What’s the best guitar for beginners?

at the EEE Farm. And maybe now that I think about it, maybe we should bring that winner right here to this room and get on the podcast. That'd be pretty cool. We have a new album coming out. We just released Country Things Volume one. We have Country Things Volume two coming out November twenty seventh, so I'm going to be talking about that. That will be the completion to Volume one, sixteen songs total if you add up Volume one and Volume two. We're gonna have the physical copy,

which is going to be CD and vinyl. So all that's coming out on If you can't remember November twenty seventh, remember Black Friday is when this is going down and that's also the same time, within a few days that we give away the truck, all that will be cleared up. You could follow this stuff right here on this YouTube page. We will be putting out videos not only of the information on how you could win that truck, but how we're upgrading that Silverado pickup truck. And I'm also going

to be teasing a lot of these songs. So other ways you could follow me. You can follow me on cameo dot com. If you want to get like a birthday shout out or happy anniversary or a little pep talk or whatever, you can find me on cameo dot com and I could shoot you a message. It's super simple. It's a video message I could send you. You could follow on ye nation dot com. This is a exclusive

fan club that we started. It's brand new. Anything that I feel is super exclusive that I don't want to tell everybody all at once, I'm putting on ye nation dot com. So go check that website out, and then everything else, ye Apparel, everything we have going on, all the stuff we got cooking is on yee dot com. So there's a lot of dot coms and all this stuff. If you can't tell I have had so much dagam iced tea. I'm completely hopped up on iced ta and

I'm gonna finish this. I'm gonna go film some Earldibbles Junior, dip them and pick them, and then I'm gonna go right across over here to the EE garage and work on Earldibbles old truck that I'm doing with Butch and Bull. We're building this truck from scratch. We took it down all the way to the frame and we're building it all the way back up. It's it's been such a fun series that we're putting out on YouTube. I think we're like we're into like part sixteen on this series

building this truck. So so much fun stuff going on, and I'm glad that you guys joined me on this podcast this morning. I want to talk about something that I get asked a lot, and I think it's it's finally time to really get into detail about it. But decy is what if you want to learn guitar? What

if you want to learn guitar? And it seems overwhelming on how in the world you even know where to buy a guitar or how to learn or what how do you how do you get started if you want to play guitar, and I could give you my best advice on that. I could tell you what I've done and what I did to learn guitar at the time, and I think it worked for me and I think

it could work for you. If anything you hear today adds value to your life in any way, I would ask, because this is free to listen to on all fourmats, I would ask that you just tell a friend and you subscribe, comment, spread the message in all these ways. I mean, just hitting that little like button right here below this page is huge to making this podcast grow. Subscribing to whatever page you're watching or listening to right

now is huge to making this podcast grow. And even bigger than those two things, even bigger is telling a friend. If someone says, hey, where'd you where'd you get that from? You go? Uh, Granger Smith told me on his podcast over there, the Greater Smith Podcast, So that that that is awesome. That's my only price for you today listening to this, and I hope, I hope you can get some from it. We're gonna dig deep, We're going for

it right now. Welcome to Granger Smith Podcast. Ye ye did chids in DC un times and so long line I'm fool up and down on back Ranger coage. Yeah that gation. If you're new to this podcast, I'm getting these questions from you guys at Granger Smith Podcast at gmail dot com. So if you want to ask me anything under the sun, everything is is okay to ask. If you listened listened before you could you could tell that there are three lighthearted questions. There's very deep questions.

There's questions about life, there's questions about music. Whatever you have, email me Grangersmith podcast at gmail dot com. I'll read your question, include your name and where you're from. I'll read the question on the podcast and answer it the best I can, and I have them right here. I'm gonna kind of flip through so it makes it somewhat random, and go right here to Stephanie. And this question says, Hey Granger, my name is Stephanie. I'm from South Dakota.

