Pamparo in Toronto

I’ve been having a new found fascination for licks that incorporate open strings these past days. And I am not taking about the licks on an open-chord formation. To demonstrate what I mean, here’s a tab of a simple, yet challenging, lick that I was playing with last night. Just a note that there are a couple of slides/pull-offs that I didn’t get the chance to include in this tab and also the phrasing is a little different.

It was so much fun that I decided to record it so that I won’t forget the phrasing myself.

So, without further ado, here’s the 30-second clip:

Disclaimer: This is a rough take so please try not to judge the fluidity and/or tone!

If you have a lick that uses open strings, please let me know. I would definitely want to improve this technique!

Have fun!

I’m in a blog funk right now! Well, I can think of some reason why and it’s not that I have nothing to say. For those who know me, they can easily testify that I am a very opinionated person and that I always have something to say. Whether that is a good thing or not, they can be the judge of that. In any case, I just want to give an update to everyone on the other things that are happenning and have happened in recent days

- Sickness
Me and my son Gabby have been sick for about a week now. We are getting better but the weather here in Toronto hasn’t been cooperating. It has been fluctuating like crazy from very warm to almost freezing. Please pray for our speedy recovery.

- Moving
This Saturday, we will be moving to another unit down the hall from where we are now. Needless to say, we’ve been busy packing things. I can’t believe we’ve accumulated that much in the short 4 1/2 years we’ve been married.

- Music
Not much doing here. I was trying to revisit the scratch tracks I’ve laid down about a month ago or so. But that is also proving to be a challenge. I need to get a great realistic drum generator. I have the rhythm guitar down but no drum beats to match it. I am loving the tone I am getting from my rig right now. So that has been a real blessing to me!

- Church Ministry
We are in a big transition period right now. We lost very good musicians recently but also gained great ones. The problem is the getting used to and re-alignment of schedules. For the past 3 Sundays I’ve played, twice we only rehearsed 1 1/2 hours before service. Even good musicians will have trouble with that and I can tell you that we did have some challenges. But praise God for always being there to bail us out!

- Work
It has been a very busy month of May for me! With the new role of making sure that our storage infrastructure is running as smoothly as possible, it’s quite demanding. Although, it was fun working with PHP again to graph some performance metrics using GD library. Man, how I love scripts & automation

- Life
As always, it has been good! Praise God!

I did this horrendous techno-loop to satisfy my craving!