There are a ton of guitar lesson sites available for all of us to use. Some are invaluable tools that I frequent often and others are completely worthless. If you don’t have the money to pay for online lessons, your chances of running into a worthless site are even better. I don’t actively look for site to rate but I have stumbled across this and felt it worth a mention.
A guitarist by the name of Rob Bourassa is giving a “7 week primer” on YouTube which will “..enable the student to learn to play by ear.” It is a course with a weekly lesson video and 5 minute practice companions to help you stay on task. The first 3 courses covers scales and and fingerpicking (Travis). I’m running through the lessons myself because I’m curious on what the lessons will bring and my daughter is learning the guitar and he has great insight on teaching. Rob has been playing for 40 years and is an incredible guitarist and is a frequent contributor to the Acoustic Guitar Magazine Forum.
So if you are just learning or know someone who is, check it out. What Rob has done is incredibly generous. Lessons like these would cost thirty to forty dollars if you wanted to get it on DVD.
I’m a huge fan of podcasts and video podcasts and I love the the wealth of information that you can obtain from them. I have probably 20 or so on my iTouch as I write this and it keep on growing. One podcast that I am having a hard time finding is a good instructional podcasts for music. Most music podcasts that I find are usually radio shows presenting recommended listening in a certain genre. Great tools to expose yourself to new music but not what I’m looking for.
I did find is the Musicology Show from Pandora. which is a true instructional show that digs inside the nuances of music it’s styles. One show will teach you about metric modulation (aka time signature changes) and the next week you will learn about aspects of composition or what a madrigal is. For some it will be a refresher course and for others, it will expose you to different aspects of music that would otherwise stay unknown to you.
Give the Musicology Show a listen and tell me what you think. Are there any good guitar/music instructional podcasts you would recommend?
Now that I have found tab that will point me in the right direction in learning Tommy Emmanuel’s Borsalino, it’s time to get practicing. What I usually is listen the hell out of a song and watch any videos I have to observe technique. I had a great version of Tommy performing Borsalino from the Sierra Nevada Center Stage show that aired on PBS. It was on my DVR for quite a while and knew it would always be there. At least I thought it would be. Turns out my Tommy show got recorded over because I failed to protect it so needless to say, I was crushed and pissed.
Technology taketh away and technology giveth back! Did a quick search on YouTube and found the performance that I once had. Not to big of a find since YouTube has tons of videos available at anytime but I didn’t want to visit YouTube everytime I need to look at the video. I want to be able to watch it on my iTouch any time I felt like it. Thankfully, many have addressed this need with programs and services that assist me in getting YouTube videos on my iTouch. It’s called “YouTube to iPod Converter” from dvdvideosoft.com. It’s a simple little program where you enter the URL of the video, specify where you want the .mp4 video to save and click on the “convert” button and you are set. I now have my Tommy video back and can reference it any time I like.
This is yet another great resource for musicians who need to reference music on they fly when they are practicing. This video conversion method isn’t relagated to just iPods. You can do conversions for your PSP, Zune, Windows Media or any other kind of media player.
If only this software could transcribe the song for me and then I would be set. : )
I’m a “how’s that work” or “Let’s see the guts” type of guy when I see new gadgets. This now includes the Gibson “Robot Guitar” and it’s self tuning mechanism. I have heard about this new gadget and haven’t looked into it too much until news.com had an interesting pictorial with descriptions on “Taking apart the robot guitar.” I’ve seen similar contraptions that can be installed on existing guitar but it’s nothing like the robot and requires some serious routing. It was pretty cool to see how Gibson hid the electronics to keep the guitar looking authentic. The machine heads are pretty bulky in the back and looks like you will need a bit of training on how to use it. Pretty cool but seems like a gadget that I can do without.
I’ve seen on twitter and other forums that guitarist (including myself) lament over [ad#125-125-floatright] the fact that they don’t have their guitar with them. Well, your lonely days are over! All you need is buy an iPhone and jailbreak it. Below, is a video of someone doing their best to play us a Beatles medley with their new guitarpod and I’m sure that you can see that our steal and nylon stringed companions won’t have to worry about getting replaced by this “Guitar Hero” for the iPhone. Anyway, I could see someone eventually getting pretty good at playing the iGuitar and will have a nice little gimmick in an act or at parties. I also see a nice little tool that could help you work out a melody that was stuck in your head or working on chords. Will this be enough for me to hack my iPhone? I think not. My iTouch….. well….. Nah. I’ll just stick to playing the real thing.
There are a ton of guitar lesson sites available for all of us to use. Some are invaluable tools that I frequent often and others are completely worthless. If you don’t have the money to pay for online lessons, your chances of running into a worthless site are even better. I don’t actively look for site to rate but I have stumbled across this and felt it worth a mention.
mechanism. I have heard about this new gadget and haven’t looked into it too much until news.com had an interesting pictorial with descriptions on 
