Alright, so tomorrow I start my journey to Djangofest. I am driving out to the beach to drop of the dogs with a friend, staying the night in Seaside, Oregon and then taking the 5 hour drive from there to Langley. I should arrive in Langley around 3-5pm.
I plan on taking a bunch of pictures. Hopefully I will manage to get more than I got last year which was like 5 or 6. This time I hope to make it out of there with a few hundred pictures and mabye 2-10 30 second video clips. We will see how I am able to manage.
I’ll be coming home on Sunday night and I will be busy Monday and Tuesday after Djangofest but at some point I plan on posting the pictures somewhere. Stay tuned and see you all after the fest!

Nothing much has happened lately. I might go down tonight to Pete Krebs’ jazz session at The Moon and Sixpence Pub and watch him play. I introduced myself to Pete last week and he turned out to be a really friendly chap and invited me to come and possibly sit in for a few tunes. I got to play around with his Favino #882 for a few minutes and its a great guitar. I am jealous.
I have been messing around with Djangos Tiger lately. I am using the Transcribe program to jam along to MP3 files of the Robin Nolan Djangos Tiger arrangement and using soloing ideas from Patrick Sassois’ Djangos Tiger tune and found some amazing ideas.
Next time you do Djangos Tiger try using the Amaj7 arp, Dmaj7 arp, and the A6 arp, as derived from the C6 arp shape in Appel Direct, which I sorta show below. Together these sound really cool over that tune are are much easier to pull off than the traditional melody.
—————————————–
-4-5-4-5-1-2-1-2————————-
—————–1-2-1-2—————–
————————-1-2-1-2———
———————————-3-4—-
————————————–4-5-
-4-5-6-7—————-
———5-4————
————-7———-
—————6——–
—————–7-6-5–
————————
This is what I use to supplement the traditional melody. Its easy if you are a beginner and can’t quite manage to do the harder stuff.

I am making huge strides in my practicing. I have memorized nearly all of a 45 song list of tunes, although I still need to work more on just a few of them such as Sheik Of Araby, Blues For Ike, Micro and Tea For Two. Also, I am starting to improve on my beginnings and endings now, but I still need more work. Since I have memorized most of the chords, it has also been a lot easier to pick up the melody lines into memory.
I have made slight improvement with my playing over Django’s Tiger. I can finally play the head cleanly over the faster version in the Robin Nolan book. The Transcribe software helped a lot for that one. I love that song more than probably any of them because its challenging.
Finally, I have to add that Michael Horowitz helped me out quite a bit this month and I owe him a lot for all the useful information he shared. He is a great teacher and anyone who has a chance should try to learn from him.

I have discovered that one reason why my guitar soloing lacks flavor is probably because I have been focusing too much on minor arpeggios and scales. Up until now I have been mostly wrestling with getting minor licks to work with songs including using the harmonic minor scale, but I have been lately thinking less of the use of the dominant scale forms, especially when mixed with the diminished scales.
This week I am experimenting with thinking of the dominant forms first, then adding major forms or the dorian scale, and finally thinking of the minor forms last. Hopefully this experiment will result in me finding a breakthrough in my playing. Wish me luck! Its all just a journey of endless experimentation and I love every minute of it.
For example, in order of preference, my choice of scales or arpeggios might be dominant 7th, diminished, major 7th, whole tone, harmonic minor, major 6th, minor 7th, minor 6th, minor, chromatic.