A few days ago, Carol (She-lives) awarded me with Brillante Weblog Premio 2008.

Last week, Jon of GuitarNoize appreciated my blog as “excellent” and named it among the few sites in his list of “who’s who in guitar blogosphere”

A few months ago, Jack of Pribek.net rated me E for excellence (read my list of bloggers that I also awarded back then). Because I haven’t had the time to do it so far, I will say it now: thank you, guys(and gals), for your nice words! I am always happy to know that somebody out there appreciates my posts.

That fills my heart with a strange feeling of satisfaction and happiness. Really, I feel like some kind of balloon right now!

It is very interesting how much motivation such things can give you. This blog is not about money and not money is what keeps it running. This blog is about electric guitars, about acoustic guitars, about rock and blues music, about me, you and everything around music. Such appreciations along with my love for guitars keep this blog running.

So, again, I want to say thanks you for you reading my blog and a bigger thank you to those of you that took the time to subscribe to my RSS feeds(by the way, if you haven’t done it already, subscribe now and get my posts everyday by email or RSS)!

And for all of you, read on because so many post are still waiting to be written here! If I only had the time…

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At last rehearsal with the band we decided to cover Don’t cry from GNR, after all, it must be pretty easy, we all like GNR and this it’s a song we sing and play since high school, we know it by default, right? Eh, when listening the song I was surprised by a few nice progressions there, that I didn’t expect, that helped the song a lot. But that’s not the subject of this post.

The subject is actually the guitar solo or the guitar behind the solo, to be more exact. I didn’t pay too much attention in the beginning to the chords behind the solo, presuming they go by some repetitive chords like the chorus for ex. How wrong I could be!

After working this part with they guys in my band, I could say that my impression is that the solo was created first, and then they created a backup track to support the solo, which is totally strange from my point of view. I say this because the chords under the solo don’t follow any pattern, the length of a particular chord depends on the particular passage the solo plays and not the other way around.

My way of soloing is to actually improvise over a common pattern in the song, like the chorus or some intro, f.e. and I have never written a solo that I needed to back up later. I have some passages in particular songs that I needed to explain to my band mate playing the other guitar when he joined the band and I did need to find chords to match a particular progression but I was the only guitar player in the band at that moment and the only melodic backup was the bass line, which can be pretty free; I think this does not apply to GNR since Slash was never the only player there, isn’t it? Then?

My opinion is that Slash worked the solo without the second guitar player, in a free way, making the solo sound nice and then they searched for some backup chords to match the solo.

Listen here and tell me your call on this.

PS: When embedding this video here I was totally charmed by this song and listened every note of it until the end, totally forgetting I have this post under editing!!

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I remember one day I stumbled upon IG’s blog on the internet and I was just amazed of how well the audience followed his blog. I couldn’t stop asking myself why this was happening, especially since I was on my own quest of building an audience for myself, so I subscribed to his feeds to see why. Soon, I have understood it and ever since I read his blog almost every single day. Now, because I am away, he was very kind to lend me a hand here. So, without any more words, I give you IG!

Howdy Guitar Flame readers. This is IG here, of IG BLOG, guest posting for Ovidiu. Thanks for having me!

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the serious need for guitar teachers.

Consider this: The last time the U.S. instrument industry reported sales results, sales of acoustic guitars in the $350 price range decreased by almost 15 percent from the previous year. Sales of electric guitars in the same price point declined by 24 percent from previous record levels. That’s almost one third.

Why am I talking about cheap guitars? Because that’s the kind of guitar that is typically purchased by the first-time guitar player, the newbie. This group of folks is the new generation, the ones who will continue the tradition of guitar playing. And the numbers suggest they are not very happy right now.

Why not?

A recent American Music Conference survey on music-making asked people to list the barriers that kept them from taking up a musical instrument.” The top response was “inability to find a good teacher,” which rated well ahead of “lack of time,” “it’s too hard to learn,” “can’t afford an instrument,” and “don’t have enough talent.”

Access to decent guitar instruction is critical for those who want to play guitar and are looking to take the next step to act on their dream.

And the weird thing is that the guitar industry is not doing anything about this. I remember the music shop close to my house when I was a guitar hungry teenager. Although I didn’t quite realize at the time, the guitar lessons I took at the shop were critical for me to stick with guitar. But, over the past decade, thousands of similar independent shops that offered lessons have shut down, mainly due to instrument sales competition from Guitar Center and internet retailers.

And this is the nail in the coffin right here: You Google “guitar teacher” and the city of your choice, and you’re likely to get an endless list of online teaching methods that don’t relate at all to the frame of mind of a beginner. Because there is no substitute for the living and breathing guitar teacher when it comes to going from “I just bought my first guitar” to “I can play a cool three-chord song.”

A three-chord song.

Teach a beginner a three chord song, and you’ve just build his or her interest to play guitar for a really long time. There are hundreds of thousands guitar players capable of teaching three-chord songs and inspiring a lifetime of playing. But, somehow, I just don’t see our current guitar selling infrastructure connecting these guitar leaders with the newbies.

IG BLOG (guitar – life) dishes out inspiration and ideas to guitar players everywhere

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I’ve just sent my newly purchased Variax guitar to the company that sold it to me for fixing it since I couldn’t make it start again since that single hour of playing/testing it. I  expect it to return in perfect condition, in a couple of days, ready to rock!

On the other hand tonight I will leave for one week to the seaside where I am going to stay away from everything that means work. Well, not everything since I will take my laptop with me for reading emails and maybe answering a few comments here and hopefully I will be able to post once in a while an article or two, when time (OK, my wife) will allow me get close to my computer!!!

So, I don’t know how well I will be able to keep the rhythm of posting new articles, but hey, everybody needs rest once in a while! And I hope by the end of my one week holiday my guitar will be ready and willing…

And since the weekend is here and I will not be present to entertain you, please take a bit of time to enter the competition for winning the most recent 4 CDs collection of Willie Nelson, One Hell of A Ride, read again the article that generated the highest number of visitors in one day and ever on this site, the funny top 10 list for a successful power metal band, read the article and watch the movie that generated the highest number of Diggs, over 100 diggs WITHOUT REACHING THE FIRST PAGE ON DIGG!!! By the way, why don’t you digg it, maybe a few diggs more could make it move even if so much passed since that moment!

And also, why don’t you read my reports on how my site traffic went so far. Here’s the 5th report since I couldn’t manage to write the 6th and last report (but I promise I will one of those days). This 5th report will lead you to the rest of the reports too.

By the way, the picture in this post is from Mamaia resort, here in Romania where I am heading to this very night, the most expensive resort on Romanian seaside where rich people pay up to $15.000 for a bottle of champagne at whild night parties…Don’t ask…

So without any more words, I wish myself a happy holiday and a lot of sun and good weather! Thank you!

Talk to you again from the seaside later! Bye!

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There is this little game I like to play when I have idle moments (like when waiting in the car, waiting for food at the restaurant, you get the point). I like to listen the song that is on the radio, CD, etc and figure out the tonality, chords, etc.

It is a game of ear training and of course it doesn’t work all the time, but if you start paying attention you will see that you start recognizing particular phrases, particular chord progressions that you have previously heard in other songs that you have already played.

It is a fun and useful game to play and I found myself “playing it” a lot of times and I can not tell you the satisfaction when you figure out a sequence.

I had the idea of this post after listening this morning a song that had a pretty straight forward chorus that I instantly recognize, helped also by the chord at the end which makes an unmistakable mark: Dm, Am , E, Am A7. Now I can’t be sure it was Am as tonality, maybe they played it in Gm or in Bm, or in Em, who knows, but the sequence was unmistakable.

An other interesting game to play is to think of you playing particular note sequences on the guitar and try to “hear” those notes, or the other way around, to take a slow(stick to slow!) sequence and try to think of those notes on the guitar neck; you will see that if you have let’s say a D, C, Bb (note) sequence and you “see” it on the guitar neck as a D, C, B, you will instantly fell something it is not right there, your musical sense will let you know you are not right.

These are two interesting games to play for the moments you don’t have the guitar with you!

Try them and you will see how fun they are, especially the first one with figuring out the chords. OK, and another one: stay away from jazz if you are not very good at it

Anybody else playing such “games”?

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After the post about Tiago Della Vega (aka the fastest guitar player in the world, right?), I have looked some more on YouTube to find more videos about him or similar performances. Well, I did find a few, but I have decided to write about something else today and that is branding in online presence.

The fact is that I am not a marketing professional, I have not studied marketing in school but I have become more and more aware of it’s importance over the last years, no matter what’s your field.

I had this post about why marketing a band is so much like blogging, I suggest you read it if you haven’t done it already, and today I have found appropriate to cover this subject from a more “practical” point of view, being motivated by a new discovery on YT.

The idea is simple: make yourself seen, come with a particular something that will help people identify you. There are many good musicians out there, most of them playing very good, but not always become known. Why is that? Because they don’t have an unique presence that help people identify them. Maybe it freaks you out when you see Marilyn Manson or other artists like him, but that guy has an unique presence and that helped him position himself well on this crowded market.

The fact is that a little something can make the difference, and this is where I come to the reason that started of this post: a lot of people promote themselves on YouTube these days. A camera and a computer and you have just about everything you need, right? But there are so many (not-famous)people that play or sing on YouTube, how many do you actually remember once you close the browser’s window?

Fretkillr rules!

Let’s see, from my point of view: fretkillr. I love this guy’s music and channel, I subscribed to it. But why do I come back? How did I manage to remember him the first time? OK, he has a lovely acoustic guitar music, but did you notice the fact that all the time he films himself from a particular position where only the guitar is seen but not him?

Did you notice that nobody knows his real identity, who this guy is, what’s his name, etc. This created a particular cloud of mystery around him, causing interest and people speaking about him and coming back to him.

We have here in Romania an example of a band that started as a project/experiment, nobody knowing who these guys were, nobody knowing they were even from Romania, and this caused a wave of interest. The guys made their identity public only about 6-7 months after the project started to work. And what do you know? By coincidence, they guy is from my city and we used to know each other 10 years ago from recording in the same studio here. That’s marketing.

The kitchen concerts

Also, an other example, not that successful, but interesting from the point of view of creating a name/identity: concerts from the kitchen! Right! This guy films himself singing and playing the guitar from his kitchen, creating a series of clips gathered under the name “concerts from the kitchen”. I think he changes angles and environment a bit too much on his videos, but if he would keep his “thing” he may be easily remembered as “the guy who sings in the kitchen”. Not much, but it creates him an identity!

Here’s the guy:

Sandi Thom, the girl that lived her dream

And as a 3rd and final example, a girl that made it big, Sandi Thom, if I am not mistaken, started having daily concerts from her basement, streaming these shows live on her website. An unique point of view and the strange location and the internet made her big. That’s marketing, right?

Do you know any more artists with unique presence on YouTube?

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These days I am in one of those periods where nothing really comes to me easy, in terms of inspiration, or whatever you want to call it…

I didn’t post anything yesterday because nothing came to my mind. Period. Yesterday evening while rehearsing with my band, I searched for a better “solution” for the guitar part of one new song and frankly it was not that great. Seems it is a general state, I guess it may be the weather, outside it is sunny and beautiful while I am in here…well…

I guess everybody faces such periods but in artistic environment they really suck! How about if you are a composer pressed to deliver a song by the end of the week and you don’t have any good phrase yet and nothing comes to mind? How about if you are a writer and feel empty of all those great ideas that used to come to your mind a few years ago?

I guess I am not the only one facing such periods, isn’t it? What do you do when it happens to you?

PS: You know, any answer you may come up with must be better than the one I saw on a funny poster, with a monkey squeezed in a corner saying (whenever I feel like working) I squeeze into this corner and wait for it to go, guess it won’t last forever…

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We have this popular TV show here in Romania, called Happy Hour, presented by a very popular guy here.

We have the TV show’s band that does a very good job on the show playing/singing every day.

We have this very popular and appreciated pop/jazz singer, with musical studies with a lot of international awards.

We have this stupid, low class, kitsch “musical” style that is played/sung by gypsies, but unfortunately appreciated by a lot of people. I won’t comment anymore about this. Don’t confuse this with traditional gypsy music, which is another kind of thing, but can be considered the root of the previous one, the “classy” version of it maybe?

Well, this classy girl has a big show with a big band and all the fuss where she plays a song with one of the famous singers of this crappy kitsch style, for “anti-discrimination” reasons, she says. OK.

Because of this show, she received a lot of negative appreciations and in my eyes she lost a  bit of my respect for doing this. That’s my opinion. It has nothing to do with discrimination, just that she shouldn’t have associated her name with that style. Period. But, again, this is my opinion.

She comes to that TV show, and she receives a very good treatment from the presenter (I say that since he respects good artists while the bad ones he just destroys right there on spot with no mercy in an hour of very high audience).

So she is invited to sing a song (a lot of the invited artists sing with the band of the show) and she starts to give sheet music to the guys in the band, here’s the one for guitar, here’s the one for drums…the guys in the band had their moment of confusion, clearly looked at the sheet music lost and with no clue and told her that they don’t read sheet music. Well, she says, the other band (my note: the low class, kitschy one) played the song on the first take from sheet music. But I didn’t want to embarrass you, sorry for that.

Sorry, my ass! She clearly wanted to make a stand but I don’t get it! You don’t go to a rock band (they are a rock band, even if in the show play mostly pop) with printed sheet music asking them to back you up live, right there on spot, in the most popular daily TV show and you say you didn’t try to embarrass them.

Because the guys admitted they can’t play on the first take the song, she sang with a negative (what I am sure she was prepared to do right from the start).

For me, the one who lost (again) here was the singer, not the band. You could say I am subjective, I can’t read music either. Doh, what a surprise! An electric guitar player who can’t read music! But if you really wanted to sing the song with the band, you could at least send them a copy of the song and the sheets before coming there, giving them a bit of time to get the song right. Otherwise it’s a situation where nobody really wins.

The band lost a bit of it’s shining look while the singer ended the show as the queen of music, extraordinary voice, master of piano, but with big issues on her popularity. She (still) is a very appreciated singer, but I think she should not do this kind of things anymore. She clearly wanted to make a stand, probably somebody from the band made some kind of joke on her singing with “the other band” and she wanted to make them pay for it.

Well, I think she payed for it also.

The video is right after they admitted they can’t read music and she used the negative. If you look behind her, some of the guys in the band still keep the papers in their hands (probably masking the guns pointed to her, or some kind of middle finger).

Here’s another one where she sings and plays the piano, for a full picture.

And because I believe in equity, here’s on of the videos of the band.

By the way, do you read sheet music or not?What’s your opinion on that?

Dr J, this question is not addressed to you

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A quick and happy(for me) news now: yesterday I placed an order for a brand new guitar!

Yep, for real! I ordered one of those modeling guitars that I’ve got so crazy about, I have ordered a Line 6 Variax 600 Blue, the guitar in the picture here.

But since the color is not so “usual”, they don’t have it on stock for the moment, so I have to wait for 2 weeks to bring it from wherever they bring it, Germany or UK, I think. I am usually the typical customer to buy a black (electric)guitar and in the beginning when I saw this color, i said WTF is that? The most stupid color ever!! I have first seen it on Fender, along with a crazy green, but after looking again and again, I’ve fallen in love with this color for good! It has a vintage look…

However, my band mates still think it looks stupid…

So, two long weeks of waiting…oh, well…

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This video is just unbelievable, I couldn’t believe it, really! And not for what they do here, but because I have realized how complex Queen’s music really is.

How many of the bands playing today would dare to cmopose and arange something of that complexity nowadays?

Well? What do you think?

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