April 16, 2009 – 11:01 am
My first observations on sight reading music actually bring me back about 44 years. To refresh my readers, I took classical guitar lessons from the age of 11 years old to about 14 or 15 years old. I was taught to read music at a fairly introductory level. There was no theory involved (thank God) [...]
March 25, 2009 – 10:15 am
I received a comment on the post I wrote on March 17th, 2009 about sight reading music. The author of the comment has some very kind words for me, but what was said about “perfect pitch” caused a momentary thought pattern to occur, actually it became a point of major interest that deserves a [...]
The next study I will take up is learning to read music, or sight reading. The reason is that I believe it will help me learn to play the music I want to play more quickly. You know Jimi Hendrix and
Stevie Ray Vaughan.
It’s certainly possible to play the guitar without being able to read music, [...]
September 2, 2008 – 10:01 am
For all practical purposes, guitar players for the most part are never happy with their current playing skills. Work harder, practice more, play that exercise one more time, until your old lady can’t take it anymore. In a recent post on A Logical Approach to Rhythm, I spoke about the breakthrough points of acquiring this [...]
August 29, 2008 – 11:14 am
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
THOMAS EDISON
What a truth! It makes you wonder how many times we have given up on a project or hobby just before a break through. A lot of people, particularly novice guitar for beginner players [...]
August 27, 2008 – 10:29 am
About 3 months ago our jam session group had to disband. What a drag. So a good time we had and the interaction with other players was a great learning tool and fun, fun, fun. Last night we started to jam again.
We met indirectly through a quirk of fate. I’m not embarrassed to say [...]
August 13, 2008 – 10:50 am
Here are the seven steps to becoming a highly effective guitar player:
1. Enjoy the guitar you play. Picking an instrument that fits you physically and has a sound you like is an important aspect of becoming a highly effective guitar player. Lets be realistic about this. Regardless of what activity you may be performing, such [...]
August 8, 2008 – 10:23 am
How do you get rhythm and what is rhythm? You will know you have rhythm when you get it. It’s one of those guitar things we practice hard to get. It is one of the essential “spices’. It’s takes a lot of work to be extremely rhythmical.
That being said, rhythm came to me the first [...]
A volume swell is a musical crescendo commonly associated with the electric guitar. Crescendo, in standard musical notation, refers to a passage of music during which the volume gradually increases.
The technique is often executed by the little finger of the guitarist which is wrapped around the volume pot/knob of the guitar. When the note is [...]
Putting “Pinch Harmonics” or “Squealies” in terms you understand is easier to do than say. Technically speaking this is the closest I could get to explaining this subject.
Realistically speaking, this is a fairly advanced technique, it takes me a year to get proficient at playing something such pinch harmonics. I usually stumble through it before [...]
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