Challenges

There seems to be all kinds of challenges in the blogosphere, mostly photo challenges, and writing challenges. Here are a few challenges I recorded.

The first challenge was the song that started out as a drum track that Joel put together. He sent me the track and gave me the challenge to make a song out of it. I laid down a bass track, followed by a rhythm guitar track. I made up a vocal track on the spot, so I have not written down the lyrics, then I laid down the lead guitar track. One take for each track. I named the song  Joel’s Beat.

 

The second challenge was when I was finally able to get my car washed (car washes had been closed under the lockdown). I washed my car and what did I get? Dust and muddy kitty prints all over the lid.

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The third challenge was for Big Baby Owl who had flown over to another branch on the cottonwood tree, then decided to climb the trunk of the tree to get up where Mama Owl was perched high above her. Big Baby Owl climbed and climbed, flapped her wings over the more difficult parts, and finally got into a fork in the tree about 10 feet from Mama Owl. She looked up at Mama Owl and Mama Owl flew off. Big Baby Owl was devastated. She just stood in the fork of the tree with her head bowed (click on the photos for an enlarged slide show).

 

The fourth challenge was photographing black Irises that are bleached purple in our intense sunshine. The irises look almost black to the naked eye, but properly exposed photos show how purple black really is.

 

The fifth challenge was doing super wide-angle photos of Spunk and living to write about it and post the photos.

 

The Capsaicin Club (Red or Green?)

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What is that paparazzo doing to that “poor innocent guitar”, as Laurie likes to say? Listen to the The Capsaicin Club for clues.

Stay tuned for the video.

The Capsaicin Club
Music and lyrics by Timothy Price

Timothy Price: vocals, rhythm and lead guitars, digital percussion, recording, final mix.
Ron Blood: bass guitar, recording, post processing, final mix.

 

Jimmy Smith

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Meet Jimmy Smith — guitar player, guitar teacher, guitar repairman, and guitar builder extraodinnaire. Not only is he great guitar enthusiast, he’s a master craftsman, studio tech and all around nice guy who loves Fender Stratocasters and their shapely features.

After playing in a band through the eighties, where he maintained all the instruments and built sets for the band, Jimmy started repairing instruments, and building his own guitars. He opened for business in Olympia, Washington in 1999 before he and his wife, Lisa, moved his business to the Durango, Colorado area a couple of years later. They finally relocated to Corrales, New Mexico in 2009 as GRS Music.

Jimmy changed the name of the business to The StratAcademy around 2016, and moved to the current location on Corrales Road a year ago. The StratAcademy is made up of a small retail space, his repair shop, a music studio for practice, lessons and recording, and a larger shop where Jimmy builds guitars and holds seminars on building guitars where students build their own solid body electric guitars from scratch under Jimmy’s tutelage.

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Jimmy likes to experiment with different woods and materials for guitar bodies and necks. He is experimenting with Oriented Strand Board (OSB), commonly known as flake board, to build guitars. This is the second OSB guitar he is building with a Les Paul style body. He built a Strat style guitar out of OSB which will have its own post after Jimmy finishes a video of him playing it so we can hear how it sounds.

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Jimmy explaining the OSB process.
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OSB neck for the OSB Les Paul.

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This body is made of a hardwood that is very lightweight. It feels like a hard balsa wood. You can see neck and body templates in the shelves behind Jimmy.

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A Texas Flag Telecsater body Jimmy got from a pawn shop.
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Jimmy made this body out of 2x4s used to frame buildings.

Stay tuned for more about the StratAcademy.