I'm at the beach right now (probably my favorite place to be in the world), and I must say, there is nothing more relaxing than sitting back watching the pretty sunset and playing my guitar on a deserted beach early in the morning.


Where is everyones favorite most relaxing, chill place to play there acoustic?

My favourite place to play? Hmm thats a tricky one. I usually play sat on my computer chair as thats my spot where I spend most of my time but favourite would probably be in the pub.

The kitchen sat on the chiar in front of the back door/garden when the sun is out..awesome

very chillaxing

I like to play out on my front porch, got one of those old wooden church pews out there to park my butt on and watch the sunset while I play.

Yeah man, anywhere outside where its somewhat quiet and pretty usually gets me.

my room ...late at night when it's cold and rainy ....or at least cold windy ...just silence...and the ambient noise of crickets and the breeze....the faraway droning hum of a distant car... it's great .

Late just before closing in a small club when there's only a few stragglers left. Second is early in the morning (I get up just before daylight) out on the back porch just about sunrise. I have an old cheap guitar hanging on the wall outside. I make my first cup of coffee and go sit out there for a half hour or so most mornings. Lilly (my coonhound) lays on the porch out there with me. (She thinks I'm great.)

My favorite place to play is around the campfire, with my friends.

haha that made me laugh. but yeah the best place to play would have to be somewhere outside. Maybe on the dock up at my cabin

"Sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away...
Ooo, I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay.
Wastin' time..."

I've actually changed my mind. My favourite place to play guitar would be in the centre of my friends living room with the mic in front of me, the drums next to me and with all the windows open so the centre of town can hear us jamming. Alas that never happens anymore.

I like it when you hit that "golden hour" at the pub when everyone has had the right amount of drink to start singing along, danicing around and generally enjoying it. All the time before that is playing and hoping people are enjoying it, but when everyone starts to show it, man o man, thats the best place to be playing!

The room I record everything in has a sweet spot which has lots of great acoustic ambiance making the sound nicely.. well, huge. So that's where I moved the sofa and that's where I like to play acoustic best.

Yes, that's kind of what I meant above. For an acoustic solo gig, when the crowd has thinned way down and all the background-noise and glass-clinking has stopped. All the drunks asking if you can do something by Kiss or Iron Maiden have long since gone and passed out somewhere else and and those looking to pick up someone have all picked up or given up and gone, ("...after all the jacks are in their boxes and the clowns have all gone to bed...") and the stragglers that are left are mellow and actually paying attention to what you say and what you play and it's more like a room of friends than strangers. A couple of people clapping means more than a club full.

And conversely, maybe more like what you're talking about, in a band-gig situation where the mood and the crowd are just right and you know you're hot that night and the people don't wanna get off the dance floor and so you run one tune right into the next for a two hour set.

Those are the gigs that make it all worth it.


This time next week, I should be sitting under a willow tree picking tunes with Bowling Green John Cephas and a jar of good 'shine (although his "rediscovery" and the relative financial success it has brought has given him a bit of a taste for Laphroaig single-malt lately ). Scotch or 'shine, not a bad place to be. (But I'm gonna miss Lilly. )


<-Me and John a couple of years ago after a jar or so.

<- Lilly. I'm gonna miss her.

Yeah, its pure acoustic, I just love those solo gigs when you load up the car, play your set, get home after midnight........the feeling when you wake up the next morning before work is ace and for me, gives me a spring in my step the next day. Love it!!!!



Fenderguitarfreak, you so very lucky. I would be so happy to be able to walk to the beach first thing in the morning, hot coffee, guitar and have a couple of hours on the beach before everyone else arrives. My nearest beach is 2 hours drive so I would have to get up damn early lol

When i used to go camping with the wife, and we would get something going in the evening, and a few campers would gather round, and sing along. I also like to sit on a beach and just chill out late in the evening.

I love playing in front of a bunch of my friends but I'm honestly too nervous and scared to sing in front of them...thats usually for just me myself and i.

I enjoy playing in my hallway; it's got great acoustics, but it's really narrow so I have to move out of other peoples way a lot.

Haha so I just realized how gay this sounded...but yeah I was on a good bit of adderoll when I typed this...needless to say I was in a great mood.

Only if you were wearing a thong and enjoying a drink with a little umbrella in it.

I like to play in my kitchen and in the bathroom because the sound is so good! Out of the house, playing on the back deck or out at the family farm house are favorite spots.

I also like to escape to this wooded area and play by my amatuer fire.

in all honesty this is my favorite place to play, and in particular it is my favorite place to sing. the notes just ring out better.

Hahaha . Yeah, that would be pretty bad. I was actually drinking a beer.

Favorite place? Well that has to do with situations and moments. For example one of my favorite times playing was when me and my buddy just got to Chicago and the sun was rising and we were both playing on Lake Michigan.



But I also like going down to the river and playing.

With me, it's more about the time than a place. I like to play between 2 and 4 AM. That's the time when our brains naturally release the psychedelic neurotransmitter DMT (Dimethyltriptomine). Our brains subconsciously know where the sun is in relation to the earth at all times (I believe there's some kind of magnetic physical property that senses it initially). Excluding the extreme north, wherever you live on the globe, our brains can tell when the sun is in a certain position on the other side of the world, and 2-4 AM is when DMT kicks in.

I like playing guitar at this time; everything is just more surreal. If you lose yourself enough in the music, you become a part of it, and you're "awake in a dream state."

Check out some of these DMT links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grcqs9cDuN8...feature=related

http://www.kilbot.net/writing/dmt.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_elf


Description of an Enhanced DMT Trip
At about minute two of a DMT trip, according to McKenna, you burst through a chrysanthemum-like mandala, and find that

There's a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying "How wonderful that you're here! You come so rarely! We're so delighted to see you!"

They're like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on [them ...] and these things are saying "Don't give in to astonishment", which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say "Don't do that. Pay attention to what we're doing".

What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Faberge' eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what's happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".

We're now at minute 4.5 [of the trip] and you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There is a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called "meaning". After a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they begin to physically move away from you. Usually their final shot is that they wave goodbye and say "Deja vu! Deja vu!".

I also have had some of my best playing sessions about that time, but didn't really understand why. Good informative (if slightly off-topic ) post!


(B/t/w... Back in the 60s DMT was a semi readily available recreational-drug, sometimes also used as an enhancing additve in a tab of LSD. I liked it quite a bit.



Anyway, good post!

Thanks, man. Isn't this part about what Terrence McKenna said about his trip just soooo note worthy when thinking about what we do when we sing?: they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".

I have GOT to get my hands on that stuff .....I SOOOOO want to have an experience like that .....