The best thing about being a musician is being able to play the music that you love. The next best thing would be to see all of your favorite bands playing on the same day and on the same stage. I got to do that last weekend and it was at a spectacular event in Indio, CA called “the BIG 4 concert” featuring Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax.

To understand why this venue was such a great time I can say that of all these bands, Metallica has been my main influence since I discovered music. This dates back to 1994 off the release of Metallica – Live Shit: Binge and Purge. The album was a box set that featured 3 discs, 3 VHS, a scary guy stencil, a backstage snake pit pass, and a 72 page photo book with all the missives and letters that were going on at the time all encased in a Metallica Tour Box. The videos were based out of their performances in San Diego and Seattle and the CDs were from a 2 or 3 day event in Mexico City. You might just think I was a fan of Metallica, but it’s always been about a little more than that.

My first real guitar happend to be a Kirk Hammett ESP KH2 Skully model with the skull and crossbone pearl inlays, dual EMG pickups, Original Floyd Rose Tremolo, reverse Jackson Dinky headstock. And it was from the second I played the first A chord in the intro to “Sad But True” that I really understood what rock was supposed to sound like. Being a guitar player is a bit different than being a fan, in my opinion anyway. The way the ear develops or the physical limitations that the body has to go through to understand a riff or a melody best describes why I like the music. Maybe it’s a bit defiant, a bit angry, a bit faster and more agressive… but the music has always been an outlet. A common idea that people that don’t play guitar would say based on some naive assumption is that the guitar makes me happy. The expression never transfered for me how someone elses opinion of what I do can somehow translate into being an emotion of me being called “happy”. Does that mean I’m not happy? No, it means I’m a guitar player and I like playing Metallica riffs. Why, cause their heavy and nothing makes a solid point better than a dark heavy riff played at mock speed.

I cut my teeth as a guitar player through Metallica and started off with the epic track “Seek & Destroy” moving straight from the riffs of Kill ‘Em All, then Ride the Lightning, to Master of Puppets, through …And Justice For All, and the Black Album. After reading the story of Metallica and their history with anthrax and Megadeth I quickly got into those two bands as well.

My first Antrax album was either the Sound of White Noise or Attack of the Killer B’s. I know all the songs off both those albums like the back of my hand. Something about growing up in Alaska and having long rides everywhere really helps things sink in a lot better I believe. The Sound of White Noise is still my favorite album beginning to end. It’s just so heavy. What’s ironic about the album is that I had come to California as a songwriter and had written a few riffs while I lived in New Mexico that I ended up keeping as the first couple tracks I would end up releasing on my debut CD Skate, Rock, Die!! and it wasn’t until I listened to The Sound two years after I recorded the title track that I realized one of my riffs was so melodically similar. I think it’s great that that influence was able to transfer on such a subconcious level.

The same thing happend with Slayer in 2007. I had read an ad in The Reader that said Kerry King would be doing a clinic at Guitar Trader. I always liked Slayer’s image and had an experience in their mosh pit when they toured with Marilyn Manson the previous year. Now I’ve been in mosh pits in and out for 15 years and had never experienced anything that cool. It was right off their album prior to World Painted Blood and I was continually liking this band more and more yet I had never bothered to learn any of their riffs. Why? My general attitude toward music revolved around riffs that made sense. Anytime that I had ever attempted a Slayer riff I just didn’t understand it. That included the guitar solos as well. Metallica, or Kirk Hammett for that matter always took a methodical approach to his solo playing in a context that I could understand. With Jeff and Kerry it seemed a bit off the cuff and the chaos really took off in the guitar solos. Needless to say, I needed the clinic.

The Kerry King clinic was awesome. I knew for 2 weeks before hand that I was going to go. I unfortunately didn’t know what I was supposed to know or what was going to be taking place so I didn’t have anything preparred other than a good 15-20 minutes of playing their songs by ear to get psyched up. There were 4 or 5 songs that I figured out in a pretty short amount of time and had spent the entire morning using my hand gripper just to remain pumped up. I went out there with my friend April and her boyfriend and it was just a fun experience from the preshow all the way until we got there. I think April brought him a brew from her homestate of Oregon just to share with him. I on the other hand brought out my guitar and a CD Digipak from the same album they toured on during the Manson gig the year prior. Kerry came out and started talking and getting the crowd to give him a Q&A on all sorts of things Slayer. After all the talking he invited people up to start playing with him. I was ready and after about 6 or 7 people went up they were all playing the songs that I had already practiced. I think the 7th guy went up there and played “Angel of Death” or something and I thought I knew the next part. I raised my hand and Kerry called me up. This is why I’m a huge Slayer fan today… I told Kerry I was going to play the next part and not only did I not play “Angel of Death”, but I busted right into “Raining Blood” which happend to be the song Kerry told everyone to hold off on until the end. To save myself, I didn’t actually know I was playing “Raining Blood”. So I took off in to the riff, and I’ll admit I have a really well developed ear but as soon as I went into the gallup piece I knew the guitar was in an alternate tuning than I had played it at home. This forced me to shift the entire intro into 1st position rather than 2nd position and really sounded off. Kerry let me know the song I was playing was in 2nd position and played the whole intro and main riff with the 2nd shred piece right after. I’d never seen anything so fast! I have been a much bigger fan ever since. Turns out their riffs make just as much sense as Metallica’s and the solos are just as fun if not more exciting that a lot of Kirk’s melodic work.

Even more cool, last week I met Megadeth (Chris and their bassist Dave) out at Guitar Trader as I did Kerry King a few years back. I didn’t get on stage or jam with them this time around, but I got to see in close detail as to how Chris attempts to recreate the guitar solos of previous Megadeth guitar players such as Marty Friedman of whom I saw play up in Soldotna, Alaska at the Sports Arena. They started off w/ “Sympony of Destruction” and ended with “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due”. I saw one of my students there after the show and that was pretty nice gettin’ recognized at such an event.

The Big 4 show in Indio started off in traffic as arriving in the desert there were two ways to get into Coachella. Had I arrived 2 hours earlier there was plenty of tailgating going on. The line in wasn’t that bad, they were letting girls go in first which seemed like a strange way to break up couples before the show even began but I wasn’t fazed. After arriving I felt it would be a good idea to pick up a couple shirts at the merch booth to support the bands that I came to see. The line was a bit long and Anthrax started immediately as scheduled while I was still in line.

Rushing onto the fairgrounds was a bit liberating. There was still enough room to play a game of soccer (had I brought a soccer ball) all the way up to the first half of the green. Anthrax played a great show and although I really like the band and have a huge amount of respect for them, they didn’t play one song off of The Sound of White Noise. I didn’t expect them to, I went and saw the Big 4 Live on the Sonosphere when they played in Europe and did the broadcast live and projected it to the theaters here. I just feel that the band still had a lot of important things to say on that album due to the amount of posers that it was aimed at at the time and still being relevant today. Plus, they were just great songs if I haven’t mentioned that yet.

Megadeth came on second and by this time I just remember my forehead was starting to crisp due to the intense heat. I heard from a lot of people, primarily on the radio that Megadeth put on the best show. I think a lot of this is because Megadeth has been the underdog their entire career and people like to go for that. When it’s easy to look at another band who has done a lot more with their career and then you look at the other band who stayed true to their roots it becomes more and more “Wow, Megadeth really is the best band here. Look at that guitar solo!” And not to stray too far from the subject of the Big 4, but I just picked up a signed copy of Dave Mustaine’s new book, and after reading everything that he had to go through just to remain as successful as he is was really inspiring. But the band did come before Slayer and really… nothing is heavier than Slayer.

Now, although I said that Slayer was the heaviest band there that doesn’t mean that Metallica didn’t put on the best show. Metallica by far had the best show and well, I knew and could sing along to all of their songs. Like everyone else at the show, I was blown away. They played “Orion” on stage for the first time since the Cliff Burton days. The pyro at the peak of the show was awesome. James had all the members from the other Big 4 bands come on and play “Am I Evil” at the end. I thought it was cool how they didn’t do this in New York and did the Motorhead instead and in another venue play the Misfits. It was an awesome day all around and it was nice to see how the bands had set aside all the b.s. and all rock out on the same stage.

There has been a lot of stuff printed up and video footage made since this show that is really worth checking out. Guitar World dedicated an entire issue to it. Revolver came out with the Big 4 trading cards. And I’m sure, like me… everyone got a ton of pictures. Thanks for checkin’ out my blog and I’ll see you all next time!

Metal,

Jason Martin

Hope everyone had a great summer and spent a lot of time at the beach. I’ve been on hiatus lately in between laptops so I haven’t had much time to get the blog back on the up and up. Couple things to look forward to in the near future; The Big 4 concert in Indio feat. Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax, My Summer Tour Across the U.S., and more importantly My Birthday in Vegas which was celebrated last month (and maybe a bit into this month as well).

Everything in general is goin’ really well. I’ve got my ProTools back up and running on my new computer and am looking forward to recording new material on something other than my old digital 4-track. The last thing I started on sounded like something out of a horror film, but before that the last thing I finished sounded like a gospel track meant only to be played at church. I’ll be experimenting with new sounds until I find out what’s best for a sound as a whole.

Since I’ve been M.I.A. I’ve been noticing a lot of familiar faces wondering whether or not I’ve moved. Not even close, as a matter of fact this week marks my 10 year anniversary as a resident of Pacific Beach. I’ve just been busy training, preparing, and jumping around too much to feel local. I recently played a gig out in Lakeside where I played every song off my first album Skate, Rock, Die!!! for a skatepark benefit and continued through my catalog using 5 of my favorite guitars. The gig went well and I hope they get that skatepark built soon. I also played a wedding this summer out at the Rancho Bernardo Inn out in North County. I played with a few awesome musicians that fit the bill perfect and wouldn’t mind doing another one sometime. When I’m not in San Diego, I’ve been headed out to Temecula for a session with my student Matthew before heading out to either L.A. or Palm Springs depending on what events are going on. So, I’m still here I’m just busy.

Some of the work that’s been keeping my hands tied are my transcriptions via GuitarPro 6. For the last 15 years, (seriously, since 2004 or so) I’ve been transcribing and taking notes as handwritten documents that I’ve used to help study up before my sessions. With the laptop my training and transcribing have been sped up tenfold using the GuitarPro to make audiofiles, as well as professional transcriptions, that I can use in an effecient mannor. This summer I finished the Metallica Riff-By-Riff series which timed out well with huge concert event this summer. It was fun to relearn the material and make the process a lot more simple than it was previously. This doesn’t include the work that I’ve been doing with the Guitar Player and Guitar World lessons. Although Guitar World provides a good amount of video footage to go along with their lessons, popping them into GuitarPro is simply easier and more hands on.

If you missed out this summer, I did another gig out at DayJams this year. Had a great time forming some killer bands and getting some exposure as a beginning guitar instructor and a shred clinic master. It was my first public shred clinic and I did a lot of material using technique that I’ve been working on the last year or so such as sweep picking, arpeggios, string skipping, and tapping. The class had a lot of students from all different levels and I seriously got down to business. The best part of DayJams was getting some of my crew out there teaching and taking names and that’s a really big deal.

One last thing before I forget, I joined up at a local website called Fretdaddy.com that makes fretboard stickers for your scales if you needed any help soloing and such. Be sure to check them out if you get a chance!

Have a killer Halloween.

Rock,

Jason Martin

For the first time, last month I was able to head up to the NAMM Show and figure out what all the madness was about and I thought it’d be fun to share some of that. This year, I was invited by Virginia at Voyage-Air Guitars, the same company that I won the Grand Prize from at the ASCAP EXPO last year so thanks again to the awesome guitar company that made the whole thing possible.

Welcome to Anaheim

Sundays event took place up in Anaheim and offered a free breakfast for those who got there early. I live in San Diego and missed the free NAMM breakfast but made it up there as soon as I could so I wouldn’t miss anything else. The minute I got there I got the hint that I might not be able to see everything. It was overwhelming before I even stepped foot in the door. The Anaheim Convention Center is about 4 of 5 floors not including the basement which they made all the people with my particular badge check out before getting to the main floor. Getting in and getting my badge was no problem, but for some reason above my name Virginia decided to put ALIDA on the top. I figure it’s cause she thinks I’m a leader so I took it as a compliment. On my way down the escalator down to the basement there was a wall a huge wall of music magazines that were being given away for free that I took advantage of.

The first showcase room centerpiece I saw was Voyage-Air Guitars. Barney was workin’ hard at the booth when I got there. At first I didn’t know if he’d recognize me, but as soon as I started talking to him I think he knew who I was. He and Virginia had invited me to the Sheraton hotel party the night before and found out that I missed a lot of performances and festivities. I just wanted to say hi to the crew and decided to carry on.

The Voyage-Air Guitars booth looked amazing by the way. I really liked the new electric model they had with all the body art. I had never seen the electric model or how it would look folded into a backpack I was very impressed. Hopefully I can get my hands on one before they go out of stock!

The next few booths got me started taking pictures non-stop. I saw some guitar player hand cream that would help healing and another booth that had a device that would make chords for you. I met up with G7th Capo and saw they had some really good looking, high-tech capos for controling the amount of grip you could use against the fretboard. I was practically in guitar heaven, but with banjos, bass guitars, guitharps, ukuleles, and mountains of all that assorted with all the lastest designs and accompaniments.

Not only were there instruments at NAMM this year, but if you wanted to build your own guitar from scratch they had plenty of bodies and necks that you could choose from as well as a variety of leather straps to choose from to go with your new guitar. I tend to be someone of a guitar geek when it comes to spotting something new and one of the things that I’d never heard of before was a guitar with built-in tubes that directly plugged in to the guitar.

There were also people playing everywhere so I wanted to start jamming myself. One lady gave me a fancy Rockstar pick of hers that I was able to use when the crew at Early Bird invited me to play a set with them. I saw they were playing a lot of blues and decided to follow that trend when they handed me a Les Paul style model. Then they cranked up the gain and gave me that Slayer tone that fit me a little better.

The NAMM Show 2011 had more guitars than I’ve ever seen. There were walls of guitars set up everywhere. I guess realistically a guitar doesn’t take up all that much room if it’s not set up with a regular style guitar stand. I almost need to stock up on my vocabulary to describe some of the guitars that were there. I saw quite a few acoustic cut away models that were particularly cool.

A good selection of the guitars had pretty outstanding body art. If you had any style that you wanted to match up to your character you could find it here. Country, hawaiian, metal, it didn’t matter it was there.

Some of these guitars were famous and had been in a 2011 calendar. The guy who crafted them was there with potential investors while I checked out the pieces of work. One was the guitar with a harp built into it I just thought it was cool. The bodies were all unique whether it was the shape of the body, placement of the soundhole, length of the neck, etc. One of the instruments was dubed “the pretzel guitar” because of the color and texture of the wood. It had some similiar twists and a Les Paul body shape.

There were giant harps displayed in different colors available and plenty of people trying them out. The other guitars there had plenty of people ready to try them out as well.

One of the things that I thought might be a good idea for the beach during the winter time was this gimmick called “Wristies”. These wristies were just fingerless gloves but you could still play the guitar while wearing them. Being from Alaska I think these might be a cool way to play outside without having to worry about whether or not you could play cause it’d be too cold outside and worrying if your fingers would tense up.

There were some pretty nice guitars called Vinnie Vincent there that I really liked that reminded me of something straight from the 80′s, including the available colors.

