Soniferous…The Full Video! Maybe I should actually do a video on how to pronounce the title…I’m very excited to share it with you. This is the one that Nora and I were working on a couple weeks ago that resulted in our Sushi date the other night (long story). Great filming and directing by my wife.
The song is named after the guitar I’m playing, crafted by Rood Guitars. I posted last week about how the composition came about, that it started as a tune for Nora to practice arpeggios on the mandolin and became a practice study (or “etude” if you’re feeling pretentious) for myself.
I’d always wanted to learn the technique of “sweep picking” - that’s the raking down and up motion of the right hand while the left hand frets and mutes. It’s a really cool technique! It’s just SO COOL! And I find it extremely challenging. But most of the styles that I play don’t really call for it…I’ve practiced it throughout my guitar playing career here and there, but just like they say, if you don’t use it, you lose it…
So I wanted to use it - and I knew that the best way to get myself to use the technique consistently was to write something I liked so much that I’d want to play it at every concert forever.
And that’s how “Soniferous” came to be.
Funny how songs have multiple ways of coming about and multiple stories to go with them. It was a tune for Nora to play…and then I wanted to use it for my own practice…it was the beginning of the pandemic and my career was falling apart…and it was the rebirth of something new….
And all of that, all of those feelings, those stories went into “Soniferous,” the ups and the downs, the happy and the sad.
Songwriting is such a journey…Haha because it takes so long! It doesn’t have to, but for me it usually does. It’s pretty common that I’ll work on a piece over the course of a year.
But in working on a song for that time, I find that it encompasses all of what’s going on in my world. It’s never about just one thing.
It’s all of it.
And that’s the journey. The ups and the downs, the joys and the sorrows.
Love y’all, enjoy the tune.
Guitarists - I’ll have tabs up later today in my story