Guitar Workshop: Loog Guitars

In various parts of the States, they're cutting school budgets in order to continue forcing unions on teachers, passing out condoms to first-graders, and supplementing the ever-essential administrative staffs whose occupants are rarely left alone the inside a classroom in their entire careers. Obviously some things have to go, including art and music programs, even though studies have shown that playing a musical instrument improves academic performance over the long haul.

(Keep telling yourself, it's for the children ...)

For some of you parents out there, it's time for an alternative. (It's also time to think about what to get little John Paul and Mary Margaret for Christmas, so pay attention.)

Loog Guitars started life in 2010, as the concept behind a masters thesis by a graduate student at New York University. Rafael Atijas wanted to help children learn to play the guitar in a way that was not quite so overwhelming. It also shows that you can do a lot with only three strings.

The guitar comes in one of three body shapes; the rounded cigar box*, the "Stratocaster" style, and the triangle. It also comes as a kit, which a functionally literate adult can assemble in fifteen minutes using only a Philips screwdriver. It also comes with nylon strings, which are not as difficult to play as steel strings. There are also accessories, spare parts, and even beginner's lessons, all available on the company website. And the price is only $149.00.

The videos featured here give some idea of how easily the guitar plays, and how it can appeal to adults as well. This old picker may be so inclined to try it for himself, in which case you can expect a full report right here, before the end of the year. It is safe to say from experience, that learning to play the guitar forty-six years ago this month, has brought endless satisfaction to yours truly in all the years since. Your children will thank you later.

Really.

* There is a history in rural areas, dating to the 1930s, of "guitars" fashioned from cigar boxes, and having as few as three strings. A number of country blues artists started out on such homemade instruments. The video lessons produced for the company tell more of the story.
 

Guitar Workshop: The Music of Mayberry

For this week's installment of our more or less usual midday Thursday feature, our tribute to the late Andy Griffith continues.

Besides a love for the stage, Griffith was also devoted to music, both as a singer and a guitar player. The former won him more acclaim than the latter. He recorded a series of albums of classic gospel hymns for Sparrow Records, as well as a 1996 release, I Love to Tell the Story: 25 Timeless Hymns, which eventually went platinum. One of the aforementioned earned him a Grammy Award.

But while he was no virtuoso on guitar, his playing was quite capable, and his guitar was a periodic feature on the series during its eight year run. Griffith picked and sang in his early movies, as well as in numerous episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. This first clip, entitled “The Guitar Player” and originally broadcast on October 24, 1960 (Season 1, Episode 3), Andy helps local player Jim Lindsey (James Best) get a chance at stardom, by arresting a visiting music group. We see a few musical scenes here, some of them obviously overdubbed. Even "Mister Guitar" himself, Chet Atkins, couldn't play lead and rhythm parts at the same time to that degree.

Then there's the usual Southern banter:

You heard all these fellas that come through here, playin' in the shows. How 'bout that fella we see every now and then on television, shakin' and screamin'? Sounds like somebody's beatin' his dog.

Skip ahead about seven months, to May 15, 1961, as Mayberry's favorite son returns in “The Guitar Player Returns” (Season 1, Episode 31), having made his fortune as the star picker of "Bobby Fleet and His Band With A Beat." (Groovy.) Our sheriff learns the real story soon enough, that our rising star has fallen a bit lately, and is in some financial difficulty. Andy gets to the bottom of it, with the help of a now-less discourteous Bobby Fleet. Notice also how Andy has already lost some of the country-boy hokum near the end of the first season, paving the way for the addition of other oddball supporting characters as the series went on.

What authentic playing is actually featured in these two episodes, provides an adequate demonstration of the "rockabilly style" already sweeping the South, and making a few inroads up North, by the dawn of the 1960s. We will explore that style again in a future installment.