{"id":13077,"date":"2012-04-21T23:03:07","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T03:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=13077"},"modified":"2012-04-23T06:56:20","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T10:56:20","slug":"mr-play-in-a-day-departs-having-left-the-world-a-more-musical-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/mr-play-in-a-day-departs-having-left-the-world-a-more-musical-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Mr Play in a Day Departs, Having Left the World a More Musical Place"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This has been a rather grim week or two for the passing of rock legends, and today <strong>Bert Weedon<\/strong>, inspiration for many a guitarist primarily through his <em>Play in a Day<\/em> book, said goodnight as well.<\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/SVMpT4DG4G8?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>I know practically nothing about his life, and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever heard any of his records, but in common with Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Brian May, I owned a copy of his book and at one time tried to learn to play using it.<\/p>\n<p>My knowledge of music was so rudimentary (read non-existent) that the book was far too complicated for me, and I never returned to it.  I eventually figured it out in my own way, but the act of buying the book and opening it with an untuned and probably untunable guitar in hand was enough of a statement of intent to lead me to find a doorway to the instrument even if it turned out not to be that one.<\/p>\n<p>I eventually figured it out by making a set of flash cards with chords on one side and the name of the chord on the other and to keep shuffling them and pulling them out at random until I could not only play them but remember them all as well.  I did do it in a day\u2014New Year&#8217;s Eve 1978, when I couldn&#8217;t find anyone to stay up with, but which turned out in hindsight to be the most productive evening I&#8217;ve ever spent.<\/p>\n<p>I wondered if anyone in the Hall ever did learn to play using Bert&#8217;s book?  And please share any Eureka moments with instruments that you subsequently became at least passingly competent with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This has been a rather grim week or two for the passing of rock legends, and today Bert Weedon, inspiration for many a guitarist primarily through his Play in a Day book, said goodnight as well. I know practically nothing about his life, and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever heard any of his records, but <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/mr-play-in-a-day-departs-having-left-the-world-a-more-musical-place\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[596,170],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}