Not Bad For a Girl: Katie is back on the airwaves, and she's learning new tunes

By Katie Marie, on Thursday, June 3, 2010

After a couple of days of rain it’s nice to see the sun has decided to make another appearance. Let’s hope it hangs around for a little while longer!

As always I hope you’ve had a nice week, mine’s been full of music and kayaking – horrah!

In between those two things I also managed to host my radioshow Acoustic PM, which is the first live show I’ve been able to do in about a month as I’ve been busy with oodles of random stuff, from moving to gigging to being laid up with the lurgy – so it was really lovely to be back. Big huge thankies to Giles for looking after things while I was away and if you tuned in I’m sure you’ll agree he did a fantastic job!

Karon (my lovely Cajon) had a very exciting gig last weekend as she and I played at the Exmouth Festival with Nicky Swann. The sound guy there came over and was asking about micking up Karon, and after much deliberation then said ‘I know a really great game we can play – let’s play how many different mics can we use on one Cajon!’. Karon and I thought this sounded like lots of fun.

So three mics later we managed to get the most pounding, funky, kick-ass tone you’ve ever heard a little Cajon produce. And reverberating around the Exmouth Manor Gardens she did sound mighty fine indeedy, yay! It was lots of fun. The mics we decided on were an SM57 in the soundhole, a Shure Beta 52a kick drum mic placed behind the sound hole (about 10″ away from it) and then to the side was an AKG C1000. Karon had the biggest grin you’ve ever seen and wanted to know if we could do that at every gig, lol

I’ve also been hard at work learning some cover songs as I’ll be off to Germany next month and a couple of the festy dates I’m playing have asked for a more upbeat set, so I figured I’d have a look at maybe learning a few new tunes as I’ve not done that in a little while.

First up on my list was a song by Train called Soul Sister (I’m sure you’ve probably heard it on the radio as they’ve been plugging it quite a bit!) which is a lovely simplistic tune that’s upbeat and very catchy. So I worked it all out and then my cunning plan was to maybe try incorporating a stomp box (which my right foot will be armed with) and then tapping a tambourine with my left foot.

Being a drummer, I thought doing all this would come very naturally to me and that I’d have no worries playing everything – I couldn’t be more wrong! I found it sooooo hard trying to strum and use my feet (as opposed to playing a more snare/hi-hat kind of feel with my hands) and as soon as I started strumming, my feet just seemed to have a mind of their own and just wanted to tap in a rather random fashion, grrrr! So needless to say I’ve still got lots of practising to do, but I’ll let you know as soon as it’s suitable for a public hearing

The other tune I’ve been working on is the wonderful Galileo by the Indigo Girls, which is so much fun to play (this was suggested to me by Sandra and Spikey, thanks guys!). My first thought was to put a capo on the third fret and play D and then D/C#, B and so on, but something about it didn’t sound *quite* right. So off I went to good old Youtube and managed to find a live clip of them playing it and I noticed Emily was playing her guitar with a capo on the fifth fret and doing more like C shape chords that I use a lot and I’m pretty familiar with. So off I went again and this time it sounded a lot closer but still not quite right for some reason. Then after many cups of tea and a few expletives, I did a bit more research and found out her guitar is tuned differently! Doh!

I’ll let you know next week how I get on with those two…

Another thing I’ve been busy with this week is filming here, there and everywhere for a promo video that will be on the front page of my new website. We went to various places that I like to hang out as well as filming Totnes Highstreet (which looks really cool as practically everyone we went past turned round and gorped at the camera! lol). We also did a spot of filming in my little studio which was oodles of fun and I got to introduce a few of my fav instruments. We’ve very nearly finished editing it so I’ll keep you updated with its progress.

A bit of news I can now tell you guys about. I’ll more than likely be working for a guitar website soon teaching people how to play various percussive and slap techniques! It’s all pretty exciting stuff and I’ll let you know more about it as soon as it’s all confirmed.

For each lesson I have to write a 500 word article, audio for each exercise, notation and TAB for each exercise as well as videos for each of the exercises and also an example of how people can use each lesson in different situations. Really looking forward to getting stuck in

That about wraps it up for this week, if you’re free next Wednesday it would be great to see you up at Mama Stone’s in Exeter as I’ll be playing bass with Miquid Licks!