Since everybody’s talking these days about Guitar Hero 3, even if I am not into this, (I prefer my real guitar!!), here’s a little something that will make you, all Guitar Hero fans out there fighting for the best scores, go wild!

Man, this fellow never fails! So, beat this if you can! The name is Guitar HeroNoid and you can find more about it here.

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Today I was thinking to write about something else, but while searching for a particular thing on YouTube, I got a lot of videos with Slash. Again, Slash! Seems that this guy had a lot of interesting featuring, so I thought about pointing you the top 5 Slash featuring acts. So, here we go:

1) Slash meets Michael Jackson

I guess everybody knows Give Into Me , was quite famous at his time. The starting riff reminds me of Take me for a little while of David Coverdale and Page, also of one of Shakira’s song that I can not name and…one of my own. Honestly, after hearing Shakira’s song I got mad cause my song was 3-4 years older. Well…

2) Slash meets Blackstreet,ODB and Fishbone - Fix

Not one of my favorites, but it reminds in my mind over the years. I didn’t search for this song, I just knew it.

3) Slash meets Daughtry

Just a solo thing, as he says, a s a favor to the record company, but it resulted in a great song, IMO. Here’s the song.

4) Slash meets Elan

An other beautiful solo contribution of Slash.

5) Slash meets Iggy Pop

Well, here’s just pure rock, I guess he loved it too! And Duff is there too!

If you have any other interesting featuring acts, let me know. In the meantime, don’t forget to Digg this!

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I know it has nothing to do with electric guitars, acoustic guitars or any kind of guitars and absolutely nothing with rock music, but I found this to be really creepy and I just wanted to point this here: Associated Press HAS ALREADY WRITTEN THE OBITUARY of Britney Spears! Damn! Man, I know this girl is on the wrong track, but isn’t it a bit too much?!

As they say:

“I think one would agree that Britney seems at risk right now,” Washington adds. “Of course, we would never wish any type of misfortune on anybody and hope that we would never have to use it until 50 years from now…but if something were to happen, we would have to be prepared.”

See the original here.

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This year, since we are in the beginning of it, I have thought about setting (bold) goals (and this includes my websites too). So, for this website, since it is quite new (started on November 21th) and I feel a good feedback I set up a quite HIGH target, due in 6 months starting today. So, here it is:

My target is to reach 5000 visitors per day 6 months from now!
Starting date: January 18th, Due date: Jujy 18th
The traffic must be stable, not to be 1 day spiked traffic from social networks,traffic that disappear the next day. I am not speaking about unique visitors but about all visitors since a big part of a blog traffic is made up of returning visitors.

Will I make it? Will I fail? Well, I think that I won’t fail, you can not fail in any way. If you don’t get 5000 per day and you get 3000 per day, it is great, you have 3000 each and every day, that is no failure!

At the end of each month I will post the progress and how I got there, what I did to get that progress. And most of it, I am counting on you, people, since to get that traffic you can only count on your visitors to spread the word around.

So, please be part of it! Digg it as much as you can, Stumble it often, I get good visitors from Stumble upon, send it to Del.icio.us, to whatever you want! Send it to your friends or just tell them about it! Let’s see what happens!

All I can say about it is that I will try to dedicate myself as much as I can in the next 6 months to this goal and do whatever I can to achieve my goal. I will probably ask you often to help me with one or two things from the goodness of your heart and sympathy for a fellow guitar blogger.Yeah!

So, subscribe to RSS feeds now and follow the progress each and every step of the way!

And have a post about it on your blog! That will help a lot! Thank you!

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I was just thinking about duplicate content in web environment. Everybody is afraid of somebody stealing his website content, losing rankings, blog scrappers, PR going down, etc. Duplicated content is bad, bad, bad!!!

Well, is it the same in music? I am not speaking about stealing somebody’s song and pretending it is yours, no, that it is illegal. I am speaking about playing someone’s songs. I think that if more bands play the same song, this only makes the melody better since every musician finds that particular side of the song that fits him/her. Plus that it pays tribute to the original artist which is a way of showing your respect and appreciation.

So the reason I’ve started this post started is Love of My Life by Queen.

…but also played by Scorpions here

…and also by Extreme

And of course, how could I forget Love Of My Life by…Carlsberg

Well, what do you think about it?

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Well, Jon of GuitarNoize.com gives away a Chrossroads guitar festival DVD to his readers. All you need to do is to comment on his blog, telling there what is the name of BB King’s guitar! Man, that’s a tough one! By the way, one of the things I like about this contest is that it is open to everybody, not only to people from US and Canada! Way to go, man!