I just wanted to start off by saying I love your music and a door watching your family on the Smiths, I was wondering how you choose songs that are on the radio. What makes you think, oh, this song is going to be a great hit. Also, are there any of your older songs that, whenever you think of them, you think, Man, I wish I would have written that different or change the lyrics to this. Your song Tractor means the world to me. It was played at my grandpa's funeral and there is not a dry eye when

it was played because it fit him to tea. October sixteenth will be a year since we lost him. It was an amazing He was an amazing man, and I bet that him and your dad would have had some interesting conversations. I've been struggling since he passed, but listening to you and Amber talk about lost love and faith has helped me move forward through this time and be grateful and all the time that I did get to

spend with him while he was here. Thank you for being open and honest in this crazy world we live in. I cannot wait for Country Things Volume two. Ye Ye. Thank you Stephanie so much. Shout out to South Dakota. Thank you for listening to the music and watching me and my family on the Smiths on our YouTube channel. And you have a couple questions here, so I'll dive in with the first question on how a chew songs

for the radio. And that's an interesting question, often misunderstood if you're not in the music business, and it's complicated, and I wish that it wasn't. And to be honest with you, Stephanie, this is the most frustrating subject in my career is country music radio songs that go to radio, what determines a single, and the possibility of skipping over the songs, or at least not talking about them as much, at least not making music videos of the songs in

between the radio singles on the albums. And it's tough because you mentioned Tracter that song, just like you said, for you, that song's very special for me. I wrote it about my dad after he passed away in twenty fourteen. It was on my album Remington, and it means so much to me that actually I've only played it a few times at shows, and it's difficult for me to play that song because it was about my dad and it's so close to me, the story of him through

those lyrics and through that melody. It's one of my favorite music videos we've ever done. If you haven't seen that music video, please take a look at it. Because I poured my heart into it. It's the music video kind of goes through the song itself visually and talks about my dad. And then we had to use an actor to play my dad, and so that actor I picked my dad's best friend. So these guys were inseparable. They were childhood buddies, they grew up together, they were

friends all through adult life. They had children at the same time, and it was they were so close, and they dressed the same, they talked the same, they had the same interest and so being able to use Steve in the music video playing my dad makes it even more special to me, and it makes him visually, really, if you know, my family really hits home with that

music video. And also my son, Lincoln is in that music video and he's a baby, and it's a really, I think, a really good tie together with Lincoln and Steve Lincoln. My son was three months old when my dad died, so my dad knew him for three months and Lincoln will never be able to remember that, and

so there's an interesting tie between those two. So thank you for bringing up that song, because that's a perfect example of a song that the rest of the world, the casual country music listener probably would never hear unless you're a fan of me. But what the casual fan of country music would here is my radio singles. And I've had a handful of independent, really independently, really least radio singles that I put out in regional radio when I lived when I was just marketing to the state

of Texas and Oklahoma. And then I have a handful of songs that we worked at national radio, starting with back Road Song in twenty fifteen. That was my first national radio single. My first regional radio single was Colorblind, And one day, I promise you I will be a whistleblower on this whole process. And I've actually had dreams of being the whistleblower to the whole process because it's

it's frustrating and it's devastating to the artist. But in a lot of ways, it's a necessity to try to get your music to more people, and ultimately that's you know, in a lot of ways. I can't speak for me personally, but in a lot of ways, artists have the goal of reaching more people. Who who wouldn't want their music to get to more people. No one really says I want to grow to a certain amount of fans and then I want to stop right there and I don't want to gain anymore. I want to just have those

fans and never get any more. So you get what I'm saying. It's like any business. You have a concrete company, you want to increase your client base, and that's what songs are for musicians. So what we have to do is we have to pick one and then we have to pitch that to radio, and radio can only when we give them one. They can only play that one if they want to play right, If they pick another one and decide to play that, it hurts the current single.

And if it hurts the current single, then the current single will never move up the charts because radio stations look at each other's playlist and they share them together.

