January 6, 2012

Welcome to the New Year and I hope everybody had a good and relaxing Holiday Season. This week we got back in stride with a few new Target releases and a couple Fly On The Wall videos. Our in the studio lessons this week featured Fred working on adding the vocal part to our arrangement of Ain’t No Sunshine, and Paris taking a look at the intro to Nothing Else Matters, by Metallica.

The lessons we added this week included Damien Rice’s unreleased tune Wild And Free, a song we found here at YouTube from a few recent appearances of his. It is another great example of his simple, but incredibly inspired and moving songs.

We also reached into our Recommend A Lesson list and pulled out No Matter What by Badfinger, a very talented group of musicians who got started with the Beatles’ Apple label and big support from Paul McCartney. Pete Ham and Tom Evans managed to write a handful of great tunes that have stood the test of time and I hope to get to more of them in the near future.

On the obscure front we looked again to the English band Caravan. Their song Hoedown (not to be confused with Aaron Copland’s piece as done by Emerson, Lake & Palmer), is an example of their use of unusual time signatures and some of the lesson focuses on singing along with the odd timing.

We also want to welcome our sister-sites TotallyVocals and TotallyKeyboards into the New Year and hope everybody’s musical life is happy and healthy.

Stay Tuned & In Touch,

Neil