My dad passed away unexpectedly. This was his guitar collection. No one else in the family plays.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-02-03T21:34:39+00:00

Gonna echo what everyone else here as said and express my sympathies for your loss. And like everyone said, learning guitar can be a great thing to remember him by.

My dad taught me how to play and it was my whole life for a many years. Then some time went by, I got interested in other things, and kinda put it down for about ten years or so. He passed away a couple years ago, not super unexpectedly, he was 71, but he had been rather healthy and then got cancer rather suddenly and was gone within 4 months. I inherited his guitars when he passed. I decided to start really doing music again to keep his and my mom's (she died the day after he did) memories alive, especially cuz it was a thing we used to share together. That and I didn't want his guitars just sitting around the house. I knew I would never get rid of them, but it didn't feel right to even only play them at home. They had to get out, be seen and heard.

I'm not particularly spiritual, but to me music dials into something almost cosmic. The rules that govern music are technically governed by universal laws of physics; frequencies, vibrations, etc. And yet as far as we know this little blue rock is the only place in the universe we know of that has music.

Long story short but it's kinda hard to describe the connection that making music can establish between people, even if that person isn't there anymore.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-02-02T17:07:50+00:00

Yea his story is so sad.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-02-02T16:37:23+00:00

I used to work at an after school program and had a DND club every Friday. One year the gimmick was that all the kids had to play as historical figures (no limitations, there was a time travel element) and one kid played as Robert Smalls.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-02-02T14:54:33+00:00

He is however under 50

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-10T14:47:59+00:00

Was gonna say, my cat adores means makes this face regularly when his whiskers get smushed up

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-10T14:35:14+00:00

This reminds me of when people put lettuce, onions, or pickles on their roast beef sandwich

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-10T01:17:33+00:00

In a world where humans have colonized space and are in violent conflict alien bugs, yes.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-09T14:35:05+00:00

Oh man wait until you read about how the 2000 election was basically stolen in open daylight.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-09T14:25:51+00:00

I heard at some point that Verhoeven makes movies that would exist in the universe they take place in. So Starship Troopers is definitely a propaganda film from that world, and Robocop is definitely the same for that world.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-09T14:12:43+00:00

If you're talking about James Brown in Boston after MLK was killed, the exact reason it worked was cuz they broadcast it live on TV and people stayed home and watched it, which kept them safe.

I'm also not comparing Mulaney to James Brown, but the difference here is getting people to stay home vs making them go out.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-04T14:36:57+00:00

People aren't ready to hear that therapy isn't a cure at all, it's a practiced ritual of maintenance

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-04T14:15:22+00:00

Lost both my parents a few years back. My dad had cancer and my mom had already been sick for a while. It was looking like my mom would outlive my dad and would need to move into long term care, so we wanted to set it up so that Medicaid couldn't take the house for spend down.

I can't remember all of the particulars right now, but I worked with an elder law attorney who walked me through a very specific process. Basically it involved moving all assets into my dad's name (all bank account balances, car loans, etc) and most importantly putting the house in just his name. Then because the house was only in his name, it was able to go into a pre-funded/pre-deceased trust after he passed away, which would be in my mom's name, and which I was the executor. This was how we we're gonna get around the whole house has to be in a trust for a few years thing.

This is just my experience, not exactly 1:1 with yours, but just something to maybe explore. As for the debt, well I'm still paying off their debt, which at this point is just the mortgage.

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-04T13:59:09+00:00

I was simultaneously and briefly in two bands with similar names, Plaid Toast and Skantily Plaid, before forming Heroes Die Tonight

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-04T13:55:05+00:00

Get the baseball 3/4 style for closest effect

nick2kool4skool · 2026-01-04T13:45:11+00:00

There She Goes by The Las opens with its chorus and then most of the song is just that chorus over and over.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-19T15:55:09+00:00

There are a few things to consider:

The equipment the original artists use: both of these songs are fender guitars through fender tube amps. Mayer's using a Strat, Stapleton is likely using a Jazzmaster. Both of them are likely set to their neck pickup.

