My Online Guitar Lessons

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

The Kill - 30 Seconds to Mars

Dare You to Move - Switchfoot

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.

Just read an awesome post on learnguitarnow.com’s blog about the 5 mistakes made by beginner guitarists by John W. Truggle.

His 5 points were:

1. They don’t practice with a metronome.
2. They don’t play on the tips of their fingers.
3. They try to play too fast.
4. They don’t practice what they can’t play.
5. They don’t play in front of people.

I touched on a few of these in my learning to shred is like working out post, just not as detailed.

Check out the rest of the post here.

I wish there was someway to make it official or nationally syndicated or something, because it’s a great idea.

Created by Ig and carried on throughout the blogosphere, I’m just trying to spread the awareness.

Too bad it’s only one week long…all guitars need a good hug every now and again.

…about Guitar Hero and the ‘Air Guitar’, someone decided to combine them. Licensed by Activision, the Air Guitar ‘phenomenon’ has met Guitar Hero, cleverly called the ‘Guitar Hero Air Guitar Rocker’. Revealed earlier this year at CES and available in many major retailers for only $30, now everyone can have a backing track to their air guitar skills.

Now check out its ridiculousness in action.

Today, Ig (over at igblog.wordpress.com) had an interesting post regarding the theory of deliberate practice by a Florida State University professor. The theory was that practicing for 2 hours every day for 10 years straight would make you an expert in the field. With measured disciplined practice over a long period of time, ‘expert’ status would be gained in that field.

However, what determines being an expert? Nothing is more stubborn than the knowledge of an expert. If someone ever believes they have arrived at some point, they can never grow. True success is a journey, not a destination. Everyone will have their own opinion about results, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

While I believe that true ‘natural gift’ comes from the self-discipline to practice longer and harder than anyone else, Stratoblogster had an interesting spin on things. He said that there are many extraneous variables that came into play to guarantee success, and would tend to agree. Obviously putting in 2 hours a day for 10 years on the guitar would have viable results, but what really determines results is not that someone spent thousands of hours playing, but what someone put into those hours.

This goes to show that a rigorous playing schedule can bring about many different results. This does not mean guaranteed success as a professional musician; but remember success is a journey, not a destination. Success to each person depends on their goals, dreams and aspirations. While anyone who practices for that many hours will indeed improve, their level of discipline, proper teaching, and determination is what is going to separate them from the crowd.

How can one become successful as a guitarist then? Well, what’s your idea of success? If you want to grow in your guitar journey, certainly daily disciplined practice over a long period of time is going to help you grow. Success is made up of successful days, which make up successful months, successful years, and so on.

So what’s that mean for us today? It means that right now you need to pick up your guitar, give it the attention it deserves (Ig has also declared it Hug Your Guitar Week), set yourself some daily practice target goals, and record yourself or find another way to measure your progress.