Rosetucky on hold

My new band that started in the summer of 2009 is on hold for now. I'm not sure if the bass player Rocky and I will get back together or not. We haven't practiced regularly for some time now. The band's name Rosetucky was Rocky's idea, as he grew up in Roseburg, Oregon. More than half our songs were his original tunes. We also did a few of my originals and a couple of songs from my days with R Band back in the early 1990s. It looks like The Bicycling Guitarist is going to have to be a solo act and not part of a band, at least for now. Best wishes for Rocky.

It's too cold and wet these days for me to ride and play much. Cold and wet weather is not good for the wood of the guitar. The cold isn't too good for my fingers either. Also, when the pavement is wet the skinny tires of my vintage ten-speed bicycle can slip and skid, and braking is more difficult too when the rims are wet. At least now I have alloy rims on my Schwinn instead of slick chrome steel. It used to be I couldn't stop at all when the rims were wet!

Happy new year

Last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights I had excellent rehearsal sessions with my bass player Rocky. We've been practicing almost every week the past seven months, usually two or three nights a week an hour or two each night. Our band "Rosetucky" will almost certainly play in public sometime this year, or at least record some of our new material and post it online.

Late last month (December 27, 2009) I posted a video clip on YouTube of The Beatles Help! done by The Bicycling Guitarist that I had recorded a couple weeks before that. As I type this, that clip has 222 views in the 20 days since I posted it.

I play that song even better now than I did when I recorded that a month ago. In general, my guitar playing is crisper, sharper, faster, smoother than ever before. It is my singing though that has improved the most compared to my days with R Band in the early 1990s. I am not known as "The Bicycling Singer." Enough said, okay?