And so we need to be unified on one song, so that the radio stations across the country in the world are unified on one song because as they each contribute their amount of spins, those spins are counted and that counts for the chart system, which you guys might know as the Billboard chart where a song starts going up the chart, and that's based on spins per market per radio station. So we have to focus on one. So here's the problem. There's a lot of problems, but

here's one of them. Say Philadelphia jumps on this song early, the current radio single from me, and they start playing it, but Portland, Oregon, they're not sure yet, or they're too full, maybe their playlist is too full because they can only play so many songs in one day, so they want to wait a little bit longer. And then Boston jumps in, and then Louisville, Kentucky, jumps in on it, and then and then Fort Lauderdale jumps on it. But Portland's still

not playing it. So then six months goes by and Portland goes, Okay, we're ready. We think this song's a hit. So they start playing it. But now, guess what, Philadelphia's been playing it for six months, and it's getting to be a little bit old to them. So it's brand new in Portland, it's old in Philadelphia. And you got to get them all to keep on playing it. So it keeps going up to chart, and some stations say, I don't want to play it till say Detroit will

throw that out there. SA Detroit says, we don't want to play it until it's top thirty. On the chart. So Detroit's not even going to touch it until it gets the top thirty. And so you need Portland to start playing it. You need Philadelphia to stay active on it. You need Fort Lauderdell to start increasing their spins on it so that it gets top thirty. So Detroit adds it. Then Detroit adds and they're brand new on it and

they're eight months in. But Philadelphia, now they're eight months old with the you know what I mean, it's a huge problem. And and my my fan base is thinking, yeah, we've heard this song for eight months now, he's still talking about it. And that's why you might hear an artist, a major artist that's keeps talking about the same song on Instagram and you've heard it a million times, but he's still or she's still talking about it. It's because they still got to get these other stations on board.

So by the time this whole process is done today and today today's world, it's like it's it's like a year's process, like fifty weeks or more. So by the time that year goes by, you've been pumping one song, You've got all the stations, it's peaked out at whatever position on the chart, and then then you have to decide should we release another single from this album or I already have all these new songs written, maybe we should just put up a new album. And it's a

big dilemma. Then you put out a new album and then guess what happens. All those songs that you thought were good are now old and on the previous record and it's super frustrating. How do you fix the problem? I mean, there's that's that's another question for another day. It's very it's very detailed, and one day, like I said, I might maybe I'll write a book about this. And it's not one person or one station or one artist problem. It's all of them collectively creating a system that's a

monster to the music business. And it's not it's not like some people say, like Nashville sucks, Well, it's not Nashville. It's collectively everyone cooperating in the same in the same system that becomes the problem. So to answer your original question, Stephanie, how do you pick it? We just guess. I mean,

we guess what might work well on radio. We guess what we might play it for a few people radio stations and see if they have a top song out of three that we give them, and then what sucks is you got to you got to pick the song that you know is gonna work well in all fifty states of the United States and Canada and Australia and Europe, and you it's really hard to find a song that works in San Antonio, Texas and every other city you could possibly think of. I mean, I mean, you can't.

You can't sit here and go okay. Sioux Falls works with Portland, Maine, which works with Portland, Oregon, which works with Miami, Florida, which works with Charlotte, North Carolina, which works with Phoenix, with you know, Albuquerque. It just it's a crazy mess, and it's a great question, Stephanie. I hope that. I hope they kind of got to it for you here. Let's move on. Next question random It says, Hey, there, Granger.

Everyone has their own definition of success. Was there a moment or time that you felt like you actually made it? Just hitting this time in my music career, almost twenty five years later, my definition turns out to be much less glamorous than what I ever expected it to be.

Thanks man, Love the show, Randy. Awesome question Randy, and success is a very volatile word because the reality about success is everyone has their own definition and you have to almost categorize success in your career, success in family, success in life, and those are multi layered, each of those. So if you just want to look at career, that's one thing, but you might have been a failure in your family. If you want to be a success in your family, you might be a failure in your career.

