On Practicing Guitar

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Category: Music

  • Eight Million Ways (To Be Alone)

    Eight Million Ways (To Be Alone) – A New Song In 2019, I started a big push to write songs and I did pretty well with it for a while. I had a lot of ideas saved up and I just kept ‘working with what’s in front of me,’ a concept that I employ sometimes…

  • Key To The Highway Video and Tab

    Big Bill Broonzy Illustration by Jake Bialos The great blues master Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” is one of the most famous eight bar blues. Besides the evocative lyrics and simple but catchy melody, the chord progression itself helps to make the song compelling. Eight bar blues are far less common than twelve…

  • 20 Sweet Vinyl Albums For Tough Times

    One of my guitar students asked me for recommendations of albums on vinyl so I dashed off this list. Many of them I’ve had for a long time and some for less, but one thing that they almost all have in common is that it’s pretty easy to listen all the way through. Yeah, you…

  • Chemistry Is Everything

    Chemistry is the elusive facet of any band that truly succeeds. Even at the simplest level, this is what people want to see and hear. With chemistry, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This came into play when I formed The Anodyne Blues Band with a childhood friend and a blues…

  • Ron Wood Slides on You Got The Silver – TAB

    This arrangement of one of Keith Richards’ signature songs with Ron Wood on acoustic slide guitar presents a quirky part of the Rolling Stones’ history – the sideman as star. The Stones have often employed top notch talent in their band onstage and in the studio, think Nicky Hopkins, Billy Preston, Bobby Keyes. Here, Mick…

  • Seduced By Classical Music

    How I came to so passionate about classical music is not completely clear to me. It may have started in my teens when a friend played an LP from Toscanini’s set of Beethoven Symphonies over a powerful stereo system. Or maybe my obsession had roots in Clockwork Orange, which features the music of the classical…

  • Mix It Charlie, Fix It

    Mixing the individual musical tracks of a record can be one of the most difficult phases of the production process. But I managed to get a little bit more of a handle on it when I finished my current album, Saints and Sinners. I was stuck, I admit.  But as the jazzbos sometimes say, “You…

  • Rock and Roll Dreams at the Metropolitan Museum

    This is possibly the first Gibson Les Paul Sunburt from the late 1950s to find its way to England. Keith Richards brought it over after one of the Stones' early U.S. tours. You can see him playing it in the T.A.M.I. Show, a landmark rock and roll movie.  I finally got out to see Play…

  • Swing Into Spring with Saints and Sinners at The Groove April 23

    Spring is in the air and Saints and Sinners will be making our first appearance at The Groove in Greenwich Village on Tuesday, April 23rd at 7:30 pm. We’ve been working hard uptown at The Shrine and we’re excited to bring the music downtown to all our fans in the area. We’ve got some new…

  • How To Properly Execute a “Pull-Off”

      If your pull-offs aren’t working, the first place to look is in the term: “Pull-Off,” accent on the “off” part of the movement or technique. Perhaps they should be called, ‘pull-downs,’ but that would probably be confusing. And it wouldn’t make matchy-matchy with the Hammer-On, would it? The idea is that you’re creating two…