I was and remain a blues cat. The guy at the store saw me coming and recommended a plastic case full of Boss pedals, It made a little sorta sense, cuz I had a good guitar, but a pretty bad Peavey amp. (or maybe not bad, but wrong for the sound I wanted) The only […]

Perfect Pitch is one of the milder forms of autism; it can actually be detrimental to the development of musical skills, particularly those of the ensemble variety. If you have decent relative pitch, you can hone it and improve it; perfect pitch you have to learn to ignore, for the sake of playing in tune […]

I love that word, ‘troubador’. I had some romantic notions about it when I was young. I thought it meant you took your instrument with you everywhere, and if anybody asked you to play, you did. I did just that for more than ten years. Through most of that, I didn’t have a car. Or […]

There are singers, there are Karaoke singers and then there are vocalists. Most singers can sing pretty well, if the tune is comfortably within their range and wheelhouse. Karaoke singers have between two and ten tunes that they can really wail on, but otherwise, they’re lost, and especially if they’re not singing to the original […]

Vibrato is a deep subject; deep, and sometimes wide. There are a number of vibrato types and approaches; the easiest is ye olde wiggle stick, AKA the misnamed tremolo arm, but that’s cheating, so let’s ignore it in favor of the two main finger vibrato techniques. Wide vibrato is just a series of bends; you […]