Having just been asked to transcribe a Christmas song I previously didnt know existed (Christmas Time by the Darkness), I was having a cup of coffee thinking about these songs. Most of the usual suspects had ceased to classed as music after many years of being shoved down our ears in supermarkets and shopping centres….so where are all the new Christmas songs? Well, I think there are a lot of them, but its very difficult for new songs to break through without advetising budgets equal to the size of a small countries economy.
Anyway, to redress to balance here’s one from the Porch Song Anthology:
Posts under ‘Blog’
Christmas Songs
Musicians guide
The Musicians Guide – videos and guides on marketing, performing and other aspects of the music biz
Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi
Tremendous record…I’ve listened to it 5 times in 3 days. I cant even remember the last time I listened to a record this much, and I never thought I would do it again, but there you go! Anna Calvi’s website
Differentiating good from great
Fantastic article from the Telegraph 22/6/11 about how the lttle details make all the difference from the perspective of a pianist
Worlds biggest guitar lesson
Heres an interesting projuect. Steve Vai will give the biggest ever guitar lesson online at 6.30 pm GMT on the 3rd of March…more details at
Berklee Music Online
Favourite Guitar Albums
I thought I’d write a couple of lists of my favourite guitar albums. In a strange anomaly, my favourite instrumental album of all time would be a piano record: Una Mattina by Ludovico Einaudi -my ultimate desert island disc. Anyway onto the guitar records…my criteria for these tends to be the albums ‘ worked out most songs from. I’m also more interested in great playing and original parts as part of a song rather than for there own sake, so these albums also tend to contain really good songs (in my opinion anyway).
Here we go:
Changing Strings
I’d been thinking for a little while about writing a couple of guides to changing strings and reading tablature, that sort of thing, but then I found a couple of web pages that deal with these things really well. For a cracking guide to changing strings on an acoustic you cant go too far wrong just here: Guide to changing strings
And here’s a good guide to reading guitar tabs
starting from guitar scratch
All you need is 3 chords and the truth, according to legendary Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard anyway, which is almost the same as learning to play the guitar from scratch. All you really need to be able to play 99.9999% of songs ever written are 5 major chords: C, A, G, E and D and a couple of minor chords too: Em, Am and Dm. A bit of rhythm doesnt go amiss either, so when you have your fingers on one of these chords (try a G), count to four and strum on every number…then add two strums a number, but slowly, as you don’t want to leave a gap when you change chord. Try changing from the G to a C and then maybe a D, and this is really is all there is to it.
Rocket Science Banjo
First post of a new blog on the site…i’m going to use it to recommend various guitar, and banjo websites, events and that sort of thing. So, the first one up is probably the best music website i’ve ever found and its called Rocket Science Banjo. Its purpose in life is to provide an online way to learn frailing or clawhammer banjo, something I cover in lessons, but this is done so well, I want to highlight it. Tony Spadarro runs the site and has been a clawhammer player for many years, and offers a dree download of a 200 odd page PDF that covers in a lot of detail from the basics up many clawhammer styles. The PDF comes with audio examples, and the cost is free…theres a button to make a donation, which I did, and I then got a personal email from Tony with several hundred more tabs and resources.