I put this together today. I think it’s going to end up as the guitar part for a song with lyrics, but I liked it enough as a guitar part that I’m posting it up as just an instrumental. Nothing fancy here — I recorded it with a single mic, did a tiny bit of reverb and EQ, and left it at that.

It’s a capo monster — standard tuning, but capo’d at the second fret, and then again with a partial capo at the 6th fret, covering only strings 3, 4, and 5. I use a Kyser short-cut capo for this. You could use just a single partial capo at the 4th fret to play it a full step lower, of course, which would move it from the key of F# major down to E.

– download Freedom.mp3

Other than that, it’s all in the picking pattern. The trick here is that you finger less than it seems — almost all the chords are only two finger stops. The rising part is actually played in between the two capos.

We moved to a new house. There is a huge backyard, with fruit trees. And there are many snails.

This is the first thing I have recorded in quite a while, and the first in the new house’s music room.

It’s pretty rough. I just wrote it, and haven’t learned to play it very smoothly yet, and I didn’t even try to mix it right, so it clips in places.

– download April Snails.mp3

Open D tuning, on the 1962 Gibson acoustic.