Back in early 2001, I moved from my native country of The Netherlands to England. The reason I moved was because I had accepted a job there, which I was very excited about. I ended up living in a shared house with three other housemates. This turned out to have a grave effect on my [...]
October 18, 2010
I have written a guest post on wrist position for the excellent blog, Not Playing Guitar. There seems to be some confusion about the wrist position of your fretting hand, and in this post I try to explain that a straight wrist is best. The link is here: How Should You Keep Your Wrist: Straight [...]
October 9, 2010
What is the most important thing to do when you learn to play something new? The answer is, you break it down into small pieces that you practise individually. That way you can spend a lot of concentrated and focused effort on a small part, which — because it is so small — allows you [...]
October 6, 2010
A great jam session is one of the best things in the world, in my humble opinion. A great jam session in which you take an active part is an even better thing in the world. You know that feeling; you’re playing something previously unrehearsed with other musicians, and the whole song just flows. It [...]
October 4, 2010
Last week I talked about several things that children use to learn new skills. I wrote about two things that I observed in my own children that allowed them to pick up the skill of talking. I then took this knowledge and translated it to practising playing the guitar. In this final post I talk [...]
September 27, 2010
In my post last week, I talked about what sets children apart from adults which allows the former to pick up new skills quicker than the latter. In our case we are interested in playing the guitar. I argued that time plays a big — if not the biggest — role. Most children have an [...]
September 24, 2010
I recently submitted a Youtube video to an online Blues contest — called the Blue Noize contest — hosted by one of the heavyweights of the guitar blogosphere, Guitar Noize. The challenge was to create a solo over a blues backing track provided by the organisers and submit it to Youtube to be judged by [...]
October 26, 2010