Another new concept that I had never thought of before appeared in front of me… a Glass Guitar. I’m sure it’s possible I may have seen a clear guitar before, but the body was pure glass and the guitar was promoted by having “glass tone”. Seems to me that the way the sound reverberates off the body has a lot to to with the sound that comes out of the amp. Even if it doesn’t it was still pretty fun to look at.

I ran into a guy that had created a Key Signature Chord and Scale building tool. It was a nice wheel device that when you moved the dial, it would tell you about what you were playing or how to play the correct mode in that Key. Another teaching tool I just had to get featured individual notes on a deck of cards. In between buying a deck of cards and checking out this new wheel idea for building both chords and scales I found Guitar World showing off their new idea called “Lick of the Day” that if I owned an iPhone or an iPad I would be a must have.

The next thing that caught my eye was an electronic pickup that would digitally alter your tuning into 6 different tunings with an unlimited amount of preset options.

I gathered with the other people when I hear someone performing to check out what was going on and there was a guy playing a bass ukulele. I’ve never even heard of a bass ukulele but this guy seemed to have mastered the craft. Later, another guy was playing guitar with strictly an overhand technique. Lot’s of talent in the room.

After seeing quite a few more guitars I found another glass model guitar, but it was shaped like an Ibanez and had a handle grip that resembled the classic Steve Vai model.

One guitar that stopped me in my tracks had a video pickguard. It was a pickguard with some starry design that was moving around like a really bad Pink Floyd video or something you might see during a Grateful Dead concert about an hour or two into the show. Pretty cool, so I got a bit of footage from that and a second model that had a bunch of ladies in swimsuits flashing up every few seconds. Some of the other designs that it was flashing were other guitars pickguard selections from classic Strat or Tele models and used a variety of different types of wood on the video guard as well as the same kind of wood that the guitar was made of to make it look more like an illusion.

One company that I ended up following on twitter recently due to their booth at NAMM was a pick company that made picks out of stone. I’m not sure how much they go for but it seems like a pretty good idea.

From there I saw a guitar that featured Lemmy of Motorhead on it and of all the guitar body cuts, this one was probably the most unique. The bodies were cut into very fancy shapes that included flames and then were covered in shiny rocks or whatnot and then given another badass something or other to make it look even more cool, for example adding an extra neck.

I ended up running in to a guy that was selling banjo picks, and although I don’t own a banjo I do teach banjo so I wanted to see what the guy had to offer. I got one thumb pick that was part guitar pick as well so I expect I’ll be able to use it as a hybrid tool before not too long. On the way to the back of the room to the upstairs escalator I saw something that I remember seeing while I was buying some strings in Nashville last month. An acoustic guitar in a display along with a bunch of other noise making devices that would play song requests for you. Kind of like a piano that plays itself. When the guy saw I was gettin’ video of it I think he pulled a foghorn that caught me a little off guard, but I think he was just having fun.

By the time I made it up to the 2nd floor three hours had past. I rolled up the steps to see an entire floor filled with the biggest names in the music busniness. One of the booths I saw first was Schecter and if you know anything about metal, you probably know a band that has a Schecter signature model. Everyone from Avenged Svenfold to Ministry, Gwar, Black Label Society, I can’t even go into it but they do a really good job not only with the design but they go into detail about what makes a metal guitar sound good. For example, most all the guitars were decked out with EMG pickups and a rock body style but they didn’t just stop there. Many of these guitars had extra strings as well. The first one I saw was an 8-string guitar. The service guy came over and introduced himself and let me try it out. The guitar is still tuned standard but the lowest string is naturally tuned to an F#. Hypathetcially, if you wanted to drop tune it you could go into drop E tuning which that alone just sounds disgusting enough to make me want one. I let the guy know I was interested in 7-string models, but as soon as I saw the 8-string I figured I may just skip the 7-string all together and go straight for the 8-string. The guy was right on que with “It looks like you’re headed in that direction anyway”. I asked the specs on the string guages and I was suprised to hear that the lowest string on the 8-string was only a 64. It sounded really low, and when I get one I think I’m gunna go for an 8-string Schecter. I’ve found there are now enough songs on the market as well as lessons from 7-string instructors to get what I want out of the instument.

Continuing on around Schecter I couldn’t not drool over almost every single model they brought in. There was an 8-string Flying V model that was pretty sick, and all the models from all the biggest players in the business. I grabbed one of their catalogs and that really helped put all the pieces together when I got back to my pad and re checked out the models after seeing them up close and it really made a difference. Out of just that one booth I can imagine I got about 20-30 guitars in and is also probably one of the reasons my camera died less than an hour later. Next time I’m gunna buy an extra battery for my phone so I don’t have any problems. It looked like they were having an anniversary as well as they had a new anniversary model guitar out that had a sleek stip down from the fretboard that I really liked. One of the things that was really helpful, and you’ll notice this if you click on any of the pictures is that it not only has the name and artist that plays that model, but a price on it as well.

After the Schecter walk around, I spotted more of the bigger names in the music business. The Musicians Institute was set up there. There were a lot of giant posters of celebrity musicians. One of the first ones I saw was Robert Trujillo for Warwick of the band Metallica. There was a rare autographed signed Gene Simmons Axe Bass presented next to his other signature model along next to his Gene Simmons Bass Case. The band Filter, or at least a few members were hanging out taking pictures at a headphone booth. The headphones were pretty awesome, custom fit mold to your actual ear.

After seeing a few more guitars and basses hung out around the area I saw a guy standing there shredding his new album so I caught a bit of footage and got a couple pics as well. If there was one thing that the show lacked it was people that were just hanging out shredding guitar.

Ibanez are was there and you could get right up close to a lot of the signature models. The famous Steve Vai handle grip model as well as an exotic Ibanez signature of the same guitar. I’ve always liked Ibanez guitar. But what made the Ibanez guitar area different than the Schecter was the acoustic section. Ibanez had a large amount of acoustic guitars available and then had variations on top of that, such as 12-string models. In addition bass guitars, and a line of pedals, one of my favorite models the Tube Screamer was there.

One of the things I thought was really cool, the bass actually played by the late bassist Paul Gray from Slipknot that died earlier last year. It was alongside another Slipknot bass that accompanied this one that was right handed and featured artwork from All Hope is Gone. This place was awesome.

Then I found the next greatest ultra-cool designed by DBZ Guitars. These guitars have been around for a while now, but just within these last few months they’ve managed to catch my evey more than a few times. If you want a high quiality guitar, these are going to be too good for you. They really carried their own unique style and had a large variety of things that added charismatic charm to each guitar whether it was the inlays, the embroidered body, the sleek futuristic shape, or the metal attachments down by the bridge that give it that brutal heavy duty look. Very cool show and the drapes really added to the effect.

I had gotten to see some amazing things so far. It wasn’t but 15 feet away that I saw something that was almost just as exciting as these guitars. Guitar holders! The first one was a piece of foam that had a nice cut for the neck that would fit nice and snug underneath the handle of your ampliphier so that the guitar wouldn’t accidentally fall to the ground. I won’t admit that that’s ever happend to me, but there have been plenty of good “catches” since I’ve started playing that’s for sure. The next one I can’t wait to invest in to was the Monster Grip hand. There were so many catchy designs from monster to zombie to bones to the unthinkable. This happens to be the first really cool company that I’ve seen pull something like this off. Very imaginative, and I will surely end up with a few in the near future.

The next thing that I noticed was that there was a foreign older gentleman that was trying to get me to take a picture of him and this guy that even today after I’ve been told who he was by 3 or 4 other individuals I can’t place. So I helped the guy out and took a picture for him and in return I had him do the same. The guy was trying to tell the famous guy that he was really big in Europe… I at first thought it was Tony Iommi, and then Geezer Butler…. then I heard from another guy that he played with Vanilla Fudge, and another source said he did play with Black Sabbath. I dunno, this guy was cool in my book and since I didn’t get a picture taken with any other celebs while I was there you can tell all your friends I was hangin’ out with Black Sabbath.