So how do you balance all that? So how you define success, Randy is different than your next door neighbor, or me, or your mother. So I get this question a lot when people ask me when was the time you felt like you made it? It's such a It's such a common question and yet so difficult to answer because whenever I hear that or read that, I always think, well, I haven't made it yet. And you might listen to the show Randy and think, well, bro, I follow you,

I listen to your music. You have plaques hanging on the wall, you have a podcast, and you've made it, dude. But I don't think I have and I don't think I ever will kick back in the chair in country music and go, ha made it. I made it. And then even if I did, what would I do? Then where would I go from there? Well, why if I did make it, what would I Why would I still make music? Would it just be for fun? After I've made it? Why would I want to put out another

record just because I can? And so you see the interesting problem that occurs with saying I've made it. But I could dig in a little bit and say there are moments in my career when got better are easier. Okay, even that creates problems because then you think, well, with more, a little bit more success, you get a little bit more problems. And that is so true. You make a little bit more money, you're spending more money every time. Every time you make more money in any business, you're

inevitably also spending more money. And sometimes you can make just enough money and spend exactly that amount, and then make more money and spend that, so you end up not making anything different than you were ten years ago. And it's hard to really create a separation between if you're a small business like me, creating a separation between the extra money you're making from a successful business and then the extra money then you need to spend to

keep up with that new success that you have. And that's as simple as take employees. For example, if I if my career grows as a musician and we get bigger and better shows, then I have to pay my guys bigger and better money. I can't just pay them what I paid them when we were in the van and say, ah, this is great, we're doing good, we're getting good shows, and I have to I don't have

to pay my guys anything. That's my responsibility to keep them relatively moving up with their salaries and their money so that that they're joining in on all of this. So digging into your question, my definition, as you say, Randy, my definition turns out to be much less glamorous than what I expected it to be. And that is exactly right,

and that is not any different than anyone else. The keyword that you said in that sentence is expected, because expectation is a dangerous game that you play with yourself, and you have to keep your gratefulness higher than your expectation at all times because if you don't, then when you get to where you thought you had made it, where you expected to make it, it's going to be disappointing.

Unless you're a little bit more grateful. And I've said this before, but if you're going to have higher expectations, you better have really high gratitude. And I don't want anyone listen to this podcast to have low expectations in their life or their love, or their business or their family. You shouldn't have low expectations. You need to have high. So that requires super high gratitude, and so many people forget that part of it. They forget that they need

to stack up their gratefulness. The world teaches you to run, succeed and get up early and fight and claw and expect greatness, but the world doesn't always teach you to constantly be looking around and grateful where you are right now, right here, right now. What are you grateful for today?

And if you have trouble with that question, you should seriously consider thinking about it and dissecting that in your brain, because if you can't think of what you're grateful for today right now, you have to go all the way back to Huh, I'm grateful that I'm sitting in this room in a T shirt, I'm not sweating and I'm not cold. Simple as that, I'm grateful for an air conditioner. That's keeping this room right around seventy degrees because I've been in a lot of situations when I'm really hot

and sweating and miserable. I've been in a lot of situations where I'm freezing cold and can't not warm up. So right now, I am grateful to beat a T shirt and have a normal temperature. Right I mean that sounds stupid, but that is how you can find gratefulness in everything you do, And if you learn to cultivate that gratefulness, then it will start counteracting that high expectation that you have. I don't know if I really gave you the answer that you wanted, but that's the truth.

I don't know if I've ever felt like I made it, And I could be retired from music one day and still not think that. But as long as I have a high gratefulness, I'm okay with that. Good question, buddy, here's a question from John. He says, Hey, Granger, my name is John. I would like to know how you come up with song with the song I Kill Spiders. I also wondered, is the little girl's voice in that song your daughter? Like the new album? I can't wait

for Volume two? God bless you your family, crew and friends. Stay safe. John h. Thank you, buddy, thank you for those kind words. And I Kill Spiders is on the Country Things Volume one album. I wrote that about my daughter London, and I wrote it with my buddy Tim Owens, who's a dear friend of mine, longtime songwriter with me and close friend. And he called me one day here at the Yege Farm and he said, Granger, I got a great idea for a song. It's called I Kill Spiders.

