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Entries Tagged as 'Guitar'

Forty Essential Instructions Books

December 13th, 2009 · No Comments · Guitar, Music, Teaching, inspiration

Following on from the 19 great books about music musicians and the creative process post a while ago, here are some great instruction books that I’ve found particularly useful. I have many more books than this, probably too many, but these are the ones I seem to come back to and have gotten most use [...]

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Practice 2.0

November 2nd, 2009 · 6 Comments · Geek, Guitar, Music, Teaching, The Jewel Box

Seems to me that with all the interesting things I’m finding out about via Twitter such as NaNoWriMo, Home Taping, RPM Challenge and NaSoAlMo, that there really should be some sort of practice version. I reckon it could work if you had a way of connecting a few like-minded souls with a common goal, let’s [...]

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Some exercises for improving time and rhythmic accuracy

October 21st, 2009 · 10 Comments · Guitar, Music, Teaching, The Jewel Box

Here’s a little metronome-based exercise I use to work on accuracy of note placement and awareness of time and rhythm within groove-based music. Woo, let the party begin…

A Word of Warning: Some view exercises with metronomes as cold and unmusical. And I’d agree. Just like scales, arpeggios, intervals, strings and cables are unmusical. They’re just [...]

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How to fiddle with chords and play altered dominants without tears

October 18th, 2009 · No Comments · Guitar, Music, Teaching, The Jewel Box

Here’s a way to voice the chords in a II V I. You can think of each chord as having three bits.

The three bits are:

The Root

On either the fifth or the sixth string.

The 3rd and 7th

These are on the third and fourth strings.

If the root is on the sixth string then the 7th is on [...]

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Melodic Minor Modes: G Phrygian Nat.13

October 6th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Guitar, Music, Teaching, The Jewel Box

Here’s part two of this series on the Melodic Minor Modes. This one is about the Phrygian Natural 13. Click on the thing above to hear it and download it for free if you like. Below is the notation and TAB; feel free to download that too and peruse it at your leisure. Do check [...]

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Gear lust, gigs, videos, 80s style jogging, and the Clangers.

September 26th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Gigs, Concerts, Events, Guitar, Music, News, Solo Album

Guten Tag.
Just got back from a massive European tour of three whole days with good friends Sebastiaan Cornellisen and Frans Vollink. First stop was Bremen in Germany and a short tour of the city courtesy of our fine host, Helge. Bremen has the Beck’s factory. Look, here it is.

So there’s the origin of joy and [...]

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