Another version of Little Wing - on a Chapman Stick

Funny, but a couple weeks back I posted a live video of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Little Wing and I just ran across this unique interpretation of the same song on a crazy looking stringed instrument called a Chapman Stick. I'm not exactly sure how the instrument is strung or tuned, but it seems like it's got both bass and guitar strings strung together on the same fretboard. Anyhow I thought this was pretty cool. Bob Culbertson is the musician here.

Afghanistan

I found this perspective interesting.

What the Soviets were saying about Afghanistan 20+ years ago

SRV - Little Wing

Here's a live version of Stevie Ray Vaughan playing Little Wing - my favorite tune that he plays, and probably my all-time favorite guitar instrumental. There are similarities to the studio version, but quite a bit of differences too. This is a cover of a Hendrix tune (there are some cool live versions of Hendrix playing this out on youtube also to give you an idea of how close SRV's interpretation is to Hendrix's).

You can see he has trouble getting his amp to feedback for him in places. At the end it goes into a different song.

There aren't many songs like this one. It's somewhat unique even among SRV's stuff - maybe "Lenny" is the most similar - but there's just not much that sounds like this.

Google Books Project

Click the link to read Google co-founder Sergey Brin's op-ed on the value of Google's controversial proposed online book library for out of print books.

He claims over 10 million books are now out of print and are increasingly difficult to find even in the best stocked libraries. It really is an ambitious project to make knowledge more accessible to everyone - and to prevent some books from being lost forever.

(I've read recent articles that libraries now regularly have to cull the shelves due to space constraints and the increasing volume of new material. Sorry, I don't have a link on that, but read it in NYTimes maybe year or two ago if you're the investigative type. After reading the article I did a search of the local Nashville public library system also and found some of the so-called classics aren't available here either presumably due to similar culling processes over the year. Apparently the many of the classics weren't being requested very often and ended up on the cull piles due to their unpopularity.)

Brin on the agreement with the Author's Guild and Publishers:

This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.

Richard Leo Johnson - Glidepath

I was looking through one of my songwriting books and the name "Richard Leo Johnson - Glidepath" scratched on a page. I sometimes will jot cool things down when I see them - I guess I saw him on a TV show somewhere. For Richard Leo Johnson I wrote down "cool guitar-strum technique - reminds me some of Auten music on cable access." (the Auten mention is probably guitarist D.R. Auten - he's the only D.Auten I can find reference to on the web.)

I looked up a video for Glidepath and here's what I found. I still think it's awesome.


Here's a tune from D.R. Auten I found on youtube I thought was cool.