That's how he talks. And I said, all right, I don't I said, I'm intrigued. I don't know what that means, but I'm intrigued. And he said it's basically the idea that no matter what I achieve in my life and my career, to her, I'll always be the hero. They could kill spiders for her figuratively. And I mean, I thought, man, Tim, that's an awesome idea. So I went home that day. I wrote the song probably less than an hour. It

was one of these super easy songs to write. And I wrote it from my daughter's perspective because it's just such such a cool image to think about the many times when she's called me into her room. Because she's scared. Maybe there's something she feels like, there's something in the sheets or under the bed or in the closet or on the floor, or maybe there's a cricket climbing up the wall. We've all been there, and you come in as a dad and you're just the hero that takes

the cricket and throws it outside. And I thought, well, you know, what a cool idea for a song. So after I finished it, I was in the studio right here at the EE Farm actually recording guitars, and I felt like there was needed, it needed one more thing to that recording, So I called London. She was with my mother and I said, hey, can you send me some voice memos on your phone of you acting scared?

So she said yeah, yeah. So she's she loves acting and pretending and that's that's just way up her ally. I'm gonna I'm gonna pull it up right here, and so that's the beginning of that song. And she did that on one take and I added it to the track and I think it made it a lot better. So if y'all haven't heard that song, check it out.

I'm proud of her, and it's something that I'll be able to look back on in ten years and hear her sweet little voice when she was a little girl, and it'll it'll remind me of this time in twenty twenty when we were recording at the Yee Farm making this album Country Things, and it'll be a very special memory for us. Thank you, John, appreciate it, buddy. I'm gonna take a quick break. You're right back. This next

question says, Hey Granger, It's Mary from Lowell, Michigan. What is some relationship advice your parents gave you whenever you're younger, either before or during your time with Amber. Thank you, Mary, Iowa State University, Agricultural Engineering. Thank you, Mary. That's a good question. And I haven't talked a lot about me growing up in my relationship with my parents, but it

was a good one. I'm very blessed to have had some really good parents that were they were very thoughtful in their parenting, and they had a good balance of protecting us as little boys, the three of us, and maybe even more so, preparing us for the world. And what I mean is it is more important to prepare your children for the world than protect them from that, because if you constantly are protecting them from the world.

They're going to get. The world's going to teach them a lesson whether or not you're around or not, and so it's better to prepare them. And I feel like my parents did a good job of preparing us for the world. And they were more or less, they were pretty strict on us. They disciplined us, they were strict on us. We were raising a god fearing home. And sometimes during those times, I was, you know, I get frustrated and see friends that had more freedom than I did,

and I'd get get frustrated with that. But then I got older and I looked back and I was like, oh my god, I'm so glad that they were. They were They had a close rope on me. You know, they kept us on leash, and that's a good thing. That's a good thing. When it came to relationships, they encouraged us to date as many people as possible as opposed to get stuck in a serious relationship when you're young, talking middle school, high school. They would discourage us from

getting into these serious relationships, which we still did. You know, we still did, but I remember Dad would always be like, why you do he's still dating her I'm a gradear I wish she would. Wish you'd date other a lot of other girls. There's a lot of other girls you just kind of skip around. And what he meant he maybe he didn't explain it right to a teenager, but what he meant was and what he wanted to see

from me, is explore all the options. Learn of learn all the people you don't want, the kinds of people you don't want to date, so that you could narrow it down when you get older to exactly what you need and what you want, instead of wasting two years of your high school with one girl, and then you get out of high school and it's like you haven't really seen much of the dating world. And Dad also worried about me not spending time with my guy friends

because you're stuck in a relationship. So if you're stuck every weekend hanging out with his girl watching movies on her couch, then you're missing out on really important bonding time with your buddies. Dad saw that. Dad warned me that I didn't always listen to him. I did spend a lot of time on couches watching movies with you know, girlfriends, And he was right sometimes you got to get out and mess things up with your buddies a little bit, you know, bro time you got to do that as well.

But they were strict when it came to things like no closed doors inside the house in a relationship. They always wanted to know where I was. I always had a curfew. I could never just go out and disappear and oh, hey, I'm spending the night so somewhere, or going camping with a bunch of people, guys and girls. They were onto that, and so they were very They were very involved when it came to our relationships growing up.

