Category: Blog
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War Stories, Ep. 1 – Learn Your Songs!
The old adage “Experience is the best teacher” is pretty accurate, although I’ll add one refinement to that which is that “someone else’s experience is also good too”. I tell my students all the time that they don’t need to repeat my mistakes. Benefit from my pain and embarrassment! One push I’ve been making the…
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Gig Fatigue.
I just finished five nights in a row playing at the Orange County fair on Sunday night and I’m still in something a fog. I woke up this morning (Tuesday) and realized that I didn’t even write my blog for the week. I figured this week I’d share some observations and lessons learned from the…
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How I learn songs REALLY FAST!
This week the cover band that I play in is doing five nights in a row at the Orange County Fair (more info here although this is just for the first of the five dates) and as we usually try to do when we play back to back nights in the same venue we attempt…
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I’m a terrible guitar shopper.
WARNING – LOTS OF GUITAR PORN AHEAD! I own several nice guitars. Pretty much every one of them has a story that starts out “I was actually shopping for X, but I ended up with this Y guitar”. The reason for this is that I sometimes have a preconceived notion of what I want but once I…
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Where does my sound come from?
This is a big topic and one that I am going to revisit occasionally in this blog. Today we are starting with the brain. I already hear many of you thinking “what does the brain have to do with guitar tone?” and the reality is that it has EVERYTHING to do with it. The brain…
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The Live Performer’s Social Contract
I’ve been performing music in public for almost four decades at this point if you count a disastrous trumpet recital in the 5th grade as my “live debut”. There are many elements that go into a successful public performance but I’d like to focus on one element, which is what I call the “Performer’s Social Contract…
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The Learning Squiggle.
That’s right, I said it. It’s a squiggle. Not a curve and definitely not any sort of linear progression. In over 35 years of playing guitar and nearly 30 years of teaching it, I’ve experienced the “squiggle” from both sides of the music stand. As a newly minted “guitarist”, I had a bit of a…
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It’s been a while…
I used to post stuff every week. Video lessons, blog posts, a podcast on iTunes and whatever else I could use to get the word out that I taught guitar and that I have something to share that you might want to pay for. By the time the 2014 Truefire.com “The Next Top Guitar Instructor”…