MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

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GMaq
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MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by GMaq »

Hi LM friends in the Musician's lounge area!

I will willingly admit to being out of touch down here, between AVL updates, a new ISO project (MXDE-EFL) and new drum stuff mentioned in the forum above I haven't kept up with new posts here but I hope to remedy that. I have no doubt I have missed some great stuff but better late than never!

Movin', Groovin' and Verhoeven (MGV) had a fun recent gig and luckily we filmed and recorded it and I'll be sharing a few Videos of various songs and tributes we played throughout the evening. MGV has been together the longest of all the bands I've played in (over 30 years!) but strangely we haven't done much in the way of Videos or recordings over the years so I was happy to catch some lightning in a bottle on a relatively good night..

Ten years ago if you told me I was going to become a Gordon Lightfoot fan and play his stuff live I would have laughed out loud, luckily people and times can change. The soft string-laden acoustic sounds of his 70's recordings had never really attracted me to his music but a late-blooming recent interest in folk music got me listening and boy I had really been missing out! Putting aside the beauty of the songs his hand with a lyric is what really knocked me out.. (yes, I'm one of those weirdos that actually pays attention to the lyrics..).

Here are our humble trio interpretations of his classics 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' and 'If You Could Read My Mind'

https://youtu.be/gkyXSzsozN0

The show was recorded to SD Card on a Zoom Livetrak L-20 and then imported into various Ardour 7.X incarnations and mixed and edited from there. Cameras were a combo of Zoom Q4n and a couple of Samsung smartphones. You may notice the drumkit is the recently released Blonde Bop.. Video Editing as usual done with Cinelerra-GG..

Thanks as always, comments welcomed! Best to all!

Glen

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by j_e_f_f_g »

Edmund Fitzgerald... what a depressing song. About a real-life merchant ship-sinking in a storm on Lake Superior (usa great lakes). Nobody survives.

Interesting fact: Lake Superior is actually bigger than many seas. It really should be a sea.

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by GMaq »

j_e_f_f_g wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 8:26 pm

Edmund Fitzgerald... what a depressing song. About a real-life merchant ship-sinking in a storm on Lake Superior (usa great lakes). Nobody survives.

Interesting fact: Lake Superior is actually bigger than many seas. It really should be a sea.

Haha, yes depressing, long and musically repetitive, but man what an epic story set to music!

We've only been playing it for a few months and I always think it will bomb but people seem to love it! Testament to Lightfoot's appeal as a writer I guess..

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by j_e_f_f_g »

If you like folk music with poetic lyrics, check out "Vincent" by Don McClean, a song about the troubled life of Vincent Van Gogh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrNFDxCRzU

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by sunrat »

Nice work @GMaq . You sent me off on a rediscover Gordon Lightfoot quest. Always liked Sundown and have the album on vinyl.

Sad songs can be the most moving, "Wreck..." is a classic. I just shed a tiny little tear watching this one:
I still cry - Ilse de Lange & New Amsterdam Orchestra

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

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Author of BackupBand at https://sourceforge.net/projects/backupband/files/
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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by GMaq »

I've also become a card-carrying John Martyn fanatic...

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by GMaq »

sunrat wrote: Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:46 am

Nice work @GMaq . You sent me off on a rediscover Gordon Lightfoot quest. Always liked Sundown and have the album on vinyl.

Sad songs can be the most moving, "Wreck..." is a classic. I just shed a tiny little tear watching this one:
I still cry - Ilse de Lange & New Amsterdam Orchestra

We do Sundown too...lol. We didn't catch an ideal version that night, it seems simple but it's a b**ch of a song to get to move and feel right.

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by j_e_f_f_g »

I'm concerned about glen's increasing obsession with canadian 'adult easy-listening' radio fodder. I think we should arrange an intervention before his band starts covering songs by Ann Murray and Bryan Addams.

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by Rainmak3r »

Always nice to see videos from you, @GMaq! I never heard of Gordon Lightfoot before, but greatly liked the first song you played there: I'm a sucker for long winded epic songs, and the folky nature of the song was great too! The second one I cared less about, as it was a bit too much on the "easy listening" side of things.

