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This is one of my school reports. It wasn't even the worst to be honest, but its the only one I could find. Now, at first glance, I was...

On paper it should be unstoppable. Take the best players you can find, individually brilliant, technically way beyond most of the people they'll ever share a stage with, and put them in a room together. Sometimes it's unstoppable. Return to Forever or Mahavishnu Orchestra, Audioslave, Crosby Stills Nash and Young. Often, though, it's strangely flat. Competent, impressive even, and somehow completely lifeless, in a way that a much ‘less accomplished’ band, one that's simply pl

If you've never sat in a control room while someone chooses between takes, you'd assume it's a technical job. Pick the one that's in tune. Pick the one where the timing's tightest. Pick the one with the cleanest signal. I’ve personally worked on a session where the “in tune” one had genuinely terrible timing, the one with the best timing sounded terribly out of tune, and when they finally nailed it, the engineer had left an extra mic open on the same channel and the Sax solo

My “Brother from another Mother” died yesterday. Matt was the first person I had ever heard use the phrase “Brother from another Mother”. It was back in the early 90s, and it perfectly described our relationship. We played together on stage like this all over the world, we did business together, we ran Guitar courses together, we loved each other. I will miss him terribly. The one other thing I know, is that I won’t be alone. All over the world, this man had friends and colle

Here's something nobody tells you about when you start learning an instrument. Eventually, if you stick at it long enough, your hands stop asking permission and just start to crack on with it. In my current incarnation consulting to the mighty Scan Pro Audio, I don’t get to play anywhere near as much as I used to. For the majority of the 90s. I was the international demonstrator. For Takamine and Parker guitars. My job was to play the guitar well. Even more daunting was to ha

A music shop was never really just a place that sold equipment, whatever it said above the door. Throughout the 90s I was the International demonstrator for Takamine and Parker guitars, and pretty much every day was spent in a music shop somewhere in Europe and latterly USA, Brazil and Japan, so I feel singularly qualified to talk about music stores as, particularly in the UK, there were easily 1000 physical music shops back then, and I visited pretty much all of them in my t

Watch someone play brilliantly, completely unselfconsciously, in a rehearsal room for an hour. Then turn the recording light on. I’ve felt it myself so I know it’s real. Like the God of all Music is sitting in judgement. Something happens to a huge number of otherwise capable musicians the instant a performance becomes permanent. The shoulders come up half an inch. The playing gets tighter, more careful, more correct, and somehow, despite being technically more accurate, noti

I love what I do. There's a point in most long careers where it would be entirely reasonable to stop caring quite so much. You've seen enough hype cycles to recognise the shape of a new one before it's finished forming. You've heard enough instruments claim to be revolutionary to know most of them aren't. (And the ones that genuinely were, but didn't resonate….) You've watched enough trends arrive loudly and leave quietly that a certain flat, seen it all before, detachment wo

When you're starting out on an instrument, more feels like better. More notes, more speed, more everything you can physically cram in, because that's the only measure you've got for whether you're improving. Don't get me wrong, I'm with Dani Rabin when it comes to blistering fusion solos, but we have to admit that in the main we're only going to impress each other. Very few young ladies own Allan Holdsworth records… It takes an embarrassingly long time to work out that this i

There's a particular kind of ownership that doesn't really exist anymore, and I don't think most people under a certain age have ever experienced it. I started to learn the guitar at the age of 7 and I started off as most people do, with a cheap acoustic from the local music store. My guitar teacher did a deal with me that if I learnt them how to play the tunes he wanted me to ( Mostly Fernando Sor ), for the last 10 minutes of each lesson, he would help me work out how to pl

Every few years, without fail, something that spent a decade gathering dust on a shop wall suddenly can't stay in stock. It's one of the strangest patterns you notice from working in the Music Industry, and it never stops happening. Suddenly it's exactly the sound a whole new generation wants, and the same model that couldn't be given away is being hunted down secondhand for silly money. Taste in gear, it turns out, isn't really a straight line of progress toward better. It's

Play something technically hard in a room full of musicians and you'll get a reaction. Nods, a few raised eyebrows, maybe someone asking how you did that with your right hand. As I've said. Throughout the 90s. I was the international demonstrator for Takamine and Parker guitars. Which meant having to impress Clinics full of other guitar players on a nightly basis. However I've been blessed to play in a lot of different environments. Play something simple, and true, and exactl

There's a particular kind of truth that sounds almost embarrassingly obvious the moment someone says it out loud, and yet takes most people the better part of a lifetime to actually believe. Make the Music you want to hear. That's the strange thing about this kind of knowledge. It's not information you're missing. Someone could have told you the sentence on day one, and you'd have nodded and agreed and gone straight back to doing the opposite. Understanding it in your head an

There used to be a hard ceiling on how much you could cheat. I was lucky enough to be recording music in the early '80's. This is me and my "Brother from Another Mother" Keith. We had a band Called the Ash Can School. Our early singles go for money on the Internet like here. Ash Can School – She's Only Sleeping / A Day Out Of Paris – Vinyl (7"), 1986 [r5843176] | Discogs If you were cutting to tape, with a fixed number of tracks and a genuinely finite amount of physical tape,

Everything is available. Right now, this second, more music than one person could listen to in ten lifetimes is sat behind a five quid subscription on the phone in your pocket. And I still buy CDs. Not out of some misplaced nostalgia for jewel cases with price stickers it would take an industrial acid to remove. Not because I think vinyl crackle is somehow more "authentic", that's a different argument for a different day. I buy them because of what buying used to mean, and be

It’s genuinely been a source of great joy to me over the years, when people have taken my music and applied it to something they have...

OK, I’ve been playing a lot of clinics recently, and one of the questions people ask a lot is, how best to record their acoustic guitar....

Whenever I play a clinic or concert, people are always fascinated to know how difficult it is to play in altered Tunings, and why would...

This is in response to an email from Eddie, who asked about be-bop scales, I cant do individual lesson’s etc. from this site, but I can...

A Thank You. If a blog is for anything, I figure its for getting down whats on your mind, and this one is a thank you to someone from my...