Kaleponi

Kathy Wingert is one of the elite among custom luthiers, she builds exquisite instruments of the very finest materials and has a gift for unusual visual approaches. For this year’s Healdsburg Guitar Festival she built four remarkable instruments including a dramatic harp guitar, a dainty but ferocious little parlor guitar, and two that showed the influence of the steampunk design movement. Kathy stopped by on her way home from the guitar festival and I took advantage of the opportunity to play one of the steampunk guitars and shoot a little video. (more…)

I’ve given slack key workshops at a number of local Aloha Festivals over the years. Several times I preceded or followed Hiram Bell and his always compelling `ukulele workshop. I was invited back this year, and coincidentally a friend expressed an interest in learning the lovely old North Kohala song, Paliokamoa. My friend had seen the version I did last year. I decided to create a tutorial on the song in the form of a video and tablature. (more…)

I’m happily surprised that there is such a thing as a vacation even for retired folks like us. Our trips to Kailua take us to a different world, different routines, different opportunities. I love walking around our neighborhood in Walnut Creek but in Kailua we’re walking with the Ko`olau filling half the horizon. I love the music we make and hear in Northern California, but on O`ahu we can never find the time to take in all the amazing talent playing all around the island. And of course the food, the shopping, the friends, it all piles up into a full time adventure.

I’m holding on to the good times as much as I can with a few videos from the trip. One features Lynn and her hula sisters, na wahine u`i, accompanied by my slack key. The others are a couple of clips from Honey’s at the Ko`olau Golf Course, where Mike Kaawa leads the Hawaiian Boy Crew on Sunday afternoon. (more…)

Finding Ozzie Kotani‘s book, Guitar Playing Hawaiian Style, in the old Kihei Disc record store was the key to my learning slack key. Ozzie is a remarkably adept teacher, and his book showed me the baby steps needed to begin my journey. Along with these fine grained details he included wonderful arrangements and compositions, charming pieces of music that entranced while they taught. His songs were so much fun they made me practice harder so I could get to the next piece. (more…)

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that my lovely wife Lynn took up hula when we retired a few years ago. It’s been a central part of our life since then, bringing us a whole new world of friends, interests, and experiences. Hula has added to our enjoyment of trips to Hawai`i and to my enjoyment of slack key guitar as well.

One of the high points of my week is the hula practice we host, when the house is filled with charming dancers, their hands flowing through the story they’re dancing. The other day I set out to shoot a video and when I realized it was hula practice day I decided to play R. Alex Anderson’s classic Lovely Hula Hands. Then happily I managed to capture a bit of the hula practice to add to my video. (more…)

Since Lynn remodeled the backyard so beautifully I’ve been charmed by the waving reeds she planted. I’ve been looking for the right angle, right light, right song to do a video featuring the swaying of those stalks. It’s been a pretty chilly winter so outdoor video opportunities have been slim, but we had a few nice days while Ledward was staying with us and we set up to see if we could capture the dancing reeds along with the cute little Tacoma Papoose guitar. I brought out my Composite Acoustics OX that I keep tuned low and it matched up perfectly with the Bflat tuning Ledward chose for the Papoose. (more…)

The hillsides around us are dotted with magnificent trees we call “live oaks” because they maintain their foliage in the winter. One particularly impressive example sits in a meadow adjacent to Acalanes Ridge, the highest peak in our immediate neighborhood. The East Bay Regional Park District maintains a trail between the Briones Reservoir and Mt. Diablo that takes us up to the ridge and the majestic oak tree. Ledward and I have been hiking along the trail and scouting locations for a video, so when we reached the meadow and the live oak we knew we had found our spot. (more…)

Lei Collins and Maddy Lam composed one of my favorite Hawaiian songs, Ke Aloha. It’s a love song written to one whose fragrance is alluring in the evening time. The melody is irresistible ear candy, and it flows so nicely in taropatch open G tuning. Patrick Landeza taught the song at one of his workshops long ago and I’ve played it ever since. (more…)

We’ve been staying pretty busy playing shows and jamming so it took a while to get Ledward up to Digital Duck Studio for a recording and video session. I was especially anxious to capture some of his playing on my recently acquired 1949 Martin T-18 Tiple. This unusual instrument is tuned like an `ukulele but has ten metal strings arranged in four courses. It’s quite a challenge to play well, but I knew Ledward would be the guy for the job.

We’ve been jamming a lot on Lili`u E lately, and I really like what Ledward came up with on the tiple for this one. (more…)

It all started innocently enough, Lynn suggested heading down to the Kailua Beach for a splash. I grabbed the GoPro, mounted on a little Gorillapod, just to goof around. I captured a “going out” shot, some “out here” shots, and a “coming in” shot. We had a great time bobbing in the refreshing water, watched a few kiters, then headed home.

Once I got the clips loaded Lynn asked for something to share with our buddies back home. Once I started combing through them I decided we should add a little background music, so I cranked up my new default recording rig. I’m going direct from the pickup through an effects box into an audio recorder, instead of trying to mic the acoustic sound of the guitar. The first “sea” song I thought of was Kai Hanupanupa, the Emerson Brothers tune we saw in this video from our Walnut Creek kanikapila. (more…)