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I am sure that a lot of you (rock fans) admire voices such Bruce Dickinson (Of Iron Maiden, of course), Michael Kiske (ex Helloween, “the silver throat” as some used to call him - by the way, I am a big fan of you, man!!) and others with similar abilities. I know I do. I love this kind of voices. What I didn’t know is that you can actually study this kind of vocal technique and that the way they sing is not just pure talent or God given voice but also studied technique. Here in Romania, I am not aware of someone teaching this kind of things. Of course we have all kind of music schools and a lot of great vocal trainers, but, damn, I don’t think we have something similar to this.

Here’s a movie of a guy singing a Queensryche’s song. He is a student of this private rock class. Of course, lead singers like Dickinson or Kiske are not born every day, but admit it, he’s there!

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I have always admired Jazz guitar players, but I am not into Jazz. And I surely don’t like all kind of Jazz music, I love melodic one, not that modern-I-can’t-understand-it Jazz. I love the creativity that these guys show and the chromatic scale improvisations. I think this is what fascinates me the most: chromatic scales, because there is not much theory there. Instead there is much creativity, inspiration and feeling, the very heart of Jazz music.

For me, Jazz it is like an alien world, a world still not open to me but full of hidden poetry. Don’t yet consider me uneducated, please don’t! I have listened some (some is the keyword here) but indeed, not a lot. However, it is fascinating to me the way (inspired) Jazz musicians come up with the most beautiful chromatic phrases that always make sense…As George Benson said, “everything works in Jazz”. Right, but only if you know how to make it work!

Note: I embedded the following movie only for the first 10 seconds, I think, of Charlie Parker, not for the lesson itself. I find those liks just lovely. What do you think?

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Today, because I watched a video on YouTube, I asked myself how many ways of playing the guitar we know. Ways like in how to keep the guitar, how to use it, not as in electric vs acoustic or musical styles. However, in some cases, particular techniques can be defined as an other way of playing the guitar, case when I will put a separate entry for them. Let’s see:

1) The normal way

I didn’t know how to call it in an other way than the normal way, because this is exactly what it is, in my opinion, the normal way of playing the guitar: you hold the guitar hung by your neck/shoulder and you pick/strum strings with one hand while pushing them with the other hand to get particular notes. Doh! Like this.

1b) Guitar tapping

Well, here there are many things to say. Guitar tapping is one of the favorite techniques of the 80’s, starting with Van Halen and remembering Michael Angelo Batio’s 2 hand playing/tapping. But I want to put here an other style of music, not hard/heavy rock , but Jazz. See Stanley Jordan’s version of Stair to heaven here:

2) Lap playing styleOK, this one is one of those moments when I am not sure how to categorize it since the position is different and at the same time the way of playing, usually with a metal or glass slide thus forcing me to refer to this as an other (4rd) style also. Used a lot for Hawaiian music(with specific guitars) but also for blues.
As Wikipedia says:

“The lap steel guitar is typically placed on the player’s lap, or on a stool in front of the player, who is seated.

The strings are not pressed to a fret when sounding a note, rather, the player holds a metal slide called a steel in the left hand, which is moved along the strings to change the instrument’s pitch while the right hand plucks or picks the strings.

This method of playing greatly restricts the number of chords available, so lap steel music often features a restricted set of harmonies (such as in blues). Alternatively, the lap steel guitar player can play the melody or another single part.“

Like this:

2b) Playing with a slide

I called this 4rd way of playing (since I consider it to be a different mode, not just a technique) 2b because it is somehow similar to the second because of the slide being used. We are speaking now mostly about blues music, the guitar being hold in “the normal way” while the the notes are obtained by sliding a piece of round glass or metal on guitar strings. Like this:

3) Andy McKee unique finger-style

OK, if you can or know better than me, find a better name for this cause I can’t. Composed of a series of techniques such as normal string picking,tapping, hitting and beating the poor guitar box, his style is truly unique. Here’s Andy McKee:

I would also put here Dominic Frasca with his way of playing, in the same category, in a way. More taping than Andy McKee. Also related to 1b)
Or Erik Mongrain with his lap style of playing the guitar combined with the 2 above. Of course, there is always THE FUNNY AND EXTREME WAY!!! where 2 guys share the same guitar

I ask also my fellow guitar bloggers to help me add more styles here, if they know more. Guys?!! (Jon, GuitarMX, JP, Dr. J,Cary , Ignacio and all of you blogging the guitar!)If you liked this, subscribe to RSS and please remember to Digg and Stumble this! Spread the word! Thank you!

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Today somebody entered my site searching for 12 strings fretless guitars. Man, is there such thing as 12 strings fretless guitar? What would you do with such an instrument? What would be the use? The exact use of those 12 string would be for strumming while I would find difficult to use chords while fretless…

Anyway, maybe use it like a mandolin? The mandolins I think that have the strings doubled to sound full and can be used at “soloing” at the same time. Because I couldn’t find a picture with a 12 string fretless guitar, here’s a mandolin!

By the way, if you know somebody knowing somebody who has a friend owning a 12 string fretless axe, let us know!

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