B.C. Rich was there. I just got my first B.C. Rich last year and from what I’m aware, they’ve always kind of had that same Warlock style headstock so when I saw some of these new “drenched in blood” guitars without the traditional headstock. It looked like they had taken the Jackson reverse dinky headstock and ran with it.

I knew that I hadn’t been upstairs yet and there was a list of events that were going on up there that were seminars that reminded me of the ASCAP EXPO last year. I looked around at what was going on and decided to check out the seminar on “How to Use Social Media”. The guy at the door zapped my badge and I stepped inside. It was a really quiet place and once I found a seat and it was a fairly meditative spot to be in if you needed to step away from all the chaos that was going on outside. The rest of the seminar was interesting and when it let out I made sure to check around to see if there was any other classes I might like.

Right past all that though was the Line 6 room. And I am a fan of Line 6. I stepped in the Line 6 room and they had the newest Bugera models with actual tubes placed in them with a new tan color. I definitely felt like I was in the future, but it also looked like the room wasn’t really trying to sell amps so much as the devices they had hooked up to headphones. I managed to have a cup of coffee and a few pieces from each section of food thanks to Line 6 before continuing. They did have a massive amount of beer as well but since I was driving I decided to stay professional. But props to Line 6 for only bringing beer that you need a bottle opener for, I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

After lunch at Line 6, I decided to head up to the next floor. It was almost as if they were saving the best for last. The top floor was the home of ESP. I had got my moneys worth and right in the centerpiece of the hallway was my guitar, the KH2 “skully” model. The first thing I saw when I stepped in the room was the baddest ass ESP ever imagined… I think it had diamonds incrusted into it and some sick embroidery. They had whole row of ESPs that were encased were fantastic. I was very impressed they had a stage set up for jamming during the week. They also had a few screens on with a demonstration on a “how to” for the guitar. After talking to a few of the people with the company I took a business card and headed out.

Let me just start by saying that although ESP is the best guitar company on the planet, the Fender room had the most money. I don’t even thing they just had the most money, they had other companies in there as well. I think I saw Jackson in there. Then even better… video games! I’ll start by mentioning that I didn’t come to the show to play video games, but this wasn’t any game I had seen before. Guitar Hero that entailed an actual guitar… brilliant idea who ever came up with that one. I watched one game and then had to try it out… I rocked the song “Crazy Train” and ended up taking over this guys game that couldn’t figure it out. think I got 84% cause I was on medium mode and played a few notes that wern’t on display but it still kicked a lot of ass.

One of the things I was reminded to check out was Hell Yeah’s signing at 4:30 or 5pm, and it was practically the climax of the day so I couldn’t miss it. Once I got back to the main floor I realized that I still had the other half of the room to still see. There were the bigger names in publishing there. Hal Leonard with an arsonal of what could have been the nicest display of instructional books and DVDs that I’ve ever seen. Cherry Lane was there as well as Berkely Press. I figure since one of my students had an audition with Berkely that week that I should go and find out what they had to offer in terms of theory and if they had any other information that might help me out.

I came across the DJ section of NAMM and although I’m not a DJ nor do I have immediate plans to be one, there was a ton of cool stuff for DJs there that made everything much more exciting. I scratched some mp3′s for a bit, was pretty amazed at my new talent, and headed on.

The next area seemed as if it had it’s own arena of NAMM and I like this company a bit which was Roland. Right as I walked in there were people performing everywhere. I found a station with 4 ESP MII Deluxe guitars attached… that were not ESP, and to be honest they didn’t even have pickups. These guitars had the electonic pickup that I saw downstairs that had the digital tuning device. I put on the headphones and was connected to one of the latest digital effect pedals that would turn the already “not guitar-guitar” into a synth. Pretty impressive stuff.

Also in the Roland room, there was a performer I decided to check out that went from sounding like Barry White to Damian Marley to a female pop star and then vocalized a guitar solo (that really sounded like a guitar) all in one song. Very cool. He invited another couple people up that would play some breakbeat drum and synth tracks while he improvised. Even though he mentioned they had never jammed before they still sounded pretty good.

I managed to sneak out with 5 minutes to spare before they shut the place down to make it to the Dean booth. Ironically, it wasn’t that hard to find. I saw Vinnie Paul and the rest of HellYeah sitting there signing autographs and about 3 people standing in front so I figured I’d check it out. I shouldn’t have been suprised when that 3 people turned into a snaked line of 50 people around the rest of the booth. The line was filled with all of the Dean Razorback models that Dimebag was known for and that wrapped around to the inside area where they were doing some filming. Dean has always been a favorite guitar. One of the signature models I saw was from the guitar player from Hell Yeah. They had another one that was pretty sick made for Dave Mustaine. I really did have to pick up the Dave Mustaine model although they put it in a really bad spot and in a strange wall configuation that kept it from pulling out too easy. Needless to say, once I got it out and played it there was no way I could put that thing back properly so one of the security guys came over and gave me a quick warning on how expensive the guitar was. And to be honest, I think it was only about 11 hundred bucks… not really anything I’d have minded having to pay for if he’d let me take it home. So after escaping it looked like the line was starting to die down a bit and I decided to go for one last walk around before heading back to the booth. There was so much more that I saw in that five minutes that it seemed like another show.

Martin Guitars was there. And they were giving away free picks! So I grabbed a few since they were the tortex models and still had the baby powder grip on em. I think they were made for the 35th anniversary which made them that much more cool.

By the time I made it back to Dean it looked like the security guy had cut off the line so I wouldn’t be able to jump in last minute. Luckily, the last guy in line was one of the guys that I had seen shredding earlier so I decided to go chat with him and that was how I worked my way in line. Turns out he had been playing with some of the bigger names in the business that day and was there to promote his new album that he mentioned you can download for free for the convention. Pretty good idea using NAMM to promote music, right? I had met Hell Yeah last year at the Mayhem Festival but I couldn’t come to NAMM and not say hello. Since I was the last guy in line I decided to take advantage of my extra time and compliment the guitar players new signature model. He mentioned that was the original model or something to that extent but it was hard to pay attention cause from behind me came Buddy Blaze. Buddy Blaze is fairly responsible for Dimebags signature series and kinda like me, he just wanted to come over and say hello as well. I made my way to Vinnie Paul and then Bobzilla. Turns out they were coming down to San Diego within the week and I had no idea. I think Bob was a bit distracted as well cause not only was I the last guy in line, but Guitar World came up and started doing a wrap up of NAMM interview with the band right as I was seeing if he would sign something to Jason for me. By the time I checked out the autograph later I couldn’t really make out what it said until I realized it said ALIDA on my badge and he must have just been looking at my badge. Regardless, my actual name was below it on the badge but I still thought that was pretty funny when I figured out what it said.

It was time to shut down and I remembered I had told the lady at the Capo booth that I would come back after I had a look around the place. I made it back downstairs I said take it easy to Voyage-Air Guitars and said hi to Jeff since he was a little more accessable. After saying thanks and everything I started to head out when I realized I still hadn’t picked up my capo. The lights had already been dimmed and by the time I made it back I was suprised the lady remembered me. She hooked me up with the most impressive capo I’ve ever owned that is made of stainless steel and came with a polishing cloth. If you’d like one be sure to check out G7th and that’ll be my last plug for the day.

I had a great time checking out the show and if I’ve learned anything from the experience it’s just that I’ll need to bring an extra battery for my phone so that I can show you all the cool stuff that I could only write about since I couldn’t get a picture. Well, that about wraps up my NAMM experience. Rock on, and I’ll catch ya next time!

I just got back to California after a nine day tour across the country that would not have been have as enjoyable had it not been for my new Voyage Air Guitar.

