Guitar Licks and Tips


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Great Ear training site

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I was looking around a website from an old friend of mine in Brantford Patrick Feely and I came across a link on his guitar page directing me towards an ear training website. The site is called Good-Ear and it has some real neat lessons on it that will test and help you to expand your overall musical knowledge. Most importantly it fine tunes your mind to help you understand what it is that you are listening to when you try to figure out songs by ear.

When I first started the basic lessons on Good-Ear, it reminded my of my early days when I wanted to focus all my attention towards ways that would help me grow as a guitarist/musician. I feel that working on ear training made me become a more well rounded guitarist.

When I was around 15, following being kicked out of Pylis, I was feeling a little bummed out. Shortly after shaking off the Progressive Rock blues, I decided to pull up my pant legs and begin to focus on another musical chapter in my evolution as a guitar player. This new direction brought me to my classical guitar playing era, which in turn brought me to ear training.

My ear training helped me out a ton when lifting songs off an album or just to the radio. Today I can have a song playing in my head then grab my axe and figure it out in mere seconds. This something that I highly recommend everyone to try!

Sure some people out there will argue against this discipline that it is a waste of time but I hope that I can nudge some people out there to follow this path or just explore what ear training can do for you and have some fun! Remember, the worst thing that can happen is you learn something!

So for all you adventurous types out there, take the test and tell me what you think.

Keep on Jammin’





Gibson has a new axe called the Firebird X

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Gibson guitars have just released and new line of guitar called the Firebird X. They figure that they took the best technology from guitars of the past few years and incorporated all these new advancements into this brand new revolutionary guitar. It has some very interesting combination all wrapped up into one guitar.

The body shape is taken from the 1960’s Firebird III. The only difference in the Firebird X is that they created it with a chambered body instead of solid one. This new design has many advantages. It makes the guitar slightly lighter, helps add a warmer sound to it due to the resonating ability factor (think about an acoustic guitar, the bigger it is the louder it is). In a side note here, the chambered body makes it easier to hear when it is not plugged in, not exactly like an acoustic, but only slightly louder then your standard unplugged electric guitar. This type of guitar design is also intended to help it obtain greater in sustain.

The Firebird hosts a unique bridge that has piezo pick up built in. This technology is from Gibson’s Dark Fire line. Gibson engineers have the single run through a studio-quality effective amplifier inside the guitar. This results in a stronger and more pleasant acoustic sound. How this sounds and reacts inside an electric guitar is anyone’s guess.

I have a Piezo pick up in my Larrivee L-03 and it works great. How it works is that by attacking my stringer harder, the louder the pick ups the single resulting in a louder sound. How this translates into increased volume in an electric guitar will be interesting to hear.

There is so much going on with Gibson’s Firebird X that it would take way too many posts to do it justice. So just check out this link and see for yourself how many bells and whistles this thing has in it. If I owned this guitar I would have this constant thought running in the back of my mind of when will this thing have to be brought into the old guitar shop for some work when it starts breaking down.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_mFUIQFYyM

Anyone out there own one of this guitars?

Keep on Jammin’

The Auto Sound Engineer called ARC

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The one thing that I hate most about preparing a room before doing a concert is setting up the PA to provide optimum sound quality. Trying to not only find a sweet spot, the perfect location that has maximum sound quality (think of the seat that the sound technician running the PA/sound board is sitting) but extending a spot like that to many locations in the hall or room. It is almost impossible to do this if you, the performer, are doubling as the sound guy and in a huge rush to start a show. But what if you had lots of time on your hands?

The only answer that I have run into to date is something called ARC(Advanced Room Correction system). The company that makes it is called IK Multimedia. But will it work when you gigging at a show in a fairly big room, that is the question.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grU81hWU_wE&playnext=1&list=PLE5957135774D2090

ARC is made for artists with home studio’s, working in usually a spare room that more that is not exactly acoustically friendly.

I wonder if you could bring this type of setup into a venue that you would play in and obtain the same results? Sure it would involve a lot of preparation time before a show, no act has enough time to set up their equipment and do a quality sound check before the show let alone a test setup for extend the sound sweat spot!

First off you get the ARC to start measuring the dimensions of the room that you’ll be playing in. You take this high quality mic they call the Measuring Microphone that comes with it out of the box. You then have to plug it into your computer/notebook, turn on the software. The software will direct you to sections of the room to begin taking sample sounds/readings that come from your PA speakers. The software does some adjusting and out of your speakers come the perfect sound?

It sounds a little daunting at first thought, the set up that is, but if it works out ok then what the heck right? I don’t think that I would pick up something like this unless someone has a decent comment about it. So has anyone out there used the ARC system while performing live?

Keep on Jammin’

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