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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Synchronicity Strikes Again

I get this funny feeling that I’m supposed to be teaching guitar in the East Valley…
Today, I went back to pick up my business cards and part of the text had been clipped off, making a reprint necessary. Okay. It meant an extra trip and I had several other stops planned for after [...]

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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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On the Track and Picking Up Steam

It’s been over a week since I last posted, so I thought I’d do a brief update at least…
I spent most of last week in Phoenix job-hunting and apartment-scouting. I’ve got a line on a guitar teaching position at a music store, which I will know more on at the end of this week, [...]

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What a Difference a Year Makes

My more usual optimism has returned this evening, leaving the melancholy of midday to fade away into memory. As I drove to Flagstaff to have dinner with my friend Margie, I realized how reclusive I have become the last few months – two trips to Flag in a week feels positively extraverted. Between the novel [...]

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Mosaico Flamenco at Tlaquepaque

As I walked across the cobblestoned parking area shaded by tall sycamores, I could hear rasgueados on flamenco guitars and the punctuated taconeo of a bailora’s dance floating out of the Patio del Norte.
September 8, 2007 was the 34th annual “Fiesta del Tlaquepaque” (pronounced: “ta – lockee – pockee”) which celebrates Mexican Independence Day with [...]

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Rasgueado Redux

Rasgueados
In the several posts I’ve done in the last week on guitar technique, I’ve purposely avoided mentioning rasgueados. I am not including those in my 30 minute technical program, as they are not maintenance activities for me at this point, but a major focus of development.
I’m trying to get in a minimum of least fifteen [...]

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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 Scale Meltdown

After two weeks of hardly practicing at all, I decided I’d better get to the bottom of what was going on. Certainly, there have been a lot of competing demands on my time and I don’t have any pending gigs at the moment. But, I know the kind of sustained effort it takes to get [...]

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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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