And when I got out of high school, when I left the house, I was out in the real world. I was playing music. They still had rules like you can't live with a girl. You can't. There was a lot of things that they didn't want us doing if we weren't married, and they stayed honest about that kind of stuff, and they would disapprove if we went in another direction. So maybe most important of all that is they taught us to love are our partner through their

example of their love for each other. So that's probably You asked me, what is some relationship advice your parents gave you? What probably more important is what they showed me, the relationship advice that they showed me through them and their love, and that is the most important thing they could have done for me. We'll spin through here and find another random All right, here we go. This question says, Hey Granger. I'm Will from New Hampshire. I saw you

for the first time at Bernie's in New Hampshire. It was awesome, love the show, and it was the second time I got to see you. I'm just wondering, do you and your band own your staging and do you ever go and rent them? I'm just curious and as how all that works. Ye, thank you Will, good question, man. And when it comes to touring and staging, we you don't ever own or rent staging until you're really in

the arena tour level. So arena bands, if you've ever been to a big arena concert, the headliner of that concert is renting that stage. And they've come into that empty arena early that morning and they unload their semis and they build their stage that's all packed up in their semis, and they build it right then and there for you, including lights and everything. Everything. It's literally started as a basketball or a hockey or a soccer arena,

and they built the concert out of that. And we've been on tours with guys like Forda, Georgia Line and Luke Bryan and Kane Brown that we're all in these big arena tours and so I've watched it. Sometimes I would get up at seven am just to see the stage go up. And it takes hours and hours and hours to build and hours and hours and hours to

break down. So these crew guys are the last ones to close the doors on the truck late at night, that the last ones to go to bed, and they're the first ones back up in the next city the next morning in the new arena and they're out there. First thing they do about seven am or whenever they arrive is they go out there with their tape measures and their tape and they start taping off the floor and measuring and seeing where all the legs of the staging is going to go. So typically, like you said

you saw me in New Hampshire Bernie's. Typically the at a venue like Bernie's, the stage is already there. It's already there when you get it. The lights are already hanging. Festivals that you go to that they provided that stage or the lighting. It's only in arenas when bands bring their stage. What we do bring is we bring all

of our equipment. We bring all of our anything sitting on the stage, and that includes risers, the little stages that sit on top of the big stage, the lights that shine at the people, all the instruments, banners, things like that. That's all from the band that came that night. But that's a good question. Will thank you for that. Here's a question from Pam. It says, know you've answered this one hundred times, but how hard is it living? Excuse me? How hard was it leaving the last place

that river was alive? I could never imagine what you'll have been through. And I have a handicaped son in a wheelchair and he's nonverbal, and I could never handle if something ever happened to him. You and your wife are amazing people. I followed you guys on YouTube and your channel since forever. My name is Pam. My hometown is isel Town, Ohio, a little town between Cincinnati and Dayton. Thank you, Pam. I'm trying to think how to start this,

but thank you for your kind words. My heart goes out to you with your nonverbal, handicapped son in a wheelchair. I can't imagine the difficulty that you have. You've been through with him, and you say, here, I could never handle it if something happened to him. I'm here to tell you, Pam, that you could. You could. And I know that that's just a it's just it's a way of saying it that you typed I could never handle it.

But it's a tremendously beautiful thing what humans could go through and what they could persevere through, and the suffering that they can handle. And the reason I say that is because look at history. You look at the horrors of history and the wars and holocaust and the craziness of human history, and the one thing that's consistent to that craziness is the chaos that is bound to happen and the suffering. And the other thing that's consistent is

people persevere through it. They always do. They always have something very well might happen to your son or someone else around you. Probably that's just the oddogy that we play as humans. And so you say I could never handle it, but I'm here to tell you you could. I can't tell you how I can't tell you it's going to be easy, but you would because you are apparently very strong, uh, for dealing what you've you've already dealt with so far, so it could get worse and

you you could handle it. To answer your question specifically, was it hard leaving the last place that river was alive? Oh? My god, yeah, absolutely it was. It was. It's one of the worst things in my life to leave, leave the place where we raised my little boy who passed away, and it was. It was terrible. There's not there's not a there's not an adjective to describe how terrible it was. But there was one thing worse than that, and that

