Sep 11th 09
10 Comments | Posted in Guitar, Lessons
It seems my new instructor, Kit, is a bit like Mr. Miyagi and right now he has me waxing cars and painting fences. I trust it’s all going somewhere.
First off, he had me stop practicing scales all together because of my picking motion. He told me not to do one more scale until he tells me. Somewhere along the way I apparently picked up the habit of “economy picking” rather than strict alternate picking. My previous instructor, Bruno, also suggested I try to stop economy picking but he wasn’t quite as fanatical about it as Kit seems to be.
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Sep 9th 09
4 Comments | Posted in Featured Articles, Gear, Guitar, Reviews, Tascam
So far for all my recordings I’ve been using the Tascam GT-R1 and it’s built in microphone. I’ve been pretty happy with the quality, but that may just be because I haven’t tried any alternatives. I did just order a Shure SM57 microphone to see if that helps with recording quality.
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Sep 8th 09
12 Comments | Posted in Dunlop, Featured Articles, Gear, Gibson, Guitar, Reviews, Vox
Being new to guitar I need to figure out my likes and dislikes. So far when making decisions on things like strings, picks, guitar setup, and just about any other decision that need to be made (outside of which guitar and amp to buy), I’ve always asked “what do you recommend” since I couldn’t really make an informed decision. But that’s a bad way to go about things. I need to figure out what **I** like. That’s why I like to do A/B comparrisons like this one and the one I did on my recent string comparison post. Read More…
Sep 4th 09
2 Comments | Posted in Guitar, Lessons
I decided to try a new instructor. A friend of mine (who appears in my Jam Session post) is taking bass lessons from Kit Ruscoe who is also a guitar instructor. I’m not switching because I have a problem with my other instructor, Bruno Pelletier. I actually think he is a great instructor. I’m switching for a couple of reasons. First, since I’ve only seen one instructor, I’d like to get an idea of another instructors style and see if it’s a better fit for me. And second, even though Bruno is a great jazz guitarist and instructor, he’s not quite as up on the current rock/blues scene (he didn’t know who The Black Keys were). And as much as I would like to play jazz, playing blues and rock is what I’m after. Admittedly, at first I was specifically looking for a jazz guitarist as an instructor because I thought they would make better instructors when it comes to music and guitar theory. But Kit seems to have a good mix of theory (he’s actually classically trained) and rock expertise.
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Sep 1st 09
8 Comments | Posted in Guitar, Lessons
I just got done practicing for the last hour or so. I was mostly practicing the Jazz progression in F I posted last week higher on the neck. I mentioned in that post, I wasn’t doing well with chord positions higher up the neck. It’s frustrating since I can play them fine lower on the neck. Actually, it’s not that I can’t play the cords higher on the neck, it’s that I don’t know the cord locations on the higher frets. Once I have the locations memorized for the particular chord progression, I can play them just fine. But at that point I’m just going through the motions for that progression and don’t REALLY know the chord locations.
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