This band has been playing country music in the mid-Michigan area since 1996. This video captures their live good time vibe. A country band to see if you are in the area. Find out where their next live gig is by visiting their myspace page www.myspace.com/stonecoldband.
- the MuseI created some grooves to improvise over for lessons in my free online harmonica class. This is one of my favorites, a funky blues groove. Take my free online class and lay your own harmonica solo over the groove.
Blowin’ Funk, - © 2007Brian Kelly
The first band I was in about 15 years ago was a two piece called 2nd Story. We played a lot of blues. We looked for old obscure tunes that were popular but forgotten, such as blues tunes from the original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green. Their early stuff was British Blues and it was good stuff.
Once such tune was Lookin’ for Somebody. I think I retained one line of the original lyrics, and changed up the rest. And my guitar player came up with a different and very cool chord progression for the tune. By the time we were done, it didn’t much resemble the Fleetwood Mac version. I suppose this is kind of like the way British Blues could sound very different from the American Blues that inspired it.
In need of a groove for an online jam project, I came up with a percussion groove and, as best I could remember it, the old chord progression my guitar player had developed. The online jam project was a bust, but I used the effort to lay down a harp solo of my own.
Lookin’ Jam, - © 2007Brian Kelly
I became interested in Native American flutes in the early 1990s. Flutes have a certain magical tone to them. And Native American style flutes are tuned to a minor pentatonic scale. This scale is quite similar to the blues scale and has the advantage that there are no “wrong” notes. A perfect choice for meditative playing.
I finally decided that I wanted to make one of my own, and had assembled all the gear needed around 2003. A scrollsaw, drill press, and even a lathe. I did not use the lathe for this flute, but did have the idea of boring a hole through a solid piece of wood to make the barrel, rather than cutting it in half and gluing.
- the MuseWhat I wanted for my menu bar was high level links for categories on the main page, with the lower level categories appearing if you clicked on the high level. In an earlier post, I worked out a pretty easy way to alter the PHP of the sidebar.php file to accomplish this for categories. Not exactly like drop downs in that all categories expand and contract at the same time, but it is faster than individual parents expanding each time you click on them. It also accomplished the main objective of keeping the main page clean.
Once multiple months appeared in the archive, I realized that the same issue needed to be resolved for date archives.
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I’ve read that one way to inspire creativity as a photographer is to put a different lens on your camera, then look put that lens to use. I had just acquired a 24 mm lens for my Nikon D100 and wanted to try it out. That is when I came across this waterwheel at Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan. I always try to capture geometric shapes in how I compose an image, and texture. In particular, I like the texture of the stone building and how it contrasts with the wheel. The unique aspect of this picture that still draws my eye is the green of the wheel.
