Looking for a new perspective on learning the guitar? Richard Lloyd (of the 70’s punk band Television) has a great set of lessons and essays on his site, including a fascinating explanation of why the guitar is such a pain to tune. He suggests a tuning technique that I’ve started using with great success. If you’ve got a good ear …
Look Mom, No Hands!
Knob twirlers, put your fidgety hands together. Someone’s finally come up with a way for you to tweak the parameters of your stompboxes while you’re playing. It’s called the 3rd Hand, made by a company called Tone in Progress. It’s a completely mechanical expression pedal that you attach to a knob post on one of your guitar effects pedals via …
Music Theory! Wheeee!
I’m sure there are people out there who enjoy reading about music theory. I’m sure there are also people out there who like to watch their fingernails grow. I’m going to take a wild guess and assume you fall into neither category. I mostly taught myself to play guitar, and didn’t pick up much music theory until I started teaching …
My Favorite Tool For Learning Difficult Songs
It’s called Power Tab Editor, and it’s free. Designed primarily for transcribing music in tablature (with standard music notation above), Power Tab Editor is also very useful for figuring out songs with fast, complicated parts. Here’s how it works: Download and install the Editor. Then go to Power Tab Archive and search for a song you want to learn. All …
Free Guitar Lessons on Video
Yesterday I ran across the best collection of free, online guitar lesson videos I’ve seen on the web. The lessons are clear, include opportunities to play along with a jam track, and the video quality is excellent. They’re excerpts from Peter Vogl’s DVDs, which are for sale on his site, but there’s nothing left out of the lessons–you can get …
