I was lucky enough to be able to attend one of the best guitar festivals in the country a few weeks ago. Guitar Town takes place at Copper Mountain Resort, about an hour west of Denver, Colorado. It was a great time and we filmed some videos while we were there. Also check out the written story and the photo gallery.
Here is Kaki King during the Saturday morning workshop.
An interview I did with Bryan Sutton.
More videos at our YouTube channel.
As you can tell, things have been slow around here. That is mostly because writing for Guitar Edge and Premier Guitar has taken up a lot of my time. A few weeks ago I went to the Crossroads Festival in Chicago and recorded a few videos. The first one below is with one of my all-time guitar heroes, Jimmie Vaughan.
I met with Jimmie before his CD Release Party at Buddy Guy’s new club. Not only was Buddy there, but Jeff Beck also showed up to celebrate his birthday. The next night I met up with Pete Huttlinger to record to lesson videos:
The rest of the summer I will spending getting settled into my new house in addition to cranking out lessons for GE and PG. I will also begin teaching at the Marion Music Academy this fall, so if you are interested in lessons, send me an email and I can get you the info.
I know, many blogs give you these type of posts, but I found some cool and interesting links I really want to share and I figured this would be as good as place as any to do so.
Here goes:
Alex Skolnick writes a great blog and recently has been posting about how some of his favorite songs have horrible lyrics.
I recently have been becoming an avid reader of AudioTuts+. Ear training was always difficult for me in school, so I was very happy to see them to a roundup of the best ear training websites around. My personal favorite is IWasDoingAlright.
Christopher Davis is not only a great classical guitarist, but he runs one the best guitar blogs around. To celebrate my recent move back to the Motherland (Iowa), here is an interview Christopher did with Iowa Luthier John H. Dick.
I have sung the praises of The Bad Plus here before. Ethan Iverson is usually to blame for their excellent blog, Do The Math. Recently, he posted a in-depth interview with Cedar Walton and a transcription of Walton playing “I’ll Remember April.”
Every musician has a particular way that they warm-up before a practice session or a gig. Guitarist Cameron Mizell outlines some of his favorite exercises in a recent post. I think this week I will write up some of my favorite exercises as well, since I just got a new copy of Sibelius.
Hopefully you take a minute and check out these posts. If you like them, leave a comment and let them know.
As some of you might know, I recently left my position at NGW and moved back to Iowa.
Yes, Iowa.
Both my wife and I are originally from Iowa, so it was nice to be able to move back home and be closer to family (especially with the kid). Luckily, I found a position as Managing Editor for GuitarEdge Magazine. Essentially, this is the coolest job ever. I get to write lessons and articles for one of the coolest magazines around and I get to work with some of the best writers in the game.
I am pretty lucky.
This means that you will be seeing a LOT more of my writing and lessons out there in the Internets. One of the coolest things about GE is the fact that the entire magazine is available online for free. Just go to http://digital.guitaredge.com every month and check out transcriptions (10 in each issue), lessons and articles that are way hipper than what you would find in other magazines.
Hopefully this explains why there hasn’t been much activity here lately, but once I get settled more into my new gig I will make it a point to start writing more here. I am thinking on focusing more on longer form articles and saving my Posterous page for shorter links, videos and other oddities.
Would love to hear what you think….
