If you’re every near Twentynine Palms, CA be sure to stay at one of my favorite (perhaps favorite?) motels of all time, The Harmony Motel. Don’t expect much and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I’ve been spending a lot of time relearning Maktub songs in acoustic form. It’s refreshing to strip a song down to it’s bones. Guitar strumming patterns are friggin important and endlessly fascinating! I never really noticed how I was strumming in patterns before as it always came as part of writing a song on acoustic guitar. But when I learn some of these tunes for the first time I get a whole new appreciation for patterns and how they interact with Thaddeus’s lead lines and Reggie’s vocals. Strumming chords behind those two makes me a bit of a drummer — which doesn’t come naturally.

Currently there are 6 songs we’re actively translating from an electric band sound to a two acoustic guitar version with Reggie singing between Thaddeus and I. Depending on the strumming pattern, I can create a simple 2 beat pattern which works great for some tunes or a longer cycle that takes 2 measures to complete itself.

I had a guy over from Speedy Glass today to fix a broken glass pane on my attic window — it looked like somebody used a wrist rocket to break the window last week. Getting up to the window I had to go up a ladder through a small crawl hole to my attic. I realized that I really don’t care to be in my attic much — nor do I really care what’s going on up there until something goes wrong. My basement, on the other hand, was the first thing I remodeled after I bought my house. Strumming patterns are somewhere in between those two for me — never really thought about it, but now that I’ve been forced to it’s all that I hear.