I'll never forget the day I got my first "real" guitar. It was a cherry red Korean Samick cheap-o that had terrible electronics. The moment I got it home until the time I was good enough to start a band I did not put it down.
One of my favourite ways to learn new songs was to buy guitar magazines such as Guitar World or Guitar for the Practising Musician and in one of these magazines was an advert for guitar strings. One such advert featured a picture of Kim Thayil from Soundgarden who was my idol at the time. It was for Ernie Ball's "super slinky" strings. I thought it sounded so cool at the time so I started buying this brand and only this brand. 10 gauge, regular slinky. Here's a link to these strings.
It's funny how people do not change.
Every time I restring my guitar I always think about how I would never use anything but Ernie Ball "10's". I've tried a few other brands and gauges over the years but 10's are the best for my style of playing. I'm not a real fast "lead player" but I do like to throw the occasional guitar hook in and I'm not really just a rhythm player but I do like to have strings that I can hit hard and stay relatively jangly. These are the perfect strings for me.
Later in my guitar playing career my grandmother bought me a Mexican Fender Strat Special for re roofing a house. It was a terrible weekend of grueling Ontario heat in the summer. What a bad idea. Re-roofing a house in early August in Ontario's hottest summer in years. It paid off. I went to Sam's music downtown Toronto and picked out this really cool black on black mexicastor. I loved that thing. To this day I pick it up and it feels perfect. I've had it for years and I will always have it. I'll never forget the first time I strung it up with new Ernie Ball 10's and hit into some Soundgarden. Probably a badly played version of "Spoonman" or "Black Hole Sun". I'll always remember that summer as being one of my best. Maybe that's why I still play this lime green package of strings. To remember my youth and the feeling of hitting that "G" chord on your favourite guitar with brand new strings with the amp turned up full blast.
Check out Ernie Ball's website here for more of their awesome products
Love,
Marty
@martyzylstra
May 24, 2011
May 9, 2011
the Challenge
One of my closest friends right now is Dominique Fricot.
He is great because he and I have a lot of things in common and he's not afraid to spout opinions that I agree or disagree with. We are both musicians, we both are fairly outspoken/opinionated, we both have similar tastes in music, and we both have similar belief systems.
I may have said this in my blog before but one of the things I love about Dom is that he isn't afraid to challenge me. A few months ago he made a suggestion that impacted me so deeply that I took a step back from booze for just over 2 month. I stayed sober 60 days. He also challenged me to continue to write this blog and always know the difference between "then" and "than" (which I'm still working on btw).
So last week Dom & I were hanging out and he asked me to play a solo show with him. I was given this advice from another friend about shows: always say yes and THEN figure out how you'll do it. So I agreed that I should play my songs live. Get the project off the ground. Let the songs organically grow into something new. Live energy can inject something into music. Every time I've ever played a song live for a while whether on a tour or locally in various projects, something always happens to the song. It matures. My feelings towards a particular song change. Usually for the better but it also tends to weed out the bad stuff from the good stuff. The good material gets better and the weak songs either get honed or fall off the radar and no longer stay as part of the set.
So here we are. This event (details tba) is a small benefit show. Dom seems to like to play these types of events fairly often because he's so philantropic or something but I'm glad to get a chance to play some of my songs and maybe I'll even have a few suprise guests/songs for the crowd that night. All in all, I'm completely scared out of my wits.
Dom's quote to me was, "everyone should do something that scares them once a day. After about a year, you would be invincible". And when I asked to borrow his guitar he said, "No nirvana shit".
I might cover in bloom just for him.
Check out Dominique's music/blog/web here
Check out my favourite song I wrote here
Love,
Marty
@martyzylstra
He is great because he and I have a lot of things in common and he's not afraid to spout opinions that I agree or disagree with. We are both musicians, we both are fairly outspoken/opinionated, we both have similar tastes in music, and we both have similar belief systems.
I may have said this in my blog before but one of the things I love about Dom is that he isn't afraid to challenge me. A few months ago he made a suggestion that impacted me so deeply that I took a step back from booze for just over 2 month. I stayed sober 60 days. He also challenged me to continue to write this blog and always know the difference between "then" and "than" (which I'm still working on btw).
So last week Dom & I were hanging out and he asked me to play a solo show with him. I was given this advice from another friend about shows: always say yes and THEN figure out how you'll do it. So I agreed that I should play my songs live. Get the project off the ground. Let the songs organically grow into something new. Live energy can inject something into music. Every time I've ever played a song live for a while whether on a tour or locally in various projects, something always happens to the song. It matures. My feelings towards a particular song change. Usually for the better but it also tends to weed out the bad stuff from the good stuff. The good material gets better and the weak songs either get honed or fall off the radar and no longer stay as part of the set.
So here we are. This event (details tba) is a small benefit show. Dom seems to like to play these types of events fairly often because he's so philantropic or something but I'm glad to get a chance to play some of my songs and maybe I'll even have a few suprise guests/songs for the crowd that night. All in all, I'm completely scared out of my wits.
Dom's quote to me was, "everyone should do something that scares them once a day. After about a year, you would be invincible". And when I asked to borrow his guitar he said, "No nirvana shit".
I might cover in bloom just for him.
Check out Dominique's music/blog/web here
Check out my favourite song I wrote here
Love,
Marty
@martyzylstra
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