar with a kick drum and The Blox. I decided to use a drum stick on the strings since I was sitting behind the traps.

I've been tinkering in the basement. I enjoy putzin' around with hardware and tools - mostly just hand tools any more, but I was sawing wood and drilling holes and threading rod when all of the sudden - bam! I invented The BLOX.

It's my new percussion instrument that attaches to the hi-hat of a standard drum kit. I've been researching and developing this splendid rattletrap, fine-tuning the air cavity of the sound box and the wooden blocks that strike it. I also learned that the specific gravity of poplar is .42 and that the eigenmodes of vibrating plates haven't changed much since Earnest F. Chladni sprinkled salt on a pie tin and stroked the edge with a violin bow back in the 1800s except now one can analyze those standing wave patterns with computer modeling, but I digress.

Well, I was so pleased with the prototype of my clapping device that I decided to make a video, my first one ever. The boys (my two sons) were over on Sunday and one of them has a video camera so we cranked out this clip of yers truly before dinner. Sure, the old man may have a screw loose but the music is pretty damned tight.



P.S. - You can hear full versions of the three tunes that I sampled in this video (when the door opens). They are "Walk on the C-side, "Moire (No Hard Feelings)," & "String Theory." Here's my SoundClick link: Music by Gary Peterson


For more info about The BLOX, visit: www.garypetersonart.com

I read an account of a man, blind at birth that became an accomplished guitarist. In his adult years a surgical procedure gave him sight for the first time and (after meeting the wife and kids, etc.) someone showed him his guitar for the first time. He had no idea what it was - not a clue. This thing with which he was so intimately familiar through touch and tone was totally unrecognizable to him upon sight. He had only ever "seen" it with his hands which shrink the "visible" world to an arm's length. Beyond that, I suspect he could detect interior spaces by the echoes and acoustic resonances of sound in a room (the abstract properties of musical composition are something else altogether).

Wondering how a blind person might express himself on canvas, I drew the above picture representating the sensations of touch and tones while playing the guitar as "seen" inside of my head without any reference to the instrument's outward appearance. Only the area where the two hands touch the guitar fills the picture frame. Beyond that is nothingness without eyesight. Color is a property of light (vision) but also of sound, both being functions of wave frequency.

The amorphous shape at left is where the palm of the hand or thumb touches the back of the (guitar) neck. The white spots are the fingertips playing an Am6 (A minor sixth) chord - my favorite. The four flat ovals at top left are where the left-hand fingers wrap around the fret board. The white dot at top right is where the little finger rests on the soundboard for a finger-picking style. The crescents are fingernails (but feel free to perceive them as some kind of lunar calendar or whatnot if you prefer). The strings and frets are obvious; they can be "seen" (anticipated) by touch. The prong at the bottom, just left of center, is the occasional zinger, the twanging sound of the fingers scraping across the bronze wound bass strings.

As fascinating as the parallels are between light and sound, the differences are also profound. I used color as a convenient analogy in this rendering but I would emphasize that a blind person has no concept of color as we know it. Then again, Ray and Stevie (Jose, Doc, Blind Lemon, et al) demonstrate the expanded resources and enhanced musical connections possible in brains that are free from the demands of visual processing. Those acquired sensibilities are beyond our experience except as enrapt listeners, but I hope that I've provided a reasonable visual model with "Touch and Tones."

On a related note, you hear me play guitar with The Nowhere Men. Here's a link: "D-minor Trilogy" by Gary Peterson

I wrote a new song and painted a picture based on the lyrics. It all started when my fingers stumbled across an A-minor-2nd chord on the guitar. That feverish tone cluster has a half-step interval between B and C at its core, dissonant but in a good way.

I usually compose instrumental music which equates to abstract art but a song is narrative, hence the picture. The watercolor-pencil drawing was done afterward but the image evolved in my mind's eye as I worked on the music. The words describe idle pleasantries and the psychological relationship between this man and woman. The picture is a still-life in multiple exposures. Life is not a dream but it's stranger than fiction. The music engages the mind to explore the space of this painting. The colors are less than natural but then so are the vocal harmonies in the song; they're dark sounding at first, like the Volga Boatman, but they lighten up.

I used a flat pick for this tune instead of finger-style guitar playing. The wrist action articulates the bright, treble tones of the Am2 arpeggio heard after the first two lines of each verse. It's atmospheric: sounds like water in a river, all swirling and eddy-like. That minor chord jangles the nerves real nice and then resolves perfectly into the C major of the main chorus which soothes the ear and translates to the calm, ordered scenario of this dreamscape.

Inspired by a "row, row, row your boat..." motif, I was even going to put "merrily, merrily" in the background vocals but my empiricist philosophical leanings insisted that life is NOT a dream. Still the illustration looks like someone's dreaming - or hallucinating. What's with the couple in the tree, anyway? Well, the line, "...up a tree without a paddle" is just me being funny. We've all been there. Musically, I underscore this semantic glitch with a B-flat major in the chord progression just prior to that line, sidestepping the established pattern. Ha!

Elsewhere, the line "...steady as a rock, now let it roll" points to two lovers who look kind of like Canova's version of Cupid and Psyche perched on a boulder on the far bank. The entire scene is viewed from an enclosed foreground as if inside the listener's head. The dreamer is both the object and subject. Geez-O-Pete what a mix-up. It's like hearing the music from the inside out. This reverie ends with the ethereal A-minor-2nd chord.

Click to hear "Life Is Not A Dream" by Gary Peterson