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Community Links Feature Added to Blog

29 July 2010

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 [...]

Limit Your Practice Time, Get Better Results?

29 July 2010

6 Comments

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 [...]

K’s Japan Wants Players to Smash Their Guitars

26 July 2010

2 Comments

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 [...]

How Important Are Your Guitar Cables?

20 July 2010

4 Comments

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 [...]

My Ambient Education

19 July 2010

7 Comments

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 [...]

Tune Your Guitar!

15 July 2010

2 Comments

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 [...]

To Pay or Not to Pay, the RIAA, and Filesharing

14 July 2010

3 Comments

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 [...]

Dr. Matt’s 20 Essential Jazz Guitar CDs

13 July 2010

8 Comments

OK, first let me start off by telling you what this article isn’t. Then I’ll tell you what it is. This isn’t a list of the 20 best jazz-guitar albums of all time or a list of what I think should be the only 20 jazz-guitar albums somebody to own. (This is not the be [...]

Are You Half-Assed?

12 July 2010

0 Comments

Why are some players so much better than others? Why can such-and-such play those crazy tapping arpeggio runs so cleanly and you can’t? You both practice a lot; in fact, you may even practice more than he does. Surely some people have a “knack” for the guitar. We call them naturals, prodigies, and geniuses. There [...]

Derivative or Ripoff?

9 July 2010

6 Comments

There’s a fine line between inadvertently paying homage to the musicians you respect and blatantly (even though perhaps unknowingly) ripping off their ideas. Unless you don’t listen to music at all, you probably cannot help but let other people’s ideas seep into your gray matter and have some sort of influence over your originality. The [...]