Getting comfortable with recording

It's often said that you get used to recording by recording more. While that's kind of true, it's not very helpful to look at it...

Pepe Romero & Joaquin Rodrigo

Here are some videos which are somewhat buried on Youtube, that I find inspiring and insightful. Both feature Pepe Romero and Joaquin Rodrig...

Book Review: Effortless Mastery

"The effort it takes for you to perform music equals the distance between you and mastery " - Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery. In...

Measuring progress

Tracking progress is a popular topic on guitar blogs I read. With all the day-to-day ups and downs, the best advice is to measure progress o...

How to practice things that need a lot of repetition

Some things you practice may require a lot of repetition to train your muscle memory. It's tempting to just keep repeating an exercise t...

Why every musician should compose

Composing is a discovery process. When you compose even a bit, you learn about what goes through composers heads when they compose, and you ...

How to divide up practice time

Dividing up practice time Teachers usually recommend dividing up your practice time between technique, studies, and repertoire. Since there...

What is efficient?

"When working on the exercises, the guitarist must keep in mind the fact that mechanical repetition is worthless. Every time an exerci...

Electric guitar, part 2

It's quite a different experience, beginning again but with so many years of music experience behind me. It's not quite as fun as b...

Electric guitar, part 1

Earlier this week, I gave in to a long-suppressed urge and traded my flamenco guitar for an electric (thanks to Craigslist and Jason at the ...

A piece from Joseph Miller

I found this while searching SoundCloud for classical guitar. I have worked with some students in a class I TA'd for a while on this pie...

exploring a piece

I'm hanging out in Montana right now, visiting Glacier NP and hanging out with my parents. I brought my guitar, but I've got a lot o...

Brouwer's Estudios Sencillos

This is a quick buyer-beware; you can still find the Brouwer studies in 4 short, very expensive volumes in lots of music stores. You can als...

Concert Review

I wrote a guest post for the Classical Guitar Blog about Jorge Caballero's concert in Seattle last night. I have to say, I miss the con...

Recording: Sor Studies

I want to make a point of recording myself more often and getting comfortable in front of a mic, so I am planning to record something at lea...

Some thoughtful quotes from an interview with a horror writer

This is from an interview with Thomas Ligotti , a modern horror writer who's one of my favorite authors. I think that what he has to say...

Some thoughts on interpretation

I've been playing Heitor Villa-Lobos's Prelude 3 for about 3 months now. You can hear this morning's recording of it in my previ...

Something different: recording the guitar at home

I felt like I needed to do some recording, to try to get more gigs, so I started working on that this week. Recording guitar is tricky, espe...

Recent gig post-mortem

I gave a couple of solo performances this past weekend, for the first time in a few years. They went great! The first was as background musi...

Things that bear repeating...

I just read a nice blog post from Bob Wooldridge about a concert and workshop given by Jorge Caballero at the GFA convention. There was a...

Conflicting advice

This is a tricky one. I have a moderate-sized collection of guitar method books, which I like because there's always something interesti...

Pepe Romero & Wilhelm Hellweg play Carulli and Diabelli

This is a recording I really love. I was really happy to stumble upon it when I did... I don't even remember how I found it, but I have ...

Visualization followup

I think that unless I have the time to devote my full undivided attention to this process, it's probably best to work in small chunks, p...

Visualization

This topic comes up an awful lot, and I'm not going to go into too much detail about the process, per se. Here is a good article on it ...

Coordination vs control

Today I managed to increase my scale speed by nearly 20%. I've done a lot of right hand work lately, but what seems to have done it toda...

Possibility

I'm reading another frustrating forum discussion about "am I limited because of ____"? The usual answers equate to, "of c...

Developing the right hand

I found some pieces recently I would like to learn with tremolo passages, but I've never had a good tremolo in spite of years of attempt...