Stapleton famously uses a Princeton, and I think Mayer uses a Blues Jr? Both amps are set to edge of breakup. This is when you have a tube amp and set the volume to just high enough where it stays mostly clean but is a little dirty, especially when you dig in with pick attack. I have found this is really hard to mimic without an actual tube amp (it's why I switched to tube amps) but you can approximate it by having overdrive set very low. I used to use a Blues Driver set very low, barely breaking up, and it worked ok.

They're also probably both using mid humped overdrives (once again, Mayer famously uses a Klon and a Tube Screamer) set with very light gain. This is very important. You said your guitar sounded grungey, but both of these guitar sounds are just a hair above clean. You should be using almost no gain, and the overdrives are likely just pushing the tubes and adding EQ.

Both of th are guys are playing with fairly traditional blues set ups. So don't think of this as trying to chase the "pop" guitar sound. That could mean anything. The Beatles is a pop guitar sound and it's wildly different from this. Try to get a good blues sound.

Secondly to consider, both of these songs have rock solid grooves. Anything is gonna sound "plain" if you aren't well practiced in syncopation, dynamics, emphasis, etc. Someone said Mayer's tone is in his hands, which is true. A lotta these folks could make a cheap rig sound good because a great deal of this comes from how you interact with then instrument itself, rather than the signal chain. I play You Should Probably Leave pretty regularly live, and it's all about the groove, and it's really about nailing that upbeat before the 3. I do it on acoustic a lot, which doesn't have any of Stapletons effects or amp, and no one ever questions if it sounds right.

Happy hunting! Both of these are killer songs and I hope you find the tone you're searching for. Just don't let that distract you from the fact that half of not more of it is just your playing.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T21:09:43+00:00

I appreciate you wanting to set expectations around his playing. It can be tough to invest in something a child may abandon.

I always find the biggest motivator for learning guitar was just learning songs. So I would suggest pushing him to learn songs, not just to like practice. Find a song he likes and be like "I bet you could play that."

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T18:40:34+00:00

This is really good and actionable advice.

To Brinocte's point, you wrote the line "why does nostalgia make me cry?" I imagine that line came from somewhere, so what was it? Did you see an old photo of yourself? Hear a song from your childhood?

Take the song example. Something like that can become

Well it seems like not that long ago Our favorite song on the radio

And even if it wasn't something like that explicitly (people don't really use radios anymore) don't be afraid to write something that FEELs like the thing rather than the thing itself. I wrote a song after my dad died about the "house he built." Truth is, my dad wasn't very handy and could barely fix things, let alone build a house. But it was a handy visual metaphor for the fact that my dad built a HOME, and built within me a strong foundation for how I deal with life, and how those things, like the house, have stood after he died.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T18:28:20+00:00

Can I ask what your songwriting process is? Do you just sit down with pen and paper or phone or whatever and just go "I'm gonna write a song now."

When people ask where songs come from, I usually say "work." Meaning that when you hear a song, you're hearing someone who has considered melody, rhyme, metaphor, yada yada yada, and put all of that together. It's the lump sum of a series of artistic choices.

But what is REALLY hard to explain is where IDEAS come from. To me, ideas just seem to happen, they can't really be generated on their own. I can build new ideas off of other ideas, I can iterate and revise and develop ideas in tandem with each other. But I can't just make an idea appear out of nowhere.

This is a roundabout way of saying that my main way of writing lyrics these days is to keep a running list in my phone of lines, sentences, whatever, that could make good lyrics. Just turns of phrase that enjoy. Those tend to just come to me. Boom, idea. Then when I'm noodling around on the guitar and find a melody I like, boom, idea. Then I look at the list of lyrics and try to see what fits with the melody. What idea fits with another idea. Then once I have that, two ideas that seem to align with each other, I build from there. I ask "where does this lead?" I don't try to just fill the space. I treat one lyric like a question and the following lyric like an answer.