For those that haven’t heard about this guitar I simply cannot say enough good things about it. The story goes back to last April when I recieved a royalty check from MTV/ASCAP for some airplay time I wasn’t aware occured. The song, you can find on my website or buy on Music Online Alive (as featured on Myspace) “Follow the Revolution” http://www.musiconlinealive.com/album/atomicbob/home.moa was at the time the only song I had registered with ASCAP and only 2 copies of the song had been made… I gave one to John-5, and the other to my friend April. In other words, I still to this day have no idea how or why I got paid. Long story short, I decided to step into the industry a bit further and head up to the ASCAP EXPO 2010 in LA to see if any of these experts in my field could answer this for me. After a few days of meeting everyone, tossin’ back drinks, and taking a book of notes (which I do plan to share eventually), I still had no other answer besides “You’re lucky man, most people have the opposite problem.” The end of the second day there was an announcement to enter to win a prize as you left that was supposed to be won at the start of the third day. Well, after taking advantage of the open bar and buyin’ drinks all night at the after party… let’s just say I didn’t quite make it to the opening ceremonies on day three. Fortunately enough they would save this segment until the end of the day, and after all was said and done people started checkin’ ticket numbers as prizes got called. I watched everyone go get their awarded prize, and with one thought that got me through the next numbers they called, I said the numbers in my head as they were spoke and what do ya know… “I did it”. Still no idea however what was to come, I stepped up to the stage looking around for any prizes left over and saw nothing. Once again, jokes on me I figured… except it wasn’t. I had just one the Grand Prize! A brand new Voyage Air Guitar fully loaded with travel pack and laptop attachment. Ironically, my friend Casey Desmond had just taken a picture with the guitar while schmoozing with Barney Leeson a few minutes earlier. I got the lowdown as the crowd gave a lotta thumbs up and smiles, then spoke with Virginia Cannon about some A&R stuff for Voyage Air and took a few pictures that are on a blog of mine from the event last year.

Alright, so what does this have to do with my tour? Everything. The guitar has been one of my primary instuments for all of my acoustic travel sessions this last year. The reason is not only due to the superior sound and quality of the instrument, but it folds in half! It’s so much nicer than strapping a guitar on your back and knocking your head into the guitar neck each step and the laptop compartment is f’n priceless! I could fit a laptop, books, or an extra set of clothes in the compartment and I am virtually set anywhere I go. So when it came time to go on tour there was no question which guitar was coming on the road with me. I was about to tour from San Diego, CA to New York with nothing but a backpack and my new VA guitar.

The trip itself was amazing, I cannot put into words how beautiful our country is. The timing of the trip could not have been planned any better as well. San Diego was about to flood the moment I left town and the big black cloud could be seen above the mountains as I entered El Centro. I meaning “we”. as I was traveling with my lovely friend Jen of which I would be sharing the road with day and night. The first state past was Arizona and man I would love to have a place there. Billboards had houses going for $85,000 meaning I could probably afford an ATV upon the move. One of the first things I saw in AZ was a ton of these ATV’s zoomin’ around the mountains of sand lookin’ like something that might happen on a regular basis. The next state over and more toward the end of my first day driving I had made it all the way to New Mexico, my old stomping grounds before I made it to San Diego a decade ago. I met up with a writer friend of mine named Mike Smith that ironically shared two of the same jobs I had in my hometown up in Alaska from back when I was a teenager. I went to my favorite New Mexican restaurant called Los Quates that I remember had the best red and green sauce I’ve ever had and the salsa tasted exactly the same.

Leaving New Mexico I saw something I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Snow. Although it wasn’t much, it was almost mind boggling that this stuff still existed, and it was only a 12hr drive away. Back down the mountains a bit it and on to Texas it shifted back into summertime and I got my first taste of American culture I had no idea would become a staple state to state…cows. At first I was takin’ pictures of every single one of these things… by say VA and PA I had seen enough of the species to probably never take a picture of a cow again. Texas soon grew cold as we stopped into the city for gas. I imagine it was right around 40 degrees or so. That night would be the coldest night I’d felt in ages as we stopped in Oklahoma City, of which after a few beers in Bricktown I would be calling Oakland on more than a couple occasions. Bricktown was gorgeous and although the table dancers at Coyote Ugly were worth the return alone, it was the area that would be the best aspect of the town. The whole place is literally made of bricks… and happens to be the home of Mickey Mantle.

I broke out the Voyage Air Guitar that night to put on a new set of strings before heading out to Memphis the next day. Changing the strings for the first time was a little different than I had imagined and not that I don’t know what I’m doing, but somehow I ended up busting a high e not long after. Memphis was old school, and not old school as you would think back to say the 80s, but old school as you could imagine the 50s. Elvis is their hometown hero and they are not afraid to show it. I made it out to a diner that served the best fried green tomato I’ve ever eaten as well as fried chicken that could only be found in this area of the country. They happen to be playing Elvis on the jukebox in the background. The first stop before Graceland was SUN Records. SUN Records was great and although there was a band recording that night I did manage to get a few shots playing outside just to get in some playing time. Moving on to the Music City capital of the world, Nashville I would get plenty more opportunity to keep rockin’. Nashville was awesome, I started of picking up coffee at a Starbucks that was located in a building that had the nicest architechture I’ve ever seen house a coffee shop before. The barrista sent us a block down to where I would play outside the former Grand Ole’ Opry or known to some as the Birthplace of Bluegrass. This must have been where I busted my high e.

Finding a set of strings in Nashville was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Within’ the hour I had made it into a famous music shop called Ghruns where I would jam on $3K banjos and buy a $10 string winder with built in string cutter. Although jealousy wouldn’t allow them to let me open my killer new axe at their location I did manage to clip the strings within’ the hour at my next gig. After listening to all the opening 2pm bands around the block I went back to this spot where I saw a statue of a man on a bench playing jazz, and an empty bench. Seemed welcoming enough so I jumped on it. The acoustics of that town with the tone of the guitar were incredible. I clipped the tips of the sting windage off the headstock and headed on. In a few hours I would find myself on the east coast.

The east coast is so different than the west coast. Not only the houses, but the season as well. It was officially winter again as it started snowing well enough to wanna catch some flakes on my tongue. I didn’t, but I really felt it should have almost been neccessary. The roads wern’t bad, but the only thing I could relate it to would be from what I’ve seen on television or in movies. Houses in snow resembled ginger bread houses, and they all seemed to be lit up really well. The remaining states up the east coast although equally exciting just breezed by. I believe there was one state I was only in for a mere ten minutes it was so small.

The journey ends in New York. The first thing I thought was Gotham, the houses resembled the comics I grew up with and the moon had distinct characteristics of something drawn. Driving alongside the folks in New York as I curved around the turns, tolling over bridges, passing underneath many overpass was just fun. Some of the things I would suggest everyone do in NY is pick up an egg roll for dinner and a bagel for breakfast. I don’t think they could be matched anywhere else. I spent the “Great Snowfall of 2010″ in New Jersey as 3 feet of snow fell on the entire east coast at once. I got plenty a chance to push out stuck vehicles and shovel out cars that I almost felt at home again. Back to New York for the last couple days was the highlight of the entire trip. If you wanted to name anyhting remotely historical, I bet I saw it… in 25 degree weather toes soaked in slush. Central Park, Statue of Liberty, the Atlantic Ocean, Time Square, that famous spot where NBC has the tree, famous famous stuff you’ve probably seen on MTV or the movies.

