Four Strong Winds play-along, Jan 2023 Patreon post

Sad news of Canadian singer songwriter Ian Tyson's passing.

Perhaps the most identifiable song he wrote & performed was Four Strong Winds.

That song vaulted into the stratosphere by Neil Young & Nicolette Larson's cover on his 'Comes a Time' album. Or as other half says, allowed Ian to retire comfortably to his ranch lol

If you want to have one classic Canadian campfire song in your pocket, this is it!

I've worked up the elements to a tutorial/playalong in a Patreon post. 

It has jam tracks for with simple fingerpicked melody on guitar, guitar strum and the tracks together so you can hear how they sound together.

Also lyric sheet with chord charts. as well as hand notated sheet music for the melody,  to avoid any potential claims of copyright violation. I won't do  the melody notation for every song but I wanted to offer it in this case. In further posts, I will  tell you the source of the sheet music, maybe include a partial  image like this so that you can get an idea of how complex. 

There are also tips on playing certain sections, instrumentation, and more.

Here's the link to the Patreon post: FOUR STRONG WINDS.

Cheers.

Type size & page breaks - hurdles to learning

Who all appreciates big print?

Student who had a concussion last year had trouble focusing with one eye. Made choices for larger print for her.

But who am I kidding, we all appreciate larger print.

Music publishers make obvious choices about print sizes to produce a book more cheaply. Type size and page breaks are not chosen optimally for musicians.

When a complicated section goes over the page or a repeat gores back to Lord knows where, that becomes a node where students give up.

Even lyric sheets could be laid out with clearer breaks between chorus and verse.

AND ONE MORE THING, I don't like sheet music that goes over 3 pages.  Even if taped together, it flops off the stand. I'd rather sheet music run long north to south, in a legal page size type format, if that means it doesn't go over as many pages. But these are the limitations of anything mass produced on paper.

Two pages in total are best. Fair pages are doable, but you have to rig up a support for your stand. I've used a cut down bankers box (example, see next post), a duplo blocks box.They often get recycled on me during a Christmas purge and aren't there when I need them, and the cycle begins again.

If you own your own music, you can copy the master, then cut and paste the copy to  work better for you.

Ultimately when learning a piece, you have to be able to form a 'map' of the piece in your head. That's what large type and thoughtful page breaks allow you to do.

Anyway, that's what I will prioritize in my Patreon lessons: large print & page break that make it easier to internalize a piece.

Full tutorial for this coming later this month,