Seeing so many of you post your progress gave me the courage to share too.
I very much enjoy the music of Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and tried to use my ear to learn parts of his song Outside Of This Town. Here’s my attempt:
I’ve tried different ideas for a more aggressive ending but couldn’t quite make it sound right. Maybe someone has some ideas? And also in general on how to end blues songs nicely.
Don’t know the original but it certainly reminded me of a few things. Love to help you on the ending but I am just restarting my blues journey and I always get caught at the end on an impro and seem to leave myself hanging but the idea is to get back to the root note. But you need a fancy way of doing it !
Hi Kamil well done on your first recording in AVOYP section, always a bit of a nerve wrecker to put yourself in the public.
Sounded super cool, your strumming had this cool Texas blues groove like good old Stevie. No nits from me guitar wise, perhaps a better angle at your guitar and sound quality to figure out so you don’t hear strings ringing out, other than that great stuff!
Oh and the ending - I guess you could go with any 7 chord in it’s key or something like that. In Justin’s blues lessons he has this great chord he uses to finish off 12 bar blues and it would work great which is A13, just make sure you transpose it to your key. It’s 5x567x fretting starting top string.
Well done Kamil. I love Kingfish’s music. He is an amazing old soul in such a young man. Anyway, I think you hit that very well. Right amount of distortion, nailed the riff and sounded great overall.
Bravo, Kamil. What a fabulous first recording to share.
My only problem was that it was far too short Solved that but just hitting the repeat button a couple of times.
Great rhythm and tone. Got a great Texas-style shuffle going down.
Can’t offer anything on the ending. Would just listen to more of Kingfish and others to try and emulate. But I think your ending with a lick sliding down to a chord worked OK.
Like Adrian suggested, it would be great if you could set up to be square to the camera and turn up the amp loud enough to drown out the acoustic sound of pick on strings. Guess depending on home circumstances, perhaps that’s not possible.
Hi Kamil well done on your first recording in AVOYP section, this is right down my street Blues is my thing!
You played it very well and got the SRV vibe down very well too, to get the ending right you need to feel where the music is going, not just play it - Blues of any flavour is about emotions, to be a good player you need to feel them; the end will come to you when you’ve learned the vocabulary and put it all together. It will become instinctive when you’ve immersed yourself in it, listening to your favourite artists and styles is part of the equation.
Good luck, you will get there!
Hi Kamil, played with enthusiasm and probably would have engaged me even more if all of you was in shot. I nit pick. I do know some of Christone “Kingfish” Ingram’s songs but not this one so much, but what you played was good.
Thank you all. That is very encouraging and helpful. I will be incorporating your feedback into my playing and next recording.
Both video and audio were recorded by a laptop. Unfortunately I can’t increase my amp volume much more because of the neighbors. If I’ve bought a recording microphone and put it right next to the amp, do you think it would still pick up the acoustic sound of pick on strings? I wonder how loud the amp would have to be in such case to completely drown out this unwanted sound.
@adi_mrok Damn that chord has both nice bluesy & jazzy feel. Just played it and more classic 7th chords over SRV Tin Pan Alley with a nice clean tone and hall reverb. It was really fun. I will definitely practice it more to be able to change to these chords quicker and experiment using them to end blues songs.
Great first AVOYP performance, Kamil! Loved the Texas shuffle feel.
Well, for posting here you don’t need to have perfect audio, but I do agree that electric guitar recorded where you can hear the acoustic noise of the strings is less than ideal. What kind of mic did you get? If it’s a dynamic mic the standard practice is to put it right up to amp, and the nature of a dynamic mic is less likely to pick up noise from the rest of the room. If it’s a condenser mic it will be more sensitive. You might need it a bit further from the amp (compared to a dynamic mic), and it’s much more likely to pick up noise from the rest of the room (like the sound of your pick on the strings).
Thank you very much. Sounds like the ending might be better than I initially thought.
@J.W.C I didn’t buy a microphone yet because I wanted to first try to use the gear that I already have. Being nicely motivated by the replies from this thread, in the last few days, I’ve spend some time experimenting with recording directly through the USB with Yamaha THR30II. I’ve found it quite challenging because using my favourite presets, the tones through the USB were much different than through the amp speaker. I started with farty USB recordings like this. Actually, first results were even worse because they also had clipping which I fixed by lowering USB output from the THR. With higher overdrive and gain presets it was even worse. I decided to try a different approach to amp settings and started to get promising results. See this USB recording with improved amp settings. I might also have to raise my strings a bit because fret buzz is more easily hearable through the USB recording.
Based on your microphones description, it looks like a dynamic mic might work in my case too. I will remember to try it when I get a proper audio interface in the future. For now, I will make the best use of THR30II USB recording. Hopefully I can dial in some nice tone for my next AVOYP.