would have been staying there longer. Because Amber and Not talked many times about how we have a million good memories there and one bad one, and unfortunately, the one bad one is what forced me to relocate for my own sanity and for our family's sanity, and for a restart afresh beginning where we could take what we've learned and take our love and move forward. And there's a difference between moving on and moving forward. But the only way to go is forward and relocating to a new place,

which we've now done twice. Since then. It was my only option, regardless of how difficult it was. And that sums up life in a lot of ways that when you only have one option, that doesn't matter, matter if it's easier or hard, that is your only option and you got to do it. So that's what we were

faced with. We had a lot of challenges and where we were living and moving to a new place was one of the smaller problems we were having at the time, but nonetheless it was terrible and it was one of one of the one of the hard things that we had to deal with out of the darkest time in my life so far, and we've also grown a lot mentally, spiritually, the love for each other. And I am a firm believer that through that suffering, through any suffering, we grow.

And in order for anything to grow, it has to be broken first, at some level. It needs to be broken to grow from there. And that's what we did and that's what we're doing. My heart goes out to you, Pam. It sounds like you have a challenge on your hands, unthinkable challenge, and my prayers go to you. Thank you for emailing the show. This question comes from Stephanie says Hey grangeer, my name is Stephanie, and it said hang on a second, let me let me read. Let me

correct myself as I'm reading. Like I said, I read these just off the cuff. I don't prep these at all. I read them off the cuff. So let me phrase this. Let me read it exactly how she said it. Hey granger, my name is Stephane, not Stephanie Stephane. So figured if I at least I can get a shout out. I'm from a tailgate town called Windover, Ontario, in Canada, and I was wondering if we would see a song featuring Donnie Cowboy, maybe he could even team up with Earl Dibbles.

I'm a huge fan. New album is awesome. Can't wait for volume two. Congrats, Thank you buddy. This is something I think about a lot because Donnie Cowboy is another character, if you guys don't know, on my YouTube page that's in a group of Earl Dibbles, Junior, Bobby Wayne, Live with Lionel Freddie, Donnie Cowboy. And there's a lot of characters on there that aren't as popular as Earl Dibbles, and I wish they were. I love Donnie He's one

of my favorites. Donnie is coffee and cigarettes to Earl Dibbles, beer and dipon and he loves nineties country and he has a song called Parked Out by the Lake that we have a music video for that I love on YouTube. He's just not quite as popular, so I don't actively pursue him. It's not as fun for me creatively to pursue so thing that I know is not going to

get as much attention as Earl. And you know, right now as I finished this podcast, we're about to go out and shoot another Earl Dibbles Junior Diploman pick them, which is so fun for me to pick college football games as Earl. And it goes on CBS Sports on Tuesday nights, and I know that people watch it and people like it, and people laugh, people smile, And if I know I'm making people laugh and smile at a large level like Earl does, it makes me want to

do more. And although I know people laugh at Donnie, it's just it's not as popular. So I definitely would want to do another song besides Parked Out by the Lake for Donnie. But I'll keep you, I'll keep you in the loop Buddy shout out to Windover, Ontario. Cannot wait to get back to you guys up in Canada. Let's chip another one here. This one is from Liam says, Hey Granger. I'm I'm a high schooler from Northeastern New York.

I would like to thank you for all your music You've provided me as a listener, and I can't thank you enough. I remember when I first heard you while watching Off the Ranch with Matt Carricker in the summer of twenty nineteen. I've been hooked ever since. I try and spread your music as much as I can. Every event in my life can be put to your music. I've been there in the best of times and the not so great times. Hate you like I love you hits my heart so hard in the song I'm actually

listening to. It's the song I'm actually listening to as I type this. I hope you and your family are staying safe and healthy during this tough time. My question to you is I would like to start playing guitar. What guitar do you think is best to begin with? Also, where do you get your inspiration for your music? Thank you and God bless sincerely, Liam shout out to Northeastern New York. Thank you for your question, Liam, Thank you for listening to the music and finding me off the ranch.

