May - Videos, Recording, Awards and Festivals

As T.S.Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, "April is the cruelest month."  This year, the weather gods gave us a pretty good example of that.   Still, it's May now and we're moving on with barely a backward glance and the promise of warmer days.

I have to say, though, that April was pretty positive in a musical vein.

• We now have the finished versions of the videos we shot in March - see the April Blog entry for the story.
• I was into David Findlay's studio for an afternoon and we laid down guitar tracks for three new songs. That makes seven towards the next CD.
• We did the initial shoot of videos for two of the new songs.
• The Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival added your humble correspondent to the line-up for the 2013 festival in August.
• I've also been booking tour dates through upstate New York and New England in the fall - more on this later.

Anyone hearing me complain about April is invited to smack me.

Videos
If you're following me on Facebook, you've already seen that I've set up a YouTube channel to collect my videos in one place.  The lovely and talented Andy & Ariana who run the Night Kitchen monthly concert series in Wolfville have several videos of my performances.  The Hamilton Guitar Association has one as well.

A few days ago, we added the first of the two videos we shot in March.  Waiting For McAfee is a guitar instrumental that started during an attempt to repair broken anti-virus software.  While I was chatting with their on-line support, their technician took over control of my computer remotely.  As he tinkered around with the software, I was just watching so I picked up my guitar.  I put the guitar into open G minor tuning (D G D G Bb D) and started noodling.  After about 20 minutes of watching the remote session, I had the bones of a pretty good piece. They eventually fixed the software and gave back the computer and over the course of a few days, I finished the song.

As an aside, the software broke again several times and I went through several more on-line remote sessions and came up with another song, also in open G minor tuning.  Its working title (stolen unashamedly from Douglas Adams) was McAfee are a bunch of mindless jerks who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.  It seemed a bit long to put on the back cover of a CD so its final title is Still Waiting.
 
You can watch all the videos and subscribe to my YouTube Channel here

Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival
The other major news is that I am delighted to announce that the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival has added me to their line up for the 28th annual edition of the festival in August. Details are still to come on the schedule but I can tell you that I will be involved in a guitar workshop and will be performing on the Bandstand Stage during the festival.  The festival runs from August 8th through 11th.  The line-up looks excellent and tickets are available on the website.  Sorry, the early bird deadline has passed but it's still a great deal.

More To Come
There's lots more news but we'll leave it there for now.  I'm off to New Orleans for the 9th Annual ZMR Awards on May 11th.  I'm honoured to have been nominated for Best Instrumental Album - Acoustic.  The winner for this and the other categories will be announced at the show which promises to be a great evening's entertainment regardless of who wins.

I'll have more news on the other videos and the recording we did in April in another blog.

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