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Easy to Play Beginner Guitar Songs



What is the no. 1 common goal set by all beginner guitarists? To be able to play beginner guitar songs

Traditional Photo Albums For Traditional Photos



If you asked five different ladies what their most prized possessions were, I believe that memories contained in their volumes of photo albums would be at the top of the list. Today with the Internet and computers, there are an abundance of on line and digital photo albums. Sometimes a traditional photo album is not the easiest thing to find.

The photo album has seen as many changes as the pictures it contain. The first ones were typically bound books with thick pages. The photos were mounted with glue or little adhesive corners to the pages. Fading and discoloration to the photos was due to air exposure, acid in ink, and the presence of lignin in the paper.

Other albums are made with thick white cardboard like pages. Thin lines of adhesive line the pages. Then cellophane or plastic cover the photos. This is an improvement, but still the presence of acid can damage the photos. The glue strips make removing them or reorganizing them a hard task. Also the photos can bend and tear when dislodged from their original places.

Today there are several companies that offer photo sleeves. Made from a poly substance that looks like clear plastic, the sheets each hold several photos. Sometimes referred to as archival photo holders, the photos easily slip in and out. If choosing a photo holder, be sure to read the product information and choose one that is acid free. Though a little more expensive, the photos will be safer over the years. Pioneer Photo Albums is one company that offers the photo safe books and storage boxes.

Some people like to take their albums a step further and make scrapbooks. The photo sleeves are a great way to lay out the photos and rearrange them. Then the ideas can be turned into the scrapbooks. When scrap booking, attention should be paid to the acid content. Even some ink contains acid. When marking on photos a permanent black marker may be the best thing to write on them with. Craft stores also carry pens to test the pH level. With one of these pens you can check the pH level of not just the paper, but anything else you plan to use in the book. Little stickers, lettering, material scraps, and cards all should be checked before trusting your photos next to them.

Photo albums are a great way to protect your pictures and also put them on display. My kids enjoy pulling the books off of the shelves and looking at places we used to live, birthday parties, and baby pictures. Though a little more effort is required, paying attention to the acid and lining content will help preserve them for years to come.

The Beatles Best Four Psychedelic Albums



These are the four Beatles albums you need if you are into psychedelic music. I will not put them in order (other than alphabetical) because you really need all four of them and I don’t want you thinking you can get away with leaving any of them off your list.

Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

This is probably The Beatles most purposefully trippy album. Almost every song on the album is bursting with mind melting madness of some type or another whether it be experimental production, unusual song arrangements, and/or unusual songwriting. “I Am The Walrus” & “Strawberry Fields Forever” are arguably John Lennon at his most “mad.” These are the songs where he went full out with the “kitchen sink” production, the bizarre lyrics, the unexpected song arrangements. It’s all there. “Flying,” “Blue Jay Way,” and the title track “Magical Mystery Tour,” these are songs designed to melt minds and they do just that.

Revolver (1966)

What brililant songs. And what an amazing variety in music in such a compact album. There’s more variety in this 35 minute album than in most band’s whole careers. And it’s all done so incredibly well. And then there’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” which could very well be the most far out song The Beatles ever recorded.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

This is a trip. Sure the “concept” isn’t really all that tight, but I think that’s why it works so well. It’s like you are in a carnival going around hearing these different incarnations of the same band. Again a wild selection of different styles of music but unlike Revolver, each of the songs somehow sounds connected to each other as well. It’s an amazing trick to make “Within You Without You” & “When I’m 64″ make sense together on the same album.

This is an album that has become so legendary that sometimes I think people don’t properly appreciate how great it is. It is not overrated. It really is that good. If you think otherwise, you may have not got out of that stage where you want to be different just for it’s own sake.

The White Album(1968)

I talk a lot about variety in this article because that’s one of the things that I love most about The Beatles music and it’s one of the things that I think makes listening to their albums so trippy. Well this is the peak of that variety. There’s 30 tracks here and a vast majority of them are completely different than the other 29 songs on the album. In many ways this is the ultimate Beatles trip and I think it’s their best album ever (psychedelic or not.)

And then there’s “Revolution #9.” It’s hard to get much more psychedelic than that. If you really listen to this track closely on headphones you are likely to get yourself quite a scare and I think that makes the song quite a successful piece of sound art.