I just drove back to San Francisco from Southern California, where I got to hang out with family and spend a long, full day at NAMM. And while even the longest and fullest of days isn’t enough to see half the stuff at the show, I’ve put together a little slideshow covering some highlights […] Want to torture yourself? Pause on Dec. 31st to consider the resolutions you scribbled down 364 days ago. But not everyone is a resolution cynic. Check out the comments section below last year’s NYE post, and you’ll find a dozen entires from Josh Starmer, who pledged a year ago today to record an entire […]
Just in time for the single-coil holiday season: my comparison review of 16 humbucker-sized P-90 pickups is live at Premier Guitar. This heartwarming holiday fun-fest has it all: Mouth-watering adjectives. Freshly baked audio clips. Irate manufacturers. Don’t miss it! This was a fun, if challenging project. Comparison pickup reviews are such cans […]
It’s that time of year when we stop practicing, turn off the soldering irons, and pretend to relate to spend precious time with our loved ones. I’m off to Santa Fe for a visit with my wife’s family (it’s okay — they’re mostly musicians), and I’m especially looking forward to hanging out […] Monday: Theory and Technique Tuesday: Gear Wednesday: Repairs and DIY Thursday: Biography Friday: Fiction This week we’re talking about our favorite guitar/music books. The plan is simple: I discuss a few titles I’ve found particularly enlightening, useful, or entertaining, and then you jump in and do the same. I’ve organized the days of this week […] Saw this today on the Guardian‘s site: A clever programmer named Joe Cannatti decided to visualize the fretwork of a 22 well-known players. He used Ruby on Rails code to search the internet for tablature files, and then depicted the data as “fretboard heatmaps” — fretboard graphics with frequently played notes depicted in red. (The […] If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed a recurring pattern: I attend some interesting event and promise to report on it, only to get subverted by work, crowds, jabbering with old acquaintances, and jetlag. True to form, I’ve spend the first two days either demoing TriplePlay, or staggering […] It’s wet. Will it be wild? Howdy from Frankfurt, where I arrived this afternoon to attend Musikmesse. United Airlines was its usual scuzzy self, though a nice flight attendant found a place for me to stow my guitar. And my pedalboard seems to have arrived in fine shape, even though I had to […] NAMM is loud. My idea was to scour NAMM’s five massive exhibition halls in a fast, efficient fashion, and then retire to a nearby cafe to pen witty yet informative summaries, which I’d post effortlessly via my cunning little i-devices. Instead I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut […] |
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