Total Guitar magazine and SoundCloud are hosting a guitar solo competition. The winner will get £600 worth of stuff from Ernie Ball and a premium SoundCloud account for one year. Download the backtrack (it’s the down arrow to the right of the track), shred your brains out and drop your track in Total Guitar’s drop […]
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Like most bedroom guitarists I have my gear in – the bedroom. With a 1,5 yo, the time when I can play guitar and mix my tunes, the bedroom is occupied by someone sleeping. And even though she’s moving into her own room now, I still can’t crank the volume up. And even if I […]
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When I was buying my first electric guitar I made a lot of research (because I always do). Having been a metal fan all of my life I found out I was pretty ignorant about guitars. I quickly found out that there are bunches of guitar makers, and more importantly two kinds of pickups. I […]
Read moreI currently own two acoustics and three electrics, the latter shown here: [slickr-flickr search=”sets” set=”72157626503591114″ items=”50″ use_key=”y” sort=”date” order=”ascending”] Ibanez S470 BK with stock pickups, aching to be replaced Cort M520 with a Duncan Custom in the bridge and a Duncan Jazz arriving in the mail Schecter Omen 7 with Dimarzio Blaze in bridge, refitting […]
Read more To my great happiness I found that dominating metal record label Nuclear Blast released promo streams of Symphony X songs on SoundCloud. I’ve praised SoundCloud before, and this is why I think it’s great that bands and record labels use it instead of other platforms: It doesn’t look like Geocities from 1997 like MySpace. It’s […]
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Fractal Audio’s Axe Fx is the only digital amp modeller (and multi effects unit) that professional artist actually use in their productions. With PODs and the Boss GTs being excellent units for the bedroom guitarist with lack of space, the just-announced Axe Fx 2 is really outside the competition. The new version has double the […]
Read moreI’m restarting the blog. I was pretty happy with it as it was, only one problem – it wasn’t getting any traffic. This means only half of its reason for being was working; keeping an archive for myself. The other half, sharing and getting feedback wasn’t. I’ve identified a number of potential reasons for this: […]
Read moreOften times when playing or practicing feels tedious you refer to it as having lost your motivation. I found a very insightful post on Ultimate Guitar about this – and that the obstacle might actually be something else. What if you are actually getting scared? Scared of that you are wasting your time put into […]
Read morePower chords are three-string chords which use can use to play almost any rock or heavy metal song you can think of. You usually write them down as fives, like E5 that you play like this: E — B — G — D -2- A -2- E -0- The template for a power chord is […]
Read moreThere are numerous sites and phone apps to lookup chords, but there’s still a point to knowing the theory behind how chords are constructed. And it’s really not that hard. Pick a key and start with its major scale, and then just follow the templates to which notes of the scale are used in the different kinds […]
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