Traveler~~June 2025: Wondering Why—The Red Clay Strays, Purple Rain—Prince (Acoustic)

Community Recordings Audio-Video Of You Playing
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Happy June folks!

This one needs some more practice (what doesn’t?!), but I can see this entering my live set sooner than later.

If you don’t know who this band is, check them out. Their lead singer Brandon Coleman has a stage presence that straight outta 1959.

I hope that you all like my initial rendition of this tune. As always, any feedback is helpful to making the next recording better!

Cheers!

Wondering Why—The Red Clay Strays (YouTube)

Wondering Why—The Red Clay Strays (SoundCloud)

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Keep on playing that guitar Travis! I like how you limit how often you are looking at your fingers when you play. That makes you look like you know what you are doing and its something I want to get better at too.

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Travis quite an intriguing song and I can see what you mean about the 50s echoes in Brandon’s rendition. Your cover perhaps needs a more varied dynamic - finger picking, different strumming patterns, louder / softer vocal sections. Some, or all, of these things will give your performance more colour. Well played.

Brian

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Thank you @GuitarMommaRN07 !! It took me a while to get there, but I generally feel comfortable with my fretting hand with chords in the open position. Keep jamming!!

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Thanks for the feedback @beejay56 !!

I agree with all of your points. I tried building and then pulling back my vocals throughout each verse but I don’t think that it was conveyed very well. I’ll focus on that more. It’s a great idea. I might play around quite a bit more with the last verse.

I played it in triplets and feel like it worked out kinda well. The tricky thing about ripping it down is there is a prominent and driving bass pluck pretty much throughout the whole song. Every half bar at times. I tried to convey that with dynamics on the triplets, but I’m not sure that was conveyed either.

I think the next step could be to play it fingerstyle. Maybe like the first 2/3 of the song is fingerstyle and then I “pick” it up to drive it home.

Thanks for analyzing so thoughtfully!

Rock on :sign_of_the_horns:

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Here is another that I recorded this weekend!

I had to work on this one for a couple of weeks as it’s pretty far off from the original. I hope that you all like it!

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