Evil Spud Boy

Great guitar playing is more than playing riffs and licks; it’s about presenting your emotions and feelings in musical terms. That’s why it’s called it musical expression.

When I first started playing I was so concerned about hitting every note right. I’d spend hours practicing scales and chord forms and making sure that each note sounded perfect. After about two years of practice I knew everything in the world about making chord shapes and playing scale, and nothing about making music. I’d record myself and the listen to the playback and it sounded like a bored guitar student trying to play every note perfectly.

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When you play guitar, always take proper precautions or you may suffer the fate that this person did.

read more | digg story

Here’s an interesting item I found on digg:

Looking for a better guitar amp? So were we… Enter the original Ammo Box Amp… a hand-wired tube guitar head amplifier, designed by a naval nuclear-trained engineering officer and built to MIL-SPEC using NASA/military-grade components.

Personally, I would want to hear what it sounds like before sending $500 for one.

read more | digg story

The StroboSoft tuner from Peterson is a software (PC or Mac) version of the strobe tuners for which Peterson is famous. If you don’t know what a strobe tuner is, it is a tuner that works by triggering a strobe light from the audio signal of the instrument you are tuning. The strobe light illuminates a rotating disk with markings that is spinning at a constant speed based on the pitch you are trying to tune to. This effect of this is that if your instrument is tuned to pitch, the disk will appear to not be spinning, if you are flat or sharp, the disk will appear to spin in one direction or the other at a speed proportional to how far off pitch you are. So when you are tuning, you see which way the disk appears to be spinning and adjust the tuning appropriately until the disk slows down and eventually stops.

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This is an interesting video demonstrating the iGuitar from Brian Moore Guitars. I like this guitar because it connects directly to your PC via USB, so it is especially well suited to controlling software instruments.

If you want more information about the various iGuitar models you can find it at the manufacturer’s site. They have several models which range from $995 to $2000+.

This definately seems like a much cooler item than the Fender’s guitar that holds a tablet pc that I posted about previously. I love Fender. I love my Strat, I love my Hot Rod Deluxe, But I’m not too impressed by something where the major technological innovation is routing a big hole.

This is the second part in what will probably turn out to be several posts about reading music. In my previous post about reading music, I talked about how becoming proficient at reading music seems to make the process of learning new music go much faster, allowing you to spend your practice time more productively. In this post I would like to examine what I think is another benefit: The process of learning to read develops your other guitar playing skils in a more synergistic manner than other methods.

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Among guitarists, the subject of whether it is important to be able to read standard music notation seems to create a lot of controversy. With most other music instruments, there is usually no question, if you are going to learn to play, you will have to learn to read music. But with guitar, learning to read standard musical notation is more of an option. I think this is because there is so much material available in tablature format that you can learn a lot without having to read music.

In fact, many guitarists are very proud of the fact that they can’t read music. It’s like a badge of honor. I’ve read countless interviews with great guitarists who proudly declare that they can’t read a single note. On the other hand, those than can read are also usually very proud of that ability. Being a good guitarist is quite an accomplishment either way, so I definitely feel that both groups have reason to be proud of their abilities.

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I just saw this article on gizmag saying that Fender and Intel have teamed up to produce an internet enabled guitar. It seems like this is a concept guitar and not an actual product.

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TuneCore is a new music distribution service that allows any artist to sell their music on iTunes or Rhaposody. What is really great about this is that they don’t take any cut from the sale. (You get 100% of what iTunes or Rhapsody pays out) and you don’t give up any rights or ownership of your music.

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The StroboPick is a small guitar tuner in the form of a guitar pick. Rather than measuring the frequency of the sound your guitar makes, the strobopick is like a miniature strobe light that allows you to see when the string is vibrating at the correct pitch. This allows you to tune extremely accurately and also has the advantage of working in noisy environments

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