Last December there was quite a bit of buzz over the revolutionary Gibson Les Paul Robot guitar. The first shipment of 4,000 hit stores on the Friday and were sold out by Monday.
One of the most passionate requests was for an SG Model of the Robot Guitar, and Gibson answered those demands. Check out the full guitar specs and story of the Gibson Robot SG Special here.
My guitar teacher put it this way, “In performing, you want to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses…in practicing, you want to find your weaknesses, and work through them until they are no longer a weakness.”
He asked me to play some songs I had been working on, while he analyzed and pointed out my weaknesses. While at first putting me on the spot, I played some riffs I was practicing for him, and he noticed a few things:
1) My timing - Something I had told him was my weakness before playing. The thing was, my timing wasn’t off because I can’t keep a beat, but I was being timid with my picking hand. First of all, I had been using a hard pick to try and speed up my picking. The only trouble was I wasn’t being aggressive in my picking. In trying to minimize my picking movements, I had lost my timing and tone with the hard pick. He then handed me a .60mm Dunlop, which is like a sheet of paper compared to the Dunlop Jazz III’s I was using before. He then told me to exaggerate my picking movements and play as aggressively as possible while maintaining tone. When making more deliberate movements, my timing had actually improved. The thinner pick forced me to work harder, as well as being able to control the aggressiveness of my picking more than with the thicker pick.
2) Left hand speed - Something every guitarist wants to improve, as you always need to play just a little bit faster. There are many exercises which can help build left hand strength and speed, which I fully recommend. However, if you’re not doing them right, they can actually be more detrimental than good. I have a disease in my playing I like to refer to as “flying fingers”. Not flying as in really fast fingers, but flying as in the fingers that aren’t fretting a note like to “fly away” from the fretboard. This distance between the fingers not playing a note and the fretboard slows down my playing a lot more than I thought it did. Keeping the fingers close to the fretboard, even when they aren’t playing a note is something many guitarists need to focus on.
3) Practicing with distortion - Don’t. No cheating allowed when practicing scales and hard riffs. You’re giving yourself the illusion of playing it right when you might be sacrificing tone and accuracy. I have been guilty of this for quite some time, but playing everything clean helps me to see my mistakes and weaknesses as they really are. It is frustrating at first trying to get it perfect without any fancy effects to make you sound better. But this way if you practice to perfection clean, once you add the distortion and effects, you’ll be a much better player.
I challenge you to sit down and either record and critique yourself, or get someone else to analyze where your weaknesses might be, so you can really focus on practicing through - not around - your weaknesses.
Just saw an instructional video by Greg Howe, and I was quite impressed with the technique he uses.
He calls it “Hammer-Ons From Nowhere”, and what a cool concept.
I guess he is building a lesson workshop website that he’s plans on releasing in the summer at www.ghworkshops.com.
Be sure to check out his instructional video, as well as some of his songs where he uses the technique- such as “A Delicacy”.
We got up on stage without an introduction or saying anything to the crowd first. We just stepped up to our mics, and started playing through our set.
Not being professional showmen or anything, I feel we did pretty well. Our nerves were quite calm as we have all been on stage and performed before, just not in this setting.
We should have interacted a little more with the crowd - introduced ourselves at least - but I guess we just wanted to play. We made it through all our songs almost perfectly, and the feedback we received from everyone after was positive and encouraging.
I had a friend record the show so hopefully I’ll get the DVD soon and upload it to YouTube and get it up on my blog soon.
I currently am loving the new look. But I might have an unfair bias.
What do you guys all think? Let me know.
That would be great.
Cheers,
Jesse
Over the past day or two it seems that unique guitar gadgets have gotten some attention from other guitar bloggers.
Things like IG’s sweet sunglasses,
Guitar Noize’s guitar keyring find,
Eric Makes Music strat toilet flusher handle find,
as well as Guitar Flame’s tele and strat mouse pad.
Not to feel left out on this ‘trend’ I found some more unique things, including this handmade guitar amp from an altoids tin
as well as these electric guitar cufflinks.
Check them out.
Since there are always debates about the greatest guitarist of all time, what about the greatest Guitar Hero players?
It is much easier to measure the latter though, as the score pretty much speaks for itself…
I came across this video today about a young teen named Chris Chike who is officially the number 1 ranked Guitar Hero III player in the world, as recognized by Guinness World Records. What this really means is that he has the highest score playing Through the Fire and the Flames by Dragonforce on expert.
How much time and effort do you think he put into being the world’s greatest guitar hero player? I wonder if in all that time he could have learned the real song. The only problem is, Herman Li can barely play the real thing, (if you’ve seen them live or have watched Dragonforce’s live videos you would know what I’m talking about).
