Practice

How to get the most out of your practice – ideas to find time, a good routine and other tricks.

2011-12-02

10 Great Tips from Wikihow on Writing Thrash Riffs

I found a list of 10 great tips in an unexpected place – Wikihow. Wikihow is a collaborative site with how-to manuals on almost every subject, including writing thrash riffs apparently. The tips are simple but really very good and most of them can be applied to writing music in general. Here’s the list in […]

2011-11-28

Guitar Pro for iOS – Tab Editing on Your iPhone

Guitar Pro has always been an invaluable tool for my guitar learning. First as a tool to not only read tabs but actually hear them – it’s incredible how the wrong tempo/phrasing can transform a tab for a newbie into a completely unintelligeble song. Lately I’ve been using it to tab down my own compositions, […]

2011-11-12

Practice Like a Child – Improving Your Phrasing

Have you been practising your scales, your picking and your bends like crazy and your solos are still crap? I know mine are… I found a post on guitar blog Guitar Noise that is really on to something. The answer is phrasing – the division of a solo into small parts, alternating between fast and […]

2011-09-21

Bands: Sell Us Multitrack Backing Tracks

In a perfect world you’re in a band, and you are playing your own songs. In a not perfect world sometimes you’re in a band that plays covers. In the real world, sometimes you’re not even in a band… I’ve just started rehearsing with another guitarist. It’s a lot of fun, and we’re looking for a […]

2011-09-15

How Do You Get Started Playing?

I get this question a lot – how do you get started playing guitar? Learn From the Best Well, I’m clearly no expert – I didn’t really get started until I was 33. Luckily, there are numerous experts. One of the best is Justin Sandercoe, an Aussie living in London. His site, www.justinguitar.com, is one […]

2011-06-16

Clever Online Metronome

The web is full of metronome sites, but most just let you set a tempo – basically what a traditional metronome would do. There’s more functionality that you could wish for though! How about an automatic speed trainer that increases the tempo according to a pattern you decide? Best Drum Trainer lets you set start […]

2011-04-30

Will I become good before I die?

Often times when playing or practicing feels tedious you refer to it as having lost your motivation. I found a very insightful post on Ultimate Guitar about this – and that the obstacle might actually be something else. What if you are actually getting scared? Scared of that you are wasting your time put into […]

2011-02-23

The Kübler-Ross Model for Recording

All who have seen the Simpsons know of the Kübler-Ross model for coping with grief and tragedies (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). I go through a similar process (albeit a bit more positive) each time I record my playing: 1) Expectation – during the actual recording session spirits are usually high, and it always sounds good […]

2011-02-11

Practice, Practice a Lot, Practice Correctly

I stumbled across an interesting post at Metalguitarist.org about practice (originally from jamplay.com). The really short summary is that it’s about how to achieve quality when you don’t have the time to get it through quantity. A longer summary: Balance between different parts of the practice. This goes well with my own rule of thumb where […]

2010-07-09

A Video!

Involuntary hiatus – again. And when I finally had some free time yesterday the high E string broke, and unfortunately changing strings was a bit too much work to fit into the practice session (ZR bridge). So I’m posting a video a made a month ago instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUdKEgYB2MA My first video! I’ve decided I’m going to […]