The Fretboard Master
Having been a guitar player for over 20 years, I am often amazed at the number of guitarists that have never taken the time to learn the notes on their fretboard. I have met guitar players that gig on a regular basis, and yet are unable to find a C# on the 3rd string, an A natural on the 4th string or an F natural on any string! Little do they know that by learning this one simple thing, their playing and enjoyment of the instrument will increase ten fold!It was while studying at the Guitar In...
Exciting Improvising: How To Make Up Music Out Of Your Head As You Play
Improvisation (also known as improvising) is the act of making something up as you go along -- an act with which we all have a little experience. Remember playing House or Doctor as a child, letting the game go wherever your mind would take you? That was improvisation. No rules, no boundaries, just the limitless potential of your imagination.Similarly, musical improvisation is the act of writing (creating it as you play) a song while performing it, a technique found most often in jazz and bluegr...
View From The Stage: Give Me Your Lost Your Lonely Your Drunk
They gather in clusters around tiny tables on soaring stools. You find them belly busting at the bar, shoring walls, and idling in the aisle ways?the people who leave the coziness of their living rooms, and head out into the night in search of music and camaraderie: Rock Fans. Sure they have a plethora of website concerts streaming their desktops, and cable channels of rock, hip-hop, and good ol? country, but they?ll come out in the rain to be a part of a live scene.Today it?s just me up there o...
Can You Become A BoogieMan Or BoogieLady?
Boogie music, also known as boogie woogie, is a genre of piano-heavy music particular to America in the 1930's and 1940's and 1950's. It's characteristic walking bass is familiar to many as a harkening back to rock and roll, even though the form is based strongly on the blues (in fact, it's often been called an upbeat version of the blues).Boogie originally started as a strictly piano form; the most familiar versions are still based solely around the instrument. The precise origin of boogie-woog...
Can You Become A BoogieMan Or BoogieLady?
Boogie music, also known as boogie woogie, is a genre of piano-heavy music particular to America in the 1930's and 1940's and 1950's. It's characteristic walking bass is familiar to many as a harkening back to rock and roll, even though the form is based strongly on the blues (in fact, it's often been called an upbeat version of the blues).Boogie originally started as a strictly piano form; the most familiar versions are still based solely around the instrument. The precise origin of boogie-woog...
Jazz Shrinks Complex World Jazz History
When I've had a belly full of the complexities of current events I find a jazz band in some out of the way place and retreat for awhile into melody with a big beat.For those of you who are turned on by horns, I recommend a small watering place in Cleveland called the Lake Shore Club.There, Ted Witt and his Forest City Jazz Band hold forth on Saturday nights with the best music this side of New Orleans.Located through the courtyard of an old motel, it is not the kind of joint you would wander int...
So Just What Is This ‘Americana’ Music?
Basically, Americana is Country Music. Hold on! Wait! Don't go clicking away yet!We're not talking here about the cliches of Line Dancing, Stetsons and songs about losing Wife, Dawg and Car (not necessarily in that order).What we're talking about is music with attitude, whether that be protest songs, introspective ballads or just plain old bad-ass hell-raising good time music - country yes, but Americana is also rock, blues, traditional bluegrass and even soul. Music without boundaries, held tog...
View From The Stage: Small World
Small WorldLookin? at the stats for my web-site; four percent of my traffic this month comes from Thailand.It kinda makes me think that the blues is universal and even in Thailand they get the blues. So I surfed and guess what? They?ve got the blues! They?ve got Creole Samui playing Thai blues at a New Orleans Style bar (except instead of serving Hurricanes, they serve Typhoons), The Big Buddha Blues Band (they get down?with purpose no doubt), and also the Soi Dog Blues Band?(and you thought dog...
Blues Music History
Blues is probably the purest American music ever produced and along with its jazz counterpart is the only true American music form. Its roots lie in the work songs of West African slaves in the South. When they toiled hard in the fields of South plantation owners, these slaves built a call and response method of singing, thus lending rhythm to the drudgery of their lives. These came to be called field hollers and became the basis of all blues music to follow. After the Civil War ended, the bla...
Beauty And The Blues Two Of The Best From Nottingham
Twenty five years ago, the birth of a darker side of music was forming. Straight out of the loins of fast, furious punk, came the sombre approach to life and death in the form of Goth. It was initially the delights of North London in such suburbs as Camden Town that was first blamed. Pointed at by conservative bony fingers for the introduction to such macabre ways of thinking, it was actually Nottingham and the surrounding areas, it has been said, first took the giant steps into a brave new...
by 