Are We There Yet
Are We There Yet was a piece I wrote rather early on (~1983 when I lived in Burlington, VT) and I was still trying to work out pieces by musicians like Leo Kottke and Jorma Kaukonen to understand better how to write for the guitar. It sounds like me though and not so much like them, at least to my less than objective ears.
I wrote this song specifically for a 6 string, I had bought my first decent 6-string – a 1960 Martin 00-17 – from Boyd’s music in Burlington, VT for $400 at the time, and I was all geeked to do something with it. This was a good result.
I had not played this song much at all in the past 35 years since I wrote it, and it was more of a challenge than I bargained for over the past few weeks to try to get it in passable shape to share with you. It is pretty simple but there are some stretches and jumps and so on that I struggle with.
The video version included in this post, which I recorded yesterday (8/5/22) uses a Larrivee D-09, it was in the right tuning and I didn’t feel like re-tuning the old Martin for this exercise.
There is also a technically cleaner version of Are We There Yet , sans video – from 1984 or 85 that I believe does use the old Martin 00-17: