Buying A Guitar For A Christmas or Birthday Gift? Here’s what to look for…

Posted on by October 14, 2017
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How to buy a guitar for someone else when you have no idea what to look for.

How To Buy A Gift GuitarFirst of all, let me applaud you for your cool gift idea.  It’s not something you’d usually think of unless the child/friend/mate you’re buying it for has expressed an interest in it.  So you can’t go wrong on that front.

But now that you have the idea, maybe you’ve realized you have no idea what to look for.  I’ll do my best to round up every bit of knowledge I have on the subject to make the buying process easy for you.

I’m going to assume that this guitar is for a beginning guitarist.  Buying for an experience guitarist is a little more involved because the’ve probably developed some specific tastes in guitars.  At the end of this article I’ll give a little advice on buying for the experienced guitarist.

Deep breath…. Let’s go. Continue reading →

The Importance of Unfocused Guitar Practice

Posted on by October 14, 2017
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could always be perfectly focused on what we’re doing without any outside distractions?  Of course, we all know that doesn’t always happen.  And sometimes it doesn’t happen at pretty important times.  Like when you’re playing guitar… on stage… in front of hundreds (thousands!) of people. Continue reading →

An Overview of Guitar Scales

Posted on by October 14, 2017
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Scales are an important building block of music that every guitarist should know.  And I’m sure you’ve heard that you need to know them.  This is both and easier task than it sounds like, and a harder one.  Let me give you a quick overview of guitar scales.  Both common ones and a few more esoteric.

Let’s start with what a scale actually is.  A scale is simply a set of notes that we’ll use to write a piece of music with.  Think of it like a painter’s palate.  The painter has his blue, green, red, black, white, etc… and he’ll throw those at the canvas and create a painting.  A scale is out palate of colors and we’ll throw them at the page and instrument to create a piece of music. Continue reading →

Standard Guitar Tuning – A New Way!

Posted on by October 14, 2017
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Even after almost a quarter century of playing guitar, you can learn some new stuff along the way.  If you keep looking, there’s always something new to learn on the guitar.

Recently I learned about a tuning technique I’d never thought of before.

One of the big problems with the guitar is that it’s not a perfectly tuned instrument.  Really, no instrument is, because equal tempered tuning is just a little bit off in a lot of places.  On the guitar, the B string in particular can be a nasty bugger to get right.  This technique of standard guitar tuning really seems to nail it pretty well. Continue reading →