Tosin Abasi of Animals as Leader

Getting older is a funny thing. “You just wait and see” must be on an endless subconscious loop in the minds of my parent’s generation. The younger you are, the more you think you know, and the more the older generation can’t wait for you to grow up a little bit and see the expression on your face when you finally “get it” and realize you don’t know everything.

But the burden isn’t just on the young guys. Quite often the older folks don’t give the younger guys enough credit. They just assume they know nothing, are unmotivated, and will never learn.

I am certainly, in some respects, a part of both groups. Being just a few weeks north of my 39th birthday I seem to straddle the line of being a grown-up with a wife and mortgage, and yet also being a kid who is still trying to figure out what to do when I grow up.

And so yesterday I found myself going to the Summer Slaughter 2010 metal show. I was there for one band in particular (I’ll get to that soon; bear with me) but managed to catch a few of the others. To say that my ears were assaulted would be an understatement. I didn’t hear one distinguishable note, not one single sung lyric that was actually articulated. Every singer sounded like they crap barbed wire and gargle with gun powder. As much as I try to embrace all forms of music, this just wasn’t my bag at all. I love Meshuggah, Opeth, and Periphery, and I get the cookie monster vibe. Though I’m not a huge fan of it, I can appreciate it when it’s done right.

WHEN it’s done right.

And so the old curmudgeon in me got a bit of a workout.

“They don’t know how to mosh.”

“What the f*&# is the name of the band on your shirt? It looks like vomit.”

You get the idea.

But I wasn’t there for those guys. I wasn’t really interested in the indistinguishable mass of death metal bands that sound exactly alike. I was there for one band and one band only. Furthermore, I was there to take a guitar lesson from a young guitarist who is not-so quietly making a name for himself as one of the shining stars in instrumental music.

The band? Animals as Leaders. The guitarist? Tosin Abasi.

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Social networking at its finest! I just installed a cool new plugin for the blog that I wanted to share with you all. It is, after all, a community feature that should hopefully encourage all of you Fretheads to share any and all guitar news that you come across on the Internet.

It’s very easy to use: click on the “Add Link” button and fill out the form. I should note that all of the link approvals are manually done by me, so there may be some delay from the time you submit one to the time I put it up.

I would ask that you please not spam the system. I will be more than happy to share any relevant blog posts, stories, and links that you want to share. However, if you abuse the privilege and try to post something from your blog 100 times a day, or if you try to blatantly push a product on a repeated basis, I will reject you. (Instead, please consider taking out an ad on Fretterverse. It will give you more exposure and also help me to maintain the site and defray out-of-pocket expenses.)

Try it out and, more importantly, enjoy the new feature!

Get better by practicing less?

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently wrote a small but very engaging blog post suggesting that users/customers/yourself could possibly achieve more by setting limits. One of his examples is this:

“The maximum number of tweets per day is 30.”

His point/opinion is that we might be more likely to achieve our goals if the end result is fixed and not some elusive, amorphous thing that allows us to just stop when we want to.

Godin is brilliant, in my humble opinion, and everything he writes usually gets a significant portion of my brain power for a while every day. This particular post got me thinking about my guitar practice sessions and which ones have ended up being the most successful for me.

So as it relates to guitar, Godin’s question becomes this: if you actually imposed a time limit on your practice sessions, will you accomplish more than if you sat down at the guitar to practice with unlimited time?

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Meisel COM-90 Clip-On Tuner

Having a good tuner is a must. I think we can all agree that there is nothing worse than a guitar player whose guitar is out of tune.

When I first started learning jazz guitar (still learning…) I went on this mad search for the be-all clip-on tuner to use with my jazz box. It’s not like there were a ton available on the market, but there were enough to make me do a bunch of research before buying one.

I initially ended up getting the Intellitouch PT1 tuner, but I have to be honest and tell you that I didn’t like it. It simply wouldn’t tune my guitar accurately. The one single job it was supposed to perform, and it failed. So the search began again.