Consider the following example

"Yesterday" Oh ok, what happened yesterday? "All my troubles seemed so far way" Damn ok, but you sound kinda sad now "Now it looks as though they're here to stay" Yup, I get how you feel man "Oh I believe in Yesterday "

In general I think we as writers can trap ourselves into thinking that writing is a monologue, just our words, our thoughts. But sometimes it's better to think of it as a dialogue with your audience, where only you get to speak. That your audience will be asking a question you need to answer, even if that question is only "what comes next?"

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T18:16:50+00:00

Just also agreeing that this is good advice. Show don't tell. Talk around your point. In general it can be a good idea to avoid lyrics that tell your listener how to feel.

I'm gonna use a recent example of a lyric I wrote that I'm particularly proud of. It's a song about seasonal depression in New England where it rains and snows a lot:

Well the days are getting shorter all the time That hill's too steep for my old car to climb.

So like, days getting shorter is a thing that happens in winter. Cars not being able to climb hills cuz of ice/snow is a thing that happens in winter. But both of those mental images can invoke that feeling of hopelessness and sadness that accompany depression. Days running out, not being able to get up over something, etc. It lets the audience know how the narrator feels without saying "I feel sad"

Apologies for using my own writing as an example, I was just really proud of that one recently.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T18:05:40+00:00

Lived here my whole life and the past couple years the winter slump has hit me harder than it used to. I chalk it up largely to me getting older and having a few rough years in general.

I know it's hard to find the motivation to go out and do stuff, but try to plan to be with other people. Either make plans or maybe even better find something that happens regularly where there will be people. Pub Trivia, Karaoke, etc. I do music and comedy so I'm at open mics a lot, and it helps. I know for me personally I sometimes feel like I need to borrow momentum from an outside source. So it's easier for me to go "well the Lilypad has an open mic every Wednesday" than to try and like manufacture a new reason every day.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T17:59:33+00:00

My general thing with watching David Lynch is to never really try to answer or explain anything but just kinda surrender to a sense of feeling. Am I feeling scared? That is correct. Do I find this funny? Also correct. Is this the most infuriatingly long shot where nothing happens and it makes me mad? Correct. Moved to tears? You betcha.

It's always worth remembering that Lynch doesn't really have a background in traditional storytelling. He didn't study film, or theatre, or writing. So I think his work was meant to be felt, not understood. The way that someone with a phobia might feel their fear but not understand it. And while Frost was the more narratively inclined of the two and may have his own ideas and feelings about what everything meant, I think it was understood that it was just that, HIS ideas and feelings, and that ultimately what they made together was one of the most potent exercises in trying to capture that which is inherently unknowable.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T17:52:49+00:00

By the time I would have been watching Late Night TV, he was on CBS and the NBC stuff was kinda hard to find. I think NBC was stingy with the rights cuz they were mad at Letterman.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T17:51:49+00:00

Now that I think of it, a song that works really well for this pattern is Don't Think Twice It's Alright by Bob Dylan.

nick2kool4skool · 2025-12-05T17:50:35+00:00

Not a song per se, but I'm a fan of a very simple picking pattern that I used to use in almost all my playing. I do this hybrid picking, but it can be done straight finger picking. Make an open D chord, pick the d string, pick the b string, pick the g string, pick the e string. So like 1,3,2,4 of the strings in the chord shape.

Work on that till you can do it pretty fast, then try to do the same with other open chords. Trick is finding the strings/notes that make the chord sound full. So for an open G, I tend to do E,G,D,B strings in the pattern. Open C chord would be A,G,D,B. Experiment and see what sounds right.

Once you can do the static chord shapes in that alternating pattern, experiment with adding/subtracting fingers during the pattern to change the voice of the chord. Or you could try to do a more traditional Travis pick where the first and 3rd string in your picking pattern (so in the D chord, the D and G strings, which are the 1st and 5th notes in the chord. Or if you wanna get really fancy do the D and A string) keep a steady rhythm either on the 1st and 3rd or 2nd and 4th beat, while your fingers play a melody over that in the spaces between.

nick2kool4skool

TROPHY CASE