Author: Mark Wein
-
Dominant Chord Tone Embellishments
This is a short lesson that I made for my students to recap a class at the school that I teach at. There will be a “good” and more complete version of this lesson coming up with some other content after my new YouTube channel is launched in a month or so.
-
Graduation Blues and Kinesthetic Guitar.
School is out. According to California State University, Fullerton, I have earned a Bachelors of Music degree in Commercial Music with a concentration in Jazz Guitar. Next year I will most likely start a Master’s program, but I’m still working out what I want to do with that. I have a couple of interesting options……
-
Pedalboard Rebuild
This week I decided that since I was on spring break from school and didn’t have a gig until Friday night I would tear down my larger pedalboard, fix some problems, add some new stuff and rework how I get sounds on stage. I’ve been putting this off for a while just because it’s kind…
-
My Senior Recital.
I realized this morning that it has been about five months since I’ve written a blog post or a lesson. In my final year of school (I’m working on a Bachelors of Music Degree in Jazz Performance) I’ve just been overwhelmed with school work, gigs, teaching, family and life in general and have had to…
-
Minor Chord Tone Embellishments and Enclosures
Note about the video – for some reason, the audio is only recorded on the left side so I apologize in advance for that. This is the backing track that I play over in the lesson: This week’s lesson is actually to answer a question that a student in one of my Skype classes…
-
Music and Fitness.
If you look back at my pictures on social media, you’ll see that my weight tends to fluctuate from one end of the spectrum to the other. The featured picture for this blog shows me at weights ranging from 225 back in 1999 to 285 a couple of years ago with stops at 265 and…
-
The B.B. King “Voice Box” Pattern
This is a favorite lesson of mine to teach. In the video, I’ll break down how I think B.B. plays such great melodic or “vocal” phrases in his solos. Here is the backing track that I’m using in the video:
-
Skype Guitar Lessons Available!
I figured that I would post a reminder that I am available for private guitar lessons via Skype. I’ve been teaching online this way since 2007 in various formats (Skype, Facetime, OoVoo, Google Hangouts, etc) and Skype has proven to be the most reliable format with consistent video and audio quality. Alongside the actual live…
-
Forests and Trees.
can’t see the forest for the trees An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at thesituation as a whole: “The congressman became so involved in the wording of his bill that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees; he did not realize that the bill could never pass.” If there is one overriding theme to this phase of my life (the one where I am returning to music school after two and a half decades) is that I spend too much time “in the weeds” (to mix metaphors a bit), searching for…
-
