Admin Lisa Wagner
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Hi Louis,
I just answered a similar question here so I hope you don’t mind me referring you to that post. In short – we’d love to, but it probably won’t happen this year!
Thank you ♥ -
Hi Paul!
We honestly can’t say yet. We’d truly love to tour the States but if we do it, we want to do it properly. It’s difficult to make a tour like that viable, especially for Europeans. It requires a lot of planning, money, promotions, visas, equipment, time, etc. But of course we miss live playing, and we will definitely get back on stage eventually! -
Hi Brian, I was going to write that we never used open tunings in our own music when I suddenly thought back of recording “Waiting For The Waiter”. Of course! I can’t remember what tuning I used exactly but I definitely tuned my Dobro to an open chord when doing all the slide parts. But I’m pretty sure that’s the only time we used it on a record so far.
We’ve played around with open tuning when we learned some fingerstyle pieces over the years, especially back in highschool. It’s fun, it’s satisfying, things sound great 😉 When it comes to songwriting I am normally a big fan of modulating keys which is a bit trickier with open tunings but that doesn’t mean that I won’t give writing with it a go sometime.
I like what you said about it being helpful in a writer’s block. I agree, playing around with things you’re not used to, changing up the tuning, the instrument, etc … great ways to get new ideas and break out of a rut.
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That’s an interesting question and I can see why opinions on the topic would differ.
We have above-average long fingers (it was the first thing the midwife noticed when we were born 🙂 ) and while I think it helps with certain aspects of guitar playing I really don’t think it’s necessary to become a decent guitarist.Take Django Reinhardt as you probably know … he played the fastest, grooviest Gypsy Jazz there ever was with only 3 functioning fingers. Joni Mitchell had polio as a child and couldn’t bend her fingers properly so she delved into the world of open tunings. One of the first live concerts we ever went to as young teenagers was James Brown, and we remember noticing the big funk guitarist with him who had really short fat fingers. 🙂 He was incredible! We were thinking “If he can play like THAT with those hands, surely we could master an F chord soon”.
I think every hand shape and size has its advantages and disadvantages, but these guys prove that you can make them all work for you. Due to my finger shape I still really struggle with strings on certain barre shapes not ringing out properly where I know people with stubbier, thicker fingers have an easier time with that. But I have a great reach which comes in handy for most lead playing.
I would say, find what playing style suits you best and work from there. Maybe skip the crazy chord shapes for now and improve your picking, speed and scales through regular practise. The more comfortable you become on the guitar overall, the easier it will get to unlock other techniques.
I hope that helped a little bit 🙂
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We shoot with one fixed camera while Dad moves around with a second one, capturing the close-up shots. While they look pretty close they are shot from quite a distance to avoid appearing in the field of view of the main camera.
We normally run through the songs a few times and then choose our favourite take but we’re sometimes able to use close-up shots from different takes, too.
That’s for the Duo Session, for our “proper” music videos we normally just use one camera (Our Sony A7 iii) and do lots of different takes.
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Hi Gary, At the beginning of the year we mapped out the year, working out a timeplan for everything we’d like to accomplish in 2020. Touring once again got the short end of the stick in order for us to focus on all the other projects we are absolutely stoked about.
If we play any one-off shows, we’ll of course let everyone know well ahead of time 🙂 -
If I had all the time in the world, I’d learn to play the harp! Oh and the piano of course! Oh and lap steel guitar! Oh and the sitar! Oh and the hurdy gurdy looks pretty fun to play 😉
Anything I can play while singing really would be interesting. But at the same time there are a gazillion things on the guitar that I haven’t explored or mastered yet. Thankfully, certain skills translate somewhat well to other instruments. The Cello didn’t feel TOO weird though I can still only hardly make it work for me.
But whenever I have time I mainly focus my energy on incorporating new guitar techniques and styles into my playing which, when you first get into new territory, very much feels like learning a new instrument 🙂
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Hi John,
It was one of the tunes we wrote during our stay in Lanzarote and I remember Dad sitting in one room with his little travel keyboard, Mona pondering over lyrics in another and me sitting in the garden with an iPad and piano app installed on it, tinkling around.
Whenever we work on songs it is a collaborative process where we bounce ideas off one another, pass passages we’re stuck on to someone else and always ask for feedback.
It’s normally not a straightforward “chords first, then melody, then lyrics” type of scenario but rather something that evolves on multiple fronts at the same time. If the lyrics don’t fit, the melody changes, if we want to change the feel of one part, we go back and tweak the chords etc.
Dad writes really well on keys so he did the heavy lifting on this one.
Greetings to Australia 🙂
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It’s such a melancholic, hauntingly beautiful song. Like so many of theirs. Short, sweet but it stays with you long after it stopped playing. Always one of our favourite S&G songs. We’ll add it to the long list of potential cover songs 🙂
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Hi Howard!
Thanks for that question! Over the years we have written songs in just about every constellation there is between the three of us.
As you mentioned with the Beatles, more often than not it is the case that whoever “births” the song also finishes most of the work or makes the most basic decisions about the feel and tempo of a song but it’s always a collaborative process to some extent until we get the final “thumbs up” from everyone at the end before we start recording.
🙂
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Lots of bruises on the right upper arm from Mona hitting me with her guitar’s headstock on tiny stages, sore feet from playing in boots all night (I guess that one’s on us), heat strokes (Cavern! ;-)), singing through colds and sore throats (you gotta do what you gotta do), achy blistery fingers (ah well), sweaty, painful hugs from drunken crowd members, nearly poking your eyeball out when changing guitar strings …
… but really, there are a lot more “physically” demanding or dangerous jobs than being a musician 🙂 So far we managed to dodge the carpal tunnel thing which is good … touch wood!
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Josh is great, a fantastic musician! We haven’t had the chance to meet/catch him live but it’s fun following his musical journey.
Same goes for Julia Nunes. She was probably one of the first musicians we ever watched on YouTube. More than 10 years ago, old-school YouTube 🙂 Great to know she’s still out there doing her thing!At the moment we have so much on our plates that we’re not scheduling in any concerts but we’re sure we’ll get back to that eventually. At the moment we’re all about the new album, new videos and a few other projects we’ll talk more about as the year progresses.
Thanks for the more outside-the-box song suggestions. The list of cover song wishes is looong but we’ll just add them to it 🙂
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Thanks Stephen, we’re glad you like it!
Normally we don’t offer the individual cover songs for download until we release them on a CD (like on our “MLT play Beatles & more” compilation albums). I’m sure that there will be a future cover album with “Starman” on it, but this might take a while as we plan to release an original album next.
To bridge the waiting time, however, we’ve just created another new Jukebox player in the MLT Club – called “Additional Recordings” – for the latest YouTube songs that aren’t released on an album yet. They’re only four songs for now but we’ll add all the new ones automatically as they come out.
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That is amazing! We’re so glad that our music helps you through the tough days and that it might be helping your patients, too ♥
We’d love to come to the States again. We’ll spend most of 2020 working on a new original album and various other studio and video projects, so we’ll continue to put playing live shows on the back burner for now. But we’ll definitely be announcing any touring plans in the Club first and hopefully make it back to the States in the future.Much peace & love to Cleveland!
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Hi Michael,
“Junk” has been on our “cover-wishlist” for a while now. It is one of those PERFECT songs. We love it to bits! Maybe we’ll get around to it one day. Thanks for bringing it up again, I’ll have that song flowing through my mind for the next few days now 🙂
Lisa