The next Carolinas Box Guitar Club meeting, #36, will be Saturday, January 5, 2019 from 11:00 am to 2:00+ pm at Big Al's Pub & Grubberia, 9306 Albemarle Road Charlotte, NC 28227, 704-567-2333. It's behind Rite Aid At The Corner Of Harrisburg and Albemarle Roads, across Albemarle Rd. from the Good Will store and about 200 feet back from Albemarle Rd.

If the Big Al's doesn't have a prior reservation, we will continue having our monthly meeting on the first Saturday of each month. Our purpose is to help members develop skills to build and/or play the 12-bar Blues on their 3 or 4-string, fret-less, electric, box guitars. We also have some members working on and playing 6-string guitar and bass, and harmonica. We currently have 31 on our email list.

Remember, we should be able to find the flat 7th and flat 3rd of any root note on a string. Also, we should be practicing random picking of these three notes.  For January we will continue our finger picking with some more complicated excises. We will also learn how to find the IV [fourth], Vb [flattened fifth] and V [fifth] notes of the minor Blues Pentatonic scale for any root note. Combined with December exercises of the Blues notes: the flat 7th and flat 3rd of any root note on any string, we will know all the notes of the minor Blues Pentatonic scale for any root note in a box form that can be moved to any root for any chord. This is necessary for soloing in Blues.

We will also discuss rhythm and do some exercises to follow some shuffle rhythms.

Also, we'll do some jamming that we didn't have time to do last month.
Bring your new music projects or cool equipment for show and tell. As usual, we will discuss individual building and playing issues. I think several of the Blues Jam musicians will attend to help with our jamming.

So far, our "Carolinas Box Guitar Club Jam" songs include:

• Before You Accuse Me, by Bo Diddley or Eric Clapton
  Hoochie Coochie Man by Muddy Waters or Jeff Healey
  Stormy Monday by T. Bone Walker.
  The Sky is Crying by Elmore James.
  I Almost Lost My Mind by Albert King.

All will use the 12-bar Blues chord structure except Hoochie Coochie Man.

So far, we are playing in the keys of "G", "A", "B", "C" and "D".
We should have a video camera to record our jam for the members that couldn't attend and for our personal quality control.

This should be another exciting meeting. The food and service has been great. Our waitress, Elaine, is also the manager of Big Al's. It's in our best interest to tip her generously. As long as we keep her happy, I think we will have a venue for our meetings.

See you there,

Fred