I managed to time everything with the flight home perfectly. People that had been stranded for days were all still there as 93 people were on stand by for my flight alone. I did get hassled a bit by the airport security as I had just bought an electric string winder at a local NY guitar shop along with a new Van Halen usb drive that I ended up losing in that same spot. I guess they thought I was going to use my Power Peg string winder as a weapon to jeopardize the security of fellow passengers. The flight itself was outstanding and I made it onto the plane along with a backpack and only my Voyage Air Guitar case (extra clothes in the laptop compartment) without any sort of luggage to pick up upon my arrival in LA. The guitar fit perfectly in the overhead compartment, my backpack made it under the seat, and I was able to keep a book of chord progressions in the detachable laptop compartment as well which kept me plenty occupied for the four and a half hours I was in the air.

As odd as it was that I was able to leave New York on time, somehow my flight in LA down to San Diego got cancelled less than a minute before boarding. Though I wasn’t able to leave that night, I was more than taken care of. the flight out the next day was fine and I was really impressed how the staff was able to assist with the guitar on the smaller plane as well. I got taken care of with a ton of vouchers and made it back home safe, sound, and full of the best mexican food and starbucks I’d had in a week. I thought it was interesting one of the things I would end up missing about this place was cilantro. Less than an hour later I would be right back to gigging session to session with my still new Voyage Air Guitar.

That is a brief summary of my trip. I’ll try and get some pictures up soon so everyone can enjoy. Hope everyone has a great weekend. I’m gunna head up to NAMM on Sunday and make sure to swing by to say thanks to everyone at Voyage Air for such a great instrument.

Rock on.

Starting back in 1995, somewhere around September I picked up the guitar after being inspired to play by watching one of my friends play a Metallica the main riff to a song called “Seek & Destroy”. It was from there that I decided to pick up the instrument myself and within’ a good month or so I was hooked. I’ve been playing guitar now for about 15 or 16 years and as I’ve evolved as a musician, so has my practice regimen. I’m constantly learning new styles or music and developing new exercises to work on every chance I get. The following blog is based on and inspired by Steve Vai’s 30 Hour Guitar Workout and is intended to break down the guitar into sections that will not only help you take your technique to the next level, but quite possibly work your mind into discovering how music can work so that you can use it to create anything you want it to create.

I believe that if you were to take a look at yourself as a guitar player, you could probably lump yourself into one of these three catagories. 1.) A casual player who uses the guitar solely as a vehicle for writing songs 2.) A Working musician who is relatively accomplished and dedicated to a life with their instrument, and 3) A player so insanely obsessive about their instrument that at any moment are in pursuit of attaining spiritual enlightenment by discovering their own unique abilities and talents with the instrument that they are able to present their skills effortlessly, with no apparent bounds.

There is no one category that is better than the other, but odds are that you probably fit into one of them and really, no matter which category you belong you should be able to take advantage of this blog by taking from it whatever you can grab on to.

Workout Philosophy:

Ideallistically, everyone should feel as if they will be able to possess the ability to create whatever they wish on the instrument, but to do so requires not only dedication, but a knowledge of how the heck to do that. There are certain tools that musicians can use to do this to help them become well rounded individuals and ability to discover their own voice and develop their inner ear.

The workout is geared for people who love a challenge and really want to master their instrument. The concept behind doing this is relatively simple. Start by taking a riff, a scale, or a song and playing it… very slowly. If you make a mistake, start over. Repeat this until you can do it over and over flawlessly. My personal regimen or practice if I’m in a rush is 5 times perfect, but to get it really locked in the head I recommend putting in 2 or 3 hours gradually speeding up the tempo with each mastery. Once you have reached a desired speed, try it faster… and then slow it back down to that pace. You’ll notice that it suddenly became easier without having to do much.

This doesn’t necessarily help you become a better musician or songwriter though. That is something you have to be born with or have to be taught. In any case, I’m sure we all know someone who can really rock their axe like there is no tomorrow but if you heard them play a riff they wrote you might just shake your head. Discovering yourself and deciding what you really want to say is my only advise for anyone out there who wants to write music but doesn’t quite know where to start.

Before You Begin:

Tune your instrument. This should go without saying, but you would be suprised at how often even as a musician I’ll jump into a session thinking my guitar is still in tune from the last time I played it. All it takes is one note before I realize this is not gunna work until everything is lined up just perfect. You’ll see various tunings thoughout your playing career, and not all of them are in A440. Some of them (including a couple of my favorites, Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All and Pantera’s “Cowboys From Hell”) are tuned to A435 or A445. My thought on this was that originally they were recorded in tune, but then due to tape to CD transfer the pitch was altered and was changed on accident.

Focus. The most important thing you can do while playing is really focus on what you are doing. Focus is often times even more important than the song or exercise that you are trying to accomplish. If you are getting ready for a lesson, gig, rehearsal, songwriting session, no matter what it is going to be your personal responsibility to commit yourself to getting done what you are about to do. Understand the attitude that you are trying to present, the frame of mind you want to be in, the intended goal you are trying to acheive, and then discovering that mental strength. You can do it, it’s all in the mind and as long as your determined and convince yourself that it’s possible, it will be possible.

Categories:

The breakdown for this blog will be divided into categories that breakdown the fundamentals of playing guitar into an approach that will give you the ability to narrow down what it’s time to focus on. These are:

1.) Exercises
2.) Scales
3.) Chords
4.) Ear Training
5.) Sight-reading
6.) Composing/Songwriting
7.) Music Theory
8.) Jamming

A lot of the descriptions that are within the workout are going to be given the amount of time that you should spend on each one before you move on to another and will be directly relected in your playing ability. The breakdown is reflected on what I feel is a good insight on what you should be doing to become more well-rounded as a guitarist, but realistically isn’t the end all be all at all. There are plenty of other resources out there in terms of internet websites, instructional DVDs, books or magazines that can help you out as well and may explain things in further detail than I can at this time. One of the things that I can say would be a good thing for any musician to do is to log their practice time. It may not work for everyone, but is a great apprach to finding out where you were at to help figure out where you want to be going.

Finger Exercises:

These should take about an hour of your time and played on a rotational basis between the other fundamentals of playing. If this were a 30 hour workout, you would play these exercises on hours 1, 11, and 21. All finger exercises are great for dexterity, control, and speeding the fingers up to match what the mind wants to do. If you would like, I would recommend playing with a drum machine, techno album, metronome, or anything that can carry a beat. Perhaps even a foot tap to keep you in time. Start off slow, and gradually speed these exercises up until you have total control over your fingers. As well as gaining speed and control, take a look at some of the other aspects of your playing such as experimenting with different picking positions and dynamics. It may take a while, but if you were alternate picking for example up down up down, once you have your exercise mastered try to push yourself but picking up down up down, or something different.

There are thousands or exercises out there for all different purposes. In this workout we’ll be taking a look at exercises in these categories:

1.) Linear
2.) Angular
3.) Hammer-On and Pull-offs
4.) Alternate Fingers
5.) Tapping
6.) Sweeping
7.) Multiple Picking

Linear Exercises:

The first one that I learned, and the first one that I often show people is the Chromatic Scale or 1234. This refers to the order that you play the frets or also which fingers you should be using. 1=index 2=middle 3=ring 4=pinkie and follow the frets that you are playing. I tend to assign a finger to each fret naturally, but this is also a great way to eliminate the hunt and peck method at a more rapid pace.

There are plenty of variations of this exercise such as 1324 1432 or any combination you could think of. One that might be interesting to try out is alternating 1234, 2341, 3412, 4123. This can be done on a single string or on each individual string. Note, this may not sound cool at all. But it’s not intended to be Mozart or Slayer anyway so don’t sweat it. Once you have the idea down you can take it up the neck by using a method called “position shifting”. 2nd position would refer to the 2nd fret, 3rd position the 3rd fret and so on. Exhaust all the patterns of the four note sequences and make sure that you work your weak spots the most. The same approach can be applied to 3 note per string patterns. As well as 2 note per string patterns.