That's pretty cool. Thank you for listening to Hate You Like I Love You. That song, by the way, is doing well for me. It's getting streamed a lot, it's getting looked at it on YouTube a lot. And so to go back to the beginning of this podcast, it's interesting because then you look at a song like hate You like I Love You, and you go, okay, this is leading all signs leading to being a radio single.

So kind of looping back to the original question, how do you pick a radio single, Well, something like this, you look at it and go, man, A lot of people are streaming and watching this song on YouTube, so that's a really good indicator that hates You like I

Love You could go to radio. I always like to say when someone asked me about playing guitar and the best guitar to start with, this is not a very popular opinion, but I like to say that instead of spending a lot of money on a nice guitar, because there's just like cars, there's a difference in a cheap guitar and the way it plays and an expensive guitar in the way it plays. It's an expensive guitar. It's easier to play, it's lighter on your fingers, and it

sounds better. It stays in tune better a cheap guitar, and say a pawn shop guitar is going to feel rough on your hands, it's hard to push down the strings, it sounds like crap, it's it's always out of tune. So that there there lies the dilemma. You know, So what do you do if you're a brand new guitar player and you don't want to spend over a thousand bucks for a nice guitar some I mean some guitars.

You're talking three four thousand dollars for a super nice guitar, or you're sitting there looking at the pawn shop and you go, hey, that one's one hundred and fifty, Like maybe I should just do that. So what I like to say to compromise between these two things is try a an on brand, like a brand that you recognize, a brand that you've actually heard before, and instead of some weird Japanese brand that you don't you've never heard

of in your life. So get a cheap on brand guitar, take the strings off of it and replace them with nylon strings. Nylon strings are typically used for Latin guitars. Got string guitars, as they're called. Sometimes you can get them at any guitar store or any music shop. Put nylon strings on the cheaper on brand guitar, and you could have the guy at the at the guitar shop

do it for you. Say hey, I want that guitar and I want those strings, nylon strings, and the guy's gonna go, what, no, No, that does that doesn't go together? And you go, yeah, but Granger Smith on the podcast told me I should do this, and he's gonna go, that doesn't it doesn't match up, and you can you just please try to do it? Yeah, but it doesn't have a metal ball at the end. Can you tie a knot at the end and just make it work? Trust me, Guys, put these nylon strings on here. They're

so much easier on your fingers. There's so much easier to push down and navigate. They don't stay in tune. Great, but that's the one compromise. But you're gonna thank me for it, and you're gonna want to play guitar more. If your fingers aren't hurting as bad. That's a big deal. When you get your fingers aching and it sounds like crap and your fingers are bleeding on the end, you're not going to want to go back and play guitar again. And the whole purpose of learning guitar is so you

want to just practice over and over and over. So, Liam, great question. I hope you follow this advice and then come back to this podcast and email it back Grangersmith Podcast at gmail dot com and let me know how it went for you. And as far as the inspiration your last question, where you get your inspiration free music life all over it? Everything. I listen to everything. I listen to my friends talk, I listen to the fans, I listen to a conversation in the movies, and I

write it all down phone. So I hear somebody say something in a movie or a friends or in a conversation and they say something, I write it down, and then when I start writing, I use the experiences I've had in my life to make a story around that line, that phrase, that melody, And I know that that's that's a hard way to answer that question, but that's the truth. That's where the inspiration comes from. It comes from life. I appreciate you guys so much. Once again, this podcast

is free for you. My request is if you like it, subscribe to this channel, give it a thumbs up and tell a friend, Tell a friend that, hey, you know what. I had a question and Gradersmith answered it for me on this podcast. Where the Graander Smith Podcast all the places you could listen to podcast apps in whatever format you like it. I'm there, I'm there, and also thank you for watching on YouTube. If you guys are watching me, thank you for that too. Spread the message comment below

if you like it and it keeps me going. It keeps me wanting to continue these every single Monday morning, and I love you guys for that. We'll see you next week. E