I also wonder if he played the real guitar before that. I know there is very little correlation between real guitar and the video game, but on the average are guitar players better at learning or excelling in it? What are your thoughts on it?
I know a lot of people are sick of the stupid game already, and hate the people that brag about their guitar hero ’skills.’ I say keep them separate, video games are fun and have their place, but you should really limit playing a guitar-based video game when you have a real one sitting in your room that actually has the potential for creativity and musical expression.
That might just be my opinion because I never really got into the whole craze, but at least the game has given a lot of attention to the guitar and has exposed some people to some good ol’ rock music. If the game gives a kid the idea of picking up a real guitar and giving it a shot, I’ll be happy.
With only one day left before the performance, all we could do is try and fine tune our songs through more practice. We also got busy calling up our friends and inviting them to come see our first show.
The day of the performance came, and we were set to play at 8 o’clock that night. We did another little run through at my place before cramming all of our equipment into our ‘tour bus’, also known as my parents’ white GMC safari. We then killed some time before we had to set up at the venue.
We got there at around 7 and began hauling in the gear and setting up the stage. We practiced our first two songs on stage before everyone got there to set up the mics and monitors. After we were happy with the sound levels, we just hung out until it was our time to shine…
Our first practice started out with me and the other guitarist Mike learning the songs on guitar. I guess that could be one of the first lessons I learned from this. You really shouldn’t try to learn the guitar and vocal parts at the same time. I feel it is more efficient to learn one of the two parts up to snuff before putting them together. That way, if you learn the guitar part to where it becomes subconscious or second nature to you, you can concentrate on developing the vocals without having to focus too much on the guitar.
After getting the whole gang together and running through some song ideas, we picked the winners and tossed the losers. Here is where the second lesson came about. Just because you can play the song in any key on a guitar, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to sing it in any key. Experimenting with different keys to find your vocal range is important. If you’re going to do a cover, most people in the audience won’t even notice if it’s not in the original key. However, they will be able to notice if you are straining your voice to try and hit the notes. Making it sound the best you can doesn’t necessarily mean making it sound exactly like the original.
After we finally decided on all our songs’ keys, we tried to create our own sound for each of them. Crystal being an amazing harmonizer would pretty much do the harmony for every song, although we switched things up a bit. We messed around with which guitar effects we should use for each song, as well as which guitars were going to be used and when. We started out deciding that we were going to bring just one acoustic and one electric guitar with amp, but after different tunings and sounds we ended up bringing three electrics, one acoustic, one combo, and one half stack. Lesson number three - if you have the resources to sound professional, use them. At first I was against the idea of bringing all of that gear, mainly because almost all of it was mine, and I just didn’t want to lug all of that equipment. After some discussion, I gave in to the idea, which in hindsight was a wise decision.
From there, it was just practice, practice, and then some more practice. We spent whole days in my garage playing each song over and over again. We organized our set list, but we weren’t yet satisfied with our ending song. We tossed some more ideas for a final song around, we wanted something high energy with two electric guitars to close with. We ended up thinking of one about two days before the show. It came about completely by accident. We didn’t even need to look up the guitar parts or lyrics for it! That worked out nicely for us, as the performance date was only two days away…
Our setlist:
Your Guardian Angel - The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus
Thunder - BoysLikeGirls
Anyone Else But You - The Moldy Peaches
Amazing Because It Is - The Almost
When In Doubt - Thousand Foot Krutch
I probably should have blogged about this a lot sooner, but better late than never.
In my previous blog ‘The 5 Mistakes Beginners Make‘, the 5th one was not playing in front of people. Well, last Friday was my chance to do so.
On Friday May 2nd, I was fortunate enough to open for a few local bands in my area–my first “almost official gig” I guess you could say. Not a whole big crowd or anything really, but it is something that will be memorable and taught me a few lessons.
My friend Kat was putting on free local shows, renting out her church the first Friday of each month for any local bands looking for some exposure. Originally, I was going to do my own acoustic set with my friend Crystal (an amazing singer by the way), since we had done some acoustic stuff together for my highschool talent show in the past.
So I was looking through my iTunes playlist for some good acoustic cover songs we could do together, while talking to another friend about starting a little band project up in the summer. I had mentioned that I was invited to play a show, and asked if he wanted to play the guitar as well. So now our original acoustic set had turned into a trio with acoustic and electric guitars…
Take a look at this video of me and Crystal covering ‘Hey There Delilah’ by the Plain White T’s for my senior year highschool talent show.
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