Angular Exercises: This one really makes no musical sense unless you wanna sound like a broken piano, but it really helps get your fingers crossing along the strings so that you can soon catch the distance between strings without having to think twice about anything. The first one lays the fingers across the fretboard in a diagonal pattern and can be played using either sweep picking or economy picking. Economy picking just being alternate picking, Sweep picking being a constant up or down stroke. Follow each diagonal pattern by lowering the position and then repeating down the neck. If you run out of strings, play the remaining notes on the remaining string while imagining extra strings coming out from above or below the neck depending on which direction you are coming from. Then reverse the angle and do the same. The same idea that we used in the 1234 pattern by plaing it 2341 or similiar can be used during this excercise only on a digaonal level this time. This may take time, but try not to get frustrated. Odds are it’s not gunna sound good anyway so dig in and have fun with it. To divide your exercises into an hour of playing time, devote 30 minute to Linear Exercises and the next 30 minutes to Angular Exercises.

Hammer-ons and Pull-Offs

The Hammer-on is a technique where you pick a note (either open or fretted) and then sound a higher note on the same string using one of the fretting fingers to strike tap the string like a hammer. The Pull-off is primarily the opposite, but you actually pick the note first and release the note (sometimes by plucking off but also can be thought of as pulling the fretting finger in towards your palm) to the desired note behind it. One of the things that you can do to practice hammer-ons and pull-offs are permorming trills. A trill is a rapid continuation between two notes on the same string and using the two techniques in combination. Start these exercises by starting index to middle for one minute in a trill fashion. For the second one try index to ring for one minute, followed by index to pinkie for the same amount of time. Finally, change fingers and see if you can work the ring to the pinkie in there as well.

Alternate Fingers: See how many combinations you can come up with using the same technique until they sound smooth or legato.

Tapping:

If you’re interested in two hand tapping you can include this into your hammer-on and pull-off practice time. What I like to do is find a chord or a scale and hammer-on and pull off between the first two intervals and then throw in a third note sounded by tapping the right hand onto the next tone. Or if you wanted to modulate the chord for example from a Sus2 to a Sus2#4 you can practice alternating between these two tones as you hammer on and pull off with your left hand. Another trick would be to change the direction or variation of the hammer-on/pull-off technique. One of the things that you might want to look into as well would be string skipping. The science behind skipping strings could be described by learning how to play scales on a piano. If you were to take a linear scale on the high E string and bring it on down the neck starting on the upper register, by the time you travel down 3 tones you should be able to shift your following pitch up to the G string in remotely the same area depending on the scale and then again for the A string. Kind of like an arpeggio.

Sweep Picking:

Speaking of arpeggios, a lot of times I get questions regarding these from someone who is say interested in some of the newer metal bands such as Avenged Sevenfold, or possibly some of the great virtuosos like Joe Satriani. The technique used to get an arpeggio into a lightning fast swoop using one motion is called sweep picking. Learning how to spell chords is going to greatly enhance your outlook on how to use this technique, but I also recommend learning how to play them slower at first so that each note rings out clearly and gradually increase the speed until it becomes one fluid motion. One of the tips that I’ve been given is to try playing these with a light touch at first so that your pick doesn’t stick and in my personal sessions I tend to use the term “wing flap” quite a bit as well as a swooping pinkie motion that thinks the motion though to the last remaining hammer-on about 5 notes before it’s been put into play. Avoiding using a barre is some good advise for those who might actually see the sweep first as a chord shape that looks familiar.

Multiple Picking:

One of the ways that I first discovered how to play fast was by playing what I thought a song sounded like first with my right hand, and then bringing in the left at it’s own pace. What I was really doing here was a technique called double or tripple picking. That really just refers to how many times I was actually playing the note even though in my ear that’s how my mind wanted the piece to go. You can actually put this into practice picking each notes four and possibly even five times a piece before moving on to the next note. Develop this technique through the same methods I mentioned earlier where you alternate pick, then move to downstrokes and then reverse what you are working on to just upstrokes.

Scales:

After an hour of working on your picking technique it’s time to focus on the 2nd hour. This hour can be repeated during hour number twelve and twenty two if you want to focus on turning this into a thirty hour program. Practicing scales sounds really boring when I mention it, and if you ever wanna turn someone off just show them you know how to play a pentatonic scale or worse a major scale. This is not to say that these scales are not worth practicing though there are plenty of benefits from practicing scales and one of them is the way that you can actually memorize the sound of a scale so that you can use it later on when you would like to build a mood or atmosphere.

One of the things that you could say that I learned from Jimi hendrix by listening to Band of Gypsies or even in one of my early guitar instruction courses is to harmonize or sing the note that you are playing… as you play them. It will help you internalize the scale and your mind’s eye will see the spot your trying to hit sometimes before you even hit it. This will help you paint a mental picture of what the tone sounds like and you can reach back to this for example when you are about to imprvise a solo. With all things though this may work to a disadvantage if you go to play your solo and all you do is work the scale back and forth down the strings without any thought or imagination.

Learn to play as many scales as you can in as many positions as possible. Shoot to play them in as many octaves as possible as well. Use fret markers or octave patterns to guide you when you’re transposing if you haven’t already learned the conventional or sweeping pattern for the scale you are trying to accomplish. Keep in mind the different scale degrees that are available as well as the modes will help serve you especially well when dealing with chord progressions. Play each scale forwards and backwards (ascending and descending) until you have it mastered and are ready to move on. One of the ways that I started to pick these up was by shredding them three or four notes at a time until I could knock it back and forth no sweat. As you do this don’t just look at the finger pattern but really try to focus on the spelling pattern as well. Once you’re ready, move on to the next mode in the scale but don’t cheat yourself into thinking you’ve got something that you don’t really have. If you mess up, start over. One of the techniques I taught on of my first artists who just got signed was to train yourself by looking in the mirror. I don’t really do this as often as I used to, but watching your fingers in the mirror may possibly help you learn to play without looking down at the fretboard as well. Try to play your scales as effortlessly and gracefully as possible or in whatever way looks and feels right.

One of the things I’ve started bringing into my sessions recently is an interval exercise using the major scale in a three note per string pattern by alternating the distance between tones to create a method of understanding that also sounds melodic. The first one is an ascension in thirds. The thrids are neither major or minor, but in the key of G for example if you move from G to B to A to C to B to D to C to E down the pattern you can tell what I’m speaking of. G to B is a major third, A to C is a minor third, etc. Once you’ve mastered this in the sweeping pattern, try taking it into a conventional pattern to add a new feel for the tones. Not only will the tendens in your fingers benefit from this, but your inner ear will develop and create a sort of ear-training wisdom as well. After you’ve played the pattern in thirds, try playing them using a perfect 4th between tones and after you’re done with that, do the same thing using a perfect 5th interval between tones. To really have some fun with this, play the same exercises backwards.

After you’ve played these using the intervals, take the scale and move it up note to note starting with a triplet feel moving three notes at a time. G A B, A B C, B C D, and on and one until you finish off your sweeping or conventional pattern. From the triplets follow this by adding a sixteenth note feel by playing four notes at a time and doing the exact same thing. When you are finished with that, to get even more mileage out of your scale try playing it by using harmony as an ear-training exercise moving it up the next frist using thirds, then 4ths, and then 5th intervals. Just in case you get bored with this, think of all the different scales, modes, keys, positions, intervals, and melodic intervals that exist so you don’t run out of possiblities.

If you have the access to a recording device try to record yourself as often as possible as well. The more experience you have doing this, the easier it will be to create the sound you like or head in the direction you are aiming for as well. Since I grew up in the mid nineties I have always wanted to avoid sounding to polished. I encountered this problem on my first album on my first track “Skate, Rock, Die”. The original solo sounded so 90210 I was embarrased to play it for people and luckily I learned advanced editing that enabled me to crop that out later so that all the stuff that sounded too polished got cut. I really do follow an old school punk rock mentallity when trying to create a sound which is one of the reasons “Cryptic” or “Welcome to Hell” sounded both melodic and anarchistic at the same time. Eventually playing your scale should become second nature and you should be able to extract whichever elements you wish at any time you’d like to pull them out. You’re neighbors should thank me as well.