And then I had a conversation with my band mate Mark of Gollihur Music, and he told me to check out the company Meisel. They were a clip-on tuner manufacturer that produced what he thought to be excellent tuners. I told him to bring one home for me, I tried it, and instantly fell in love with it.

The problem was, Meisel had stopped making that tuner so although I was able to procure two, if they broke I was going to be SOL.

So you could imagine my surprise – if you are a geek like me and get excited about tuners – when Mark told me that Meisel had come out with an updated tuner called the COM-90.

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Only a major idiot would do this...

A recent blog post reported on a Japanese guitar maker that is producing and selling guitars for the exclusive purpose of smashing them.

The guitar maker – K’s Japan – has created the “Smash” guitar, which sells for less than $60 USD. They are promoting the guitar as a way to let out one’s frustrations and get that rock n’ roll spirit back. (I should mention that at the time of this writing there were only 10 guitars left). They even went so far as to require you to sign a waiver stating that you are intentionally planning on smashing the guitar.

Now, I’ve spent a significant amount of time in Japan. I don’t claim to be a cultural expert or anything of that nature, but I have seen and experienced enough of the Japanese life to know that this is right up their ally. The problem I have is that it’s a guitar. Please, make it anything else but a guitar, I beg you!

It’s not even that I’m one of those “guitars must be pristine things of beauty with nary a scratch.” I just think that people who intentionally smash their guitars are jackasses.

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The glorious world of instrument cables. I’m surprised there hasn’t been an HBO documentary written about them yet, as I have seen many a discussion from some people thinking it’s the most important piece of equipment a guitarist can own.

Some people are very particular about the cables they use. For example, Paul Gilbert is a huge proponent of the curly cables. Others couldn’t care less so long as the cables work and aren’t breaking up the audio signal.

I have seen cables go for as much as $2,000, which begs the question:

How important are your guitar cables?

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A supernova

It’s always fascinating to me how you can find the most profound lessons (about life, music, whatever) from the most seemingly unlikely places and events. The “light bulb” moments that, unfortunately, don’t come along as often as they probably should, and yet when they do, a fundamental paradigm shift occurs and rockets us forward to the next point of our journey.

One of these profound lessons – related to music – happened to me this past weekend, and it happened while playing in perhaps one of the most un-guitar situations you could ever possibly think of.

Ambient electronica music.

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One of my biggest personal failings as a musician is that I was never much interested in recording or production. I never cared too much about tweaking my guitar sound to get “my” tone; I was always a plug-and-play kind of guy.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach, but as I get older and now have several music projects being worked on, I’ve come to the conclusion that ignorance isn’t necessarily bliss.

So during a recent trip to my favorite Barnes & Noble, I picked up this little gem of a book called Big Studio Secrets for Home Recording and Production by Joe Dochtermann.

My goal? To start my recording, engineering, and production education way too late in life. Here are my thoughts on the book and whether or not it is a good place to start.

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Would it be safe to say that a blog post on the different ways to tune your guitar is perhaps the most mundane form of literally creativity, ever?

Probably.

But, be that as it may there’s nothing worse than listening to an out-of-tune guitar being played. I’m talking worse than getting this stuck in your head all day.

In my many moons of guitar playing I have come across a bunch of different ways to tune the guitar. Some are better than others, and this isn’t an absolute list.

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I was having a hell of a time coming up with an appropriate post title today. I want to cover a few semi-related topics and couldn’t quite encapsulate them all into a pithy tag line. So ya get what ya get, nahmeen? (Aw yeah, I just got all East Coast on ya.)

Anyway, I’m sure it’s safe to assume that virtually every musician has an opinion one way or another on the RIAA, filesharing, the record industry’s pricing model, iTunes, etc. A recent blog post suggests that within a three-year period, the RIAA collected a little over $1,000,000 from people who illegally participated in music filesharing. That sounds pretty good, until you read the part that says they spent $64,000,000 to do it.

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