Upcoming Performance – June 7, 2008

If you’re in the Phoenix area on the evening of June 7th, come out to the City of Gilbert’s Riparian Institute and enjoy a nature walk through the 110-acre preserve and listen to music by several members of the Mesa Symphony and yours truly. I’ll be playing harp and classical guitar near where the walk [...]

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Guitar Nails, Revisited

All of the hours that I’ve spent practicing recently are starting to pay off. I can hear a real difference in the strength and clarity of my playing over just a month or so ago. My tremelo, in particular, has gotten stronger and cleaner. Some of that is due to changes I’ve made [...]

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The Dog Ate My Practice Log…

I am now a music teacher at Gilbert Music in Gilbert, Arizona.  Talk about timing – they did need another instructor, as their one classical guitar teacher is one slot shy of a full schedule.  In I walk, resume in hand…
I’ve been busy today getting all of my ducks in a row for a major [...]

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Where’s the Fire?

Don’t Dazzle Me With Brilliance…
Make me feel something. That’s what came to mind as I was listening to a classical guitar CD today.
Not to be overly hard on classical guitar – I’ve heard some truly wonderful performances in my time, most notably a concert by Angel Romero with the Flagstaff Symphony which included one of [...]

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Guitar Wench

The idea of the guitar’s “wenchy” origins as per my last post has been giving me a lot of amusement today. I will admit that this may have more to do with the proportion of my time that is spent in Elmo’s and my computer’s company, however, than with any actual wit.
It has given me [...]

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The Red Headed Step Child

The guitar playing deconstruction process continues…
I’ve spent a couple of hours each of the last three days on boiling down scales to their simplest elements. There’s probably some scholarly soul somewhere who has written a brilliant thesis on this and reduced the following meanderings into a few pithy sentences, but keep in mind that I’m [...]

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Bruce Lee, Guitar Instructor

“If you follow the classical pattern, you’re understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow – you are not understanding yourself.” ~ Bruce Lee
I am stripping away everything I thought I knew about playing guitar, using everything I know from every other thing I’ve done in my life, in an effort to pare down to just [...]

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Guitar Nails, version 2.3

Poorly prepared ptergyium. Wow, that’s a mouthful. “PPP” seems to be the reason I got separation between the acrylic layer and my natural nails, as outlined in my Guitar Nails 2.2 post. Since that post, I lost another artifical nail and went on a quest to find out why. This has been putting a crimp [...]

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Guitar Nails, Version 2.2

Overall, using the acrylic overlay without the glued on tips is working quite well. The layer of acrylic reinforces my nails and holds up to playing flamenco just fine. The only problem I am having is that I’ve lost the overlay on my index finger twice now. It only seems to last about a week, [...]

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Another Gig – Another Lesson, or Three

Wednesday night’s gig at “the Bean” (Campus Coffee Bean in Flagstaff) went well. I also learned a couple of things that surprised me a bit.
After a brief bout with the sound system (troubleshooting the vocal mic which wasn’t working properly), I got everything going and had a lot of fun with the gig. Three [...]

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Too, Too Much Fun

Too, too much fun! All of this focus on compás and rhythm improvement has had an unexpected payoff. I was practicing along on one of the pop tunes for my gig at the Campus Coffee Bean and a flamenco strum slipped in there. It was totally unconscious, and it worked. Cool!
A little while [...]

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Guitar Nails, Version 2.1

Time to do the first set of fills since the major upgrade on my nails…
This time I did get out the rotary tool and use it to take back the base of the acrylic layer where there was a little bit of separation between the acrylic and my natural nails. Geez, I like power tools. [...]

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My Metronome is My Friend, My Metronome is…

Yes, indeed, my Mundobeat metronome has been getting a mean workout the last few days. With clarity in my goals has come a sure sense of what I need to do to reach them. Compás, compás, compás. I’ve been listening to the “Solo Compás” series of CDs (the Soleá in particular, but also to the [...]

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The Saga Continues…

“LoRes” vs. “HiRes” mp3 Files
The only viable solution I could come up to the audio quality issues I was having over on mySpace was to re-upload the lower bit and sample rate mp3s for free listening/downloads. All of the variations I tried other than the 192 kbps bit rate developed the same annoying sound [...]

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Change of Plan

It seems that my mp3 compression and MySpace’s streaming process don’t mix well. Three of the four tracks sounded great on my computer, but developed an obnoxious high “buzz-hum” when they were processed for streaming by MySpace. I’ve taken them down until I can tinker around with the compression some more.
I will come up [...]

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