Pentatonic and Blues Scales:

The five-note minor pentatonic scale and hexatonic minor evil twin blues scale form the foundation for the vocabulary or most modern rock lead metal playing today. The minor pentatonic is spelled 1 b3 4 5 b7, and the blues scale is spelled the exact same way by adding the blue note or as I’ve mentioned in other blogs as the Black Sabbath tone or flat 5th sounding 1 b3 4 b5 5 b7. There are 5 “box” patterns that you should learn that are derived the same way that the modal scales were sectioned off earlier by starting on the next tone up. Minus a box pattern on the b5 tone the same 5 patterns works for the blues scale as well. One of the first things that you should notice about the minor pentatonic is the relative major that it’s based off of that is used by playing the same tones but centers around a different root tone. Really, if you are playing an E minor pentatonic scale over a G bass note you are actually playing a G major pentatonic scale. The next step you can take is to play the same box patterns you have with E minor and the hexatonic blues scale and centering them over the same spots as the G major scale and moving that up the fretboard.

Other Scales:

A scale can be as simple as two notes or as complex as 12 notes. The chromatic scale is an example of a 12 tone scale. each scale has a different tone or color and there are numerous scales to choose from to start practicing. One of the tricks that I use is to create my own scales by taking a simple scale such as the minor scale and then a more complex scale such as the hungarian minor and then combining the two to create a hybrid scale. Once again, the opportunities are limitless. Another one of my recent favorite scales is the Hirojoshi which just sounds down right sick if you can avoid the oriental influence. Pick up a book of scales if you haven’t yet learned how to spell to get you working the aura of new scales on a consistant basis.

Synthetic Scales:

How many people do you know that have no idea what the heck they are doing but sound really good on the guitar? Oddly enough what these guys are doing if they arn’t playing a rip off from a song or another persons style is making up there own scales. A lot of times I’ll do this when I wanna create a new sound. It can be something simple or complex, just use a specific interval pattern. For example 1 3 #4 5 6. I have no idea what this scale sounds like, but by looking at it I can already start to pull chords from it. Use your creativity to get the sound that you want and build the next note off the previous one. Some of the other scales that are more common are the melodic minor, harmonic minor, whole tone, augmented, and diminished scales.

Chords:

Chords will be worked into the third hour of this breakdown and once again, if you wanted to turn this into the thirty hour exercise you could repeat your chord practice on hour 13 and 23 as well. Chord breakdown areas include:

1.) Memorization
2.) Strumming techniques
3.) Improvisation

Dedicate 20 minutes to each to fill in the entire hour full of chord study.

Memorization:

Learn your chords! Buy a book, look at the chords in your song, learn to spell, learn the weird chords. Now set a goal, for example if you can commit to learning five new chords per day you’ll build up a solid vocabulary in no time. Listen closely to the sound of the chord as you play it. See if you can picture the colors that the chord is creating. Is it happy or sad, etc. and really try to memorize the sound of the chord.

Learn the type of chord quality. For example once you get beyond the major and minor chords you’ll bump into seventh, dominant seventh, 9th, 11th, 13th, sus2, and a plethera more that will add new voicings you can internalize and use at will as well. Learning how to spell chords is more theory than anything and that should also be looked at when you are focusing directly on theory, but once you got it it’s really easy to move the intervals around to create different textures that work well together or in place of each other.

Strum your chords clean, gentle, abrassive, agressive, brutal, or however to get the amount of attack that you are trying to achieve. Work your problem areas by testing any note that might not sound due to positioning.

If you don’t know a lot of chords, don’t worry… there are tons of songs out there with a simple 3 chord structure that you can take and rearrange to create your own voice as well. Some of the songs that I find I’m working on sometimes seem to have the goal of making the easiest song humanly possible and keep a solid finger down the entire time to create a pivot finger to revolve around.

Strumming:

Strumming techniques arn’t necessarily easy to teach if you don’t know in your head first what you want to do. Sometimes following someone is a great way to learn a rhythm and if they can break it down for you that might work even better. If you don’t have someone there for you to rattle off the down up patterns there are numerous books out there you can study to learn these techniques. One thing that you want to keep in mind when strumming is that you are trying to create a groove. Focus on a continuous momentum and work off that until either the left hand catches up, or slow your right hand down until your left hand can match it. You can always use a drum machine, record, or drummer to help you work your strumming patterns as well. Keep focusing on making the sound clearner with every strum and you will get better.

Try to stay locked in to your rhythm and stay in your groove until the progression becomes natural and you can do it without thinking. Keep the chords moving clean and if it makes sense, try to step outside yourself so that you are almost inside the same room looking down at yourself doing what you are doing. This is somewhat supernatural, but really I would relate this to trying to have a conversation while strumming. Not always that simple, but with practice you can get tighter and tighter.

Once you have gotten locked in with the rhythm you’ll just know. It’ll feel good and you’ll just know it. From here you can break up the rhythm by adding an alternate syncopation so that the chords don’t seem so stiff. Another idea might be to play in front or behind the beat to get the sound you are after.

If you’re playing with a metronome, one of the things that you can do is try to “bury it”. By bury it I just mean that if you hit your strum dead on you might not even be able to hear it cause you’re so locked it. by hitting the notes so dead on you’ll be rewarded with the satisfaction that only a feeling a musician can feel. Not many people can understand that, but it’s a great feeling to have. When you’ve finished you can add genres to fool around with that have unique tempos as well. Salso, flamenco, rock, ska, punk, reggae, etc. and vary the tempos to generate new ideas as well. Sometimes just working an idea faster can change the entire stucture into something that you can tweak just a hair and have something you can truely call your own.

Improvisation and Experimentation:

You have probably used a bit of creativity doing most of these exercises so far and are already experimenting with new chords. One of the ideas that you can use to help you come up with new chords is to take an easy chord that you already know and alternate one note up or down a fret. When you find a tone you like, stick it in your back pocket and use it and pull it out when you’d like to work it into a progression. Take numbers from a series (such as a telephone number or abstract numerology) and use them as scale degrees for a chord. Think of an emotion, and try to work a chord until it sounds like the feeling you are trying to evoke. Use open strings, wide finger stretches, natural harmonics, notes fretted with the fingers on the picking hand or whatever you can think of. All of these will help you come up with unique chords.

Ear Training:

This will kick off the 4th hour and well… if you are goin’ for it it can also come in on the cycle practicing this section on hours 14 and 24 as well. If you toss aside everything from this blog, ear training section is probably the most important. Training your ears is the most crucial element in making the connection between whats going on in your mind and what is coming out of your fingers. The pay offs are well worth the effort so I advise as much ear training as possible to really reap the rewards of self accomplishment on your instrument. These next few exercises takes up back to what I mentioned earlier about singing along with the notes you play.

Imporvise words over the notes you are playing. It doesn’t have to sound good, but the pitches need to be accurate. Work the notes until you can sing them with ease.

Start by singing a note, and then trying to play it using your voice as a point of reference. This might be difficult, but imagine how much your ears will imporve once you do this.

Sing a harmony over the notes you are playing. These can be exercised by starting by playing a 5th, or a 4th, major or minor 3rd, or whatever until you are able to sing on harmony perfectly to an atonal solo. Understand that if you’re not a natural, it may take a while to develop this skill. One of the times I can remember applying this in practice was during one of my first band sessions where my singer vocalized the riff to “Stone Cold Crazy” and I somehow managed to replicate it immediately on the guitar.

Memorize the sound of the intervals. This should be a little bit easier for the metal players because a lot of metal or new metal really reaches for the interval tricks off the