I was really curious about your guitar too, though: is that one of those Acoustasonic Fender guitars? I still don't know what their deal is, what can you share about your experience with them, or what drove you to one of those in the first place?

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by jeanette_c »

Hi @GMaq , as usual you bring us a lovely professional and full sound. I'm no familiar with Gordon Lightfoot, so can't possibly comment on that or compare it.
The guitar has an interesting sound. At first I thought that it was too mid heavy, but it grew on me and brings out a different quality in the sound, making it its own character in the ensemble.
It's well performed, well mixed and well processed. What more can I say? Fantastic job!

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by Gps »

I did not have a clue on who Gordon Lightfoot was.

The lyrics of the second track though, did ring a bell and I almost started to sing along.

If you vou could read my mind love ...

It does sound very good.

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by erlkönig »

@GMaq
Great! From all perspectives, it really touches me...

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by bluzee »

One of the all time great song writers. Your voice is well suited to his songs and I thought you guys did a great job with them.

One thing nice about getting older is I can voice my love of Folk and not give a care about what others think. I still go see James Keelaghan every chance I get. My favourite story of his is the time Madonna tried to fight him for a parking spot in Calgary.

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Re: MGV - Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot

Post by GMaq »

Hi,

Thanks so much for listening and the comments folks, it's really appreciated!

@j_e_f_f_g

Lol, no worries about 'easy-listening' I like well written songs in any genre, haha no Anne Murray, and I don't know whether I dislike Bryan Adams or Loverboy more... The 80's were not a great decade for me to grow up in musically especially in Canada, some pretty horrid stuff came out for sure..

@Rainmak3r

Thanks for listening and commenting I know this stuff ain't your wheelhouse at all, so double points... So about the guitar... Yes it's an Acoustasonic telecaster (the more recent and affordable Mexican built one). For what I do I absolutely love it, for what you do I think it would be disappointing as it is a hybrid guitar and doesn't fulfill either the acoustic or electric mandate to 100%. What it excels at is being one guitar for people who play a blend of acoustic and electric tunes live, it's body-sensing microphone technology is a cut above your Fishman type bridge piezo pickups so you get a better amplified acoustic tone and the electric side has some modeling built into the guitar so it has an active circuit board in it and it likes it's 9V batteries pretty good, for me 2 rehearsals and a gig and it's time for a new battery... The plus side of the circuitry is that the electric pickup has amp modeling combined with it and goes from a very convincing clean electric telecaster sound to an amazing telecaster through a turned up Fender Twin sound which gives the perfect amount of rhythm crunch and a nice subtle overdrive for most solo needs, I use some pedals for spatial effects and I have an Ibanez TS-9 Tube Screamer when I need a bit more snort.. Now here's the real bonus and where Fender has done their homework... All the sounds on this guitar are made to sound good through a PA system or your typical Acoustic amplifier...even the electric sounds! Normally if you plug an electric guitar into an acoustic amplifier it would sound ball-less and awful... not so with this, the electric sounds sound tremendous through an acoustic amp so much so I think you could blindfold fool many tube amp connoseiurs.. For me the bonus of this is one guitar and amp that covers 97.34% of the bases. I used to haul 2 electrics and 2 acoustics in different tunings plus 2 separate amps to gigs and now I have one rig. I tune the Acoustasonic down to DGCFAD and I can over all the tuning bases I need and capo up.. Here is the last point and this is why this would never work for a certified shredmaster like yourself... In order to sound good acoustically the guitar needs acoustic strings and on top of that to hold my D tuning reliably I need to move up to medium gauge acoustic strings for the larger string diameters so the electric and acoustic sounds are all there but the playability is that of an acoustic guitar with heavy strings, I think this might make you cry... :lol: I'm a chop and slop player and I also regularly play baritone guitars for my own recordings so since I don't shred and am used to heavy strings this doesn't bother me too much but it ain't a guitar for a Malmsteen cover band!

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