It's not easy to sing and play at the same time

For many people, myself included, the guitar is not just an instrument; it’s an accompaniment. I have always enjoyed expressing myself through music, in particular by singing. Not long after I really started getting interested in music in my teens, I decided to purchase an acoustic guitar at the age of 19. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to achieve. Naturally I started by learning basic chord shapes and progressions, mostly from my Oasis chord book (and still love a bit of Brit-pop today!).

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Have you made your resolution yet?

Yes, it’s that time of the year again; the end of the year. That time when we start to drool with anticipation and count down the days to see if our loved ones got us all of the guitar goodies we asked for. (And I know one of those things was our Scale Mastery eBook, right?)

The big day arrives, you get all of your new gear and toys, and you spend the next week or two shredding up a storm and sending the neighborhood pets running for cover. It’s a great time to be a guitarist, and you’re loving life.

But after that, then what? You probably tuck your new toys in the closet with the rest of your stuff and don’t pull it out again for a month, right? Life getting in the way of life and all that stuff.

Every year, millions of people try to set goals for themselves – things they want to accomplish or change about themselves – in an effort to improve their daily lives. It’s a noble cause, but unfortunately it’s also one that 99% of us stick with for about a month and then give up on. And yes, we all know the world is going to end in some Mayan apocalyptic catastrophe that would make Mel Gibson proud, but until that happens we’re going to help you set a guitar goal for 2012…

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30 Days to Better Jazz Guitar - Dr. Matt Warnock

My good friend and fellow blogger, Dr. Matt Warnock, is doing great things for the guitar community. Through his work on the Guitar International website and his own personal website, Matt has been challenging us all to be better guitarists, and his recently published eBook – 30 Days to Better Jazz Guitar – is his latest contribution.

For those of us (myself included) learning to play jazz, figuring out what we should practice and what we need to learn can become a very daunting endeavor. Fortunately, 30 Days to Better Jazz Guitar provides us with a great set of tools to improve our playing.

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Greatest band ever!

I have a profound distaste for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It would be fair to say that I think it’s a joke, a disgrace, and nothing more than a way for a select few music executives and critics to get together once a year and circle-jerk while they tell each other how great they are. But despite my misgivings, there are those who believe “the Hall” has some legitimacy to it. To those people, I have to ask why.

Take a look at a sampling of some artists who have been inducted:  The Flamingos, The Kinks, Lovin’ Spoonful, John Mellencamp, The Moonglows, The Pretenders… I could go on.

You can obviously get where I’m going with this given the title of today’s post, so it’s not like the drum roll leading up to my argument is as dramatic as usual, but I truly have to ask:

Why is Rush not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

How can an entity expect any pretense of legitimacy when it consistently fails to recognize one of the most important rock bands of the last 30 years. Whether you are a fan or not, as a musician you cannot overstate how important they are. I present to you the following list of points as to why Rush should have already been nominated and inducted:
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Gibson's new Firebird X Computer Guitar

It’s not a mystery that the line between analog and digital has been getting smaller and smaller over the years. I think Line 6 was the first company to truly innovate and show us what was possible. With modeling now taking such a prevalent position in the music product industry, it was only a matter of time before a guitar company came along and shoved a whole mess of computer equipment into it. Line 6 had the Variax, and Brian Moore added USB to their iGuitar series.

Tomorrow, Gibson will officially release the Firebird X for sale. Having “enhanced an already outstanding instrument to unbelievable performance and creative heights” Gibson aims to set the bar higher than any guitar manufacturer before by including a wide range of new features from electronic tuners to 3rd party apps.

As intriguing as this all may seem, I can’t help but wonder if we, as consumers and musicians, have finally gone so far over the edge, so far down the path of having everything in one small package with ten million options immediately available to you, that we’ve actually killed the guitar.

Is the Gibson Firebird X signaling the death of the guitar?

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Dramatic, Indeed!

It is often said that our biggest periods of growth come after the most traumatic events.

If that’s is true, then progressive rockers Dream Theater recently received an Olympic-sized injection of HGH when in 2010 it was announced that drummer and band patriarch Mike Portnoy was no longer with the band. It would be fair to say that Portnoy’s exit was the biggest hard rock/metal story of last year, and continues to be highly controversial – at least to Portnoy and his fans.

And with much fanfare and publicity, DT recently released their latest CD, (not so) ironically titled A Dramatic Turn of Events. Being a long-time DT fan who over the past few years has struggled to stay a die-hard fan, I was cautiously optimistic about what it might sound like. It’s no mystery that Portnoy was the driving force behind the band. So much so, however, that it became obvious to all that he was so much in control that it often placed him at odds with the rest of the band, especially when it came to songwriting, engineering, and production. That also set up ADToE (DT fans are big on the acronyms) to possibly be a huge failure now that the rest of the band had to fill that hole. The question is, how does the new CD fare?

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Stop the Madness!

If ever there was a crutch that would forever stunt the musical growth of guitar players throughout the history of time, that crutch would be the Pentatonic Scale. Thousands of potentially great guitar solos have been spoiled by that little sequence of five notes that simply will not die. More disturbingly, millions of potentially great guitarists have languished in Pentatonic Purgatory.

I have taken up arms and put the call out to my fellow Fretheads to stop the madness. We may not be able to get the government to stop bleeding the middle class dry, but we can certainly stop musicians from making our ears bleed.

The Pentatonic Scale Has Been Banned!

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Get your fingerstyle on!

If you’re intrigued by fingerstyle guitar playing but haven’t yet found a way into feeling comfortable with the technique involved, then you’re not alone.

It took me ten years of dabbling on and off with fingerstyle guitar before I finally felt like I had a handle on how to fingerpick. Then, I found a teacher who upended everything I thought I knew and sent me back to basics with the fundamentals of how to use the thumb and fingers to make fingerstyle guitar music.

This guide is what I wish I’d had 15 years ago when I first started exploring fingerstyle guitar. Fingerstyle guitar technique really isn’t that complicated. Yes, it’s challenging to master the many applications that arise in all sorts of different music, but virtually anyone can have a solid handle on the best approach to fingerstyle guitar technique in a very short period of time.

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Volume 1: Scale Mastery

We hinted about it here — and was a bit more blatant about it here — so it’s not really a surprise announcement by conventional standards. But, we (Fretterverse) are quite pleased to announce the release of its first eBook — Scale Mastery.

Over a year in the making, Scale Mastery takes you way beyond the typical scale-learning methods available on the market today. I promise this eBook to be an original solution to an old problem.

Whether you are a beginning guitarist just starting out, an intermediate player having trouble getting certain sounds under your fingers, or even just a player who’s bored with his playing and wants a fresh approach, Scale Mastery will open up your eyes and ears to new possibilities.

The best part is, we’re selling the eBook (along with accompanying audio backing tracks) for $10. Yes, only ten dollars USD. That’s a bargain.

Please visit our Products page for more information about Scale Mastery, as well as a link to purchase and download the eBook instantly.

Buy a copy, tell your friends and family, or just buy them copies, too!

Challenge!

If ever there was a day of the week when motivation simply does not exist, Hump Day would be it. It’s still a wee bit too early to get excited about the weekend, it’s never a paycheck day and, as much as you really want to sit around and do nothing, you know you can’t. To make things worse, the summer is just about over, the vacation days are pretty much all used up, and now begins the push for the holiday marketing and 2012 business strategy sessions are starting to take hold.

Good times… good times.

I mean, a guy would have to be some kind of nut job to think that people would be motivated to actually sit down and practice guitar on a day like this, right? I mean, the sheer gall to ask someone to do more work when they are already mentally spent with two more work days to go!

Who would be so much of a jerk that they would issue a challenge on a Wednesday to try and see who has the moxy — the balls — to challenge you to get off your ass and show what you’re really made of?

I would.

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