Thanks to the Dauphin, I occasionally listen to a podcast called Drive To Work. It's the extremely frequent and more-lo-fi-than-not dispatch from one Mark Rosewater, head designer for the game Magic The Gathering (known worldwide, and henceforth in this newsletter, as "Magic").
The conceit of the podcast is that it's being recorded as Mr. Rosewater, well, drives to work. To what extent that's really
what's happening, I'm not exactly sure. You can occasionally hear Rosewater flipping to the next page of his notes, so unless he's got a chauffeur, I'm not totally clear on how that works.
On the other hand, each episode begins, not with some crafted 15-second piece of cheeseball theme music, but with the host enthusiastically announcing, "I'm pulling out of my DRIVEway; we all know what THAT means...It's time for another DRIVE to WORK." Or, on more recent episodes,
"I'm pulling away from the CURB after dropping my son off at SCHOOL; we all know what THAT means..."
What follows is a twenty- to thirty-minute deep dive into some very specific aspect of this thirty-three-year-old game, one with a library of over 20,000 cards. And since Rosewater has been working at Wizards Of The Coast, the company that designs and sells Magic, for about thirty-one of those thirty-three years, he might talk about anything from a roundup of the most
recently issued cards to a countdown of his ten biggest failures as a game designer.
I do occasionally glaze over during some of the more arcane episodes, but the ones about the design and history of the game itself are pretty captivating, especially as they are coming straight from the horse's mouth. And in keeping with the conceit of the show's title, each episode wraps with the bookending announcement that "I'm pulling into the PARKing lot, so we all know what THAT
means...It's time for me to quit TALKIN' Magic, and time for me to start MAKIN' Magic."
Which I couldn't help thinking about as I was shooting this week's Youtube episode, because I finally relented and made a video about one of the guitars on my studio wall. And I realized what the occasion called for was an inversion of the Drive To Work wrap-up, something along the lines of "And now, it's time to quit TALKING about guitars, and get back to talking about PLAYING
guitar."
Still, if you want the six-minute history of my trusty 1981 Yamaha FG-365S, the first acoustic guitar I ever owned and the workhorse I played from high school through my first several years in New York, look no further than the link below:
I Learned Everything On This
Guitar
Speaking of learning...when you join the Fingerstyle Five membership, in addition to six hours of interactive live streamed lessons per month, you also get access to the entire archive of every tune we've ever done.
That includes over two dozen classic blues tunes, everything from steady bass versions of "You Got To Move" and "Key To The Highway" to alternating-thumb arrangements of "Nobody's Dirty Business," "Stagolee," and many, many
more.
This month's lessons include
- exercises to develop your right hand coordination
- licks to build your vocabulary in A minor
- detailed tab for adding syncopation to "Freight Train," and
- a breakdown of my improvised solos on "St. James Infirmary"
Sign up and join us at the link below!
The Fingerstyle Five