Prolly the best artist demo I’ve heard at Frankfurt (partly because it has no goddamned soloing). This is real. They were playing out in the plaza at Musikmesse. I tried to shoot my own footage, but it was just too crowded. (Though I did score a thrilling video of the back of Craig […] Rockfinger’s Tommy Lamb graced the cover of Guitar Now! in 1977. Yet another sad anniversary: Believe it or not, it’s 20 years to the day since Tommy Lamb perished in a brawl at Indiana’s Plainfield Correctional Facility. Unlike so many rock-and-roll deaths, Tommy’s demise never seemed to inspire a renewed interest in his […] 
This is perfectly awesome: Luna Lee is playing a gayageum, a Korean zither related to the Japanese koto, Vietnamesese dàn tranh, and the Chinese guzheng. She’e got other fun blues and rock covers posted on her YouTube page. Lee’s version of “Voodoo Chile” is the internet hit, but I dig her “Bold as Love” […] Pinn Panelle’s Derek Song. A highlight of this year’s NAMM show was hanging out with Derek Song, a 23-year-old digital guitarist whose band, Pinn Panelle, has racked up an astonishing 12.5 million YouTube views with their realtime cover versions of electronic music hits, especially their version of Skrillex’s “Scary Monster and Nice Sprites” […] UPDATE, 03.07.13: I should have mentioned a point that several readers noted in comments: The capo only alters the tuning of open strings. Which means that while you can play many harmonies normally available only in dropped tunings, any notes above the capo appear at their usual frets. For example, all barre chords are […] William Bennett, 1956-2013 I lost one of my oldest and dearest friends yesterday — and one of the deepest musicians I’ve ever known. Bill Bennett, longtime oboist with the San Francisco Symphony, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage onstage last weekend while performing Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto at Davies Symphony Hall here in San Francisco. He […] UPDATE: My apologies if this page failed to load properly before. After a much screaming and crying some careful troubleshooting, it seems to be working correctly now. I put together a little slideshow of some of the interesting things I saw last week at the 2013 NAMM show in Anaheim. I covered some of […] This first installment of my 2013 NAMM report focuses on products for the digital guitarist. In the coming days I’ll be doing posts on analog amps, guitar, stompboxes, and accessories. (But maybe not as quickly as I’d like, because I’ve also got to cover MacWorld in San Francisco this weekend.) This is cross-posted from Create […] Since New Year resolutions expire at midnight, January 7th, I’m racing to realize my goal of finally becoming fluent with music notation software before the sands run out. A new way to feign productivity in cafes! I’d like to share some initial impressions about Notion. This isn’t a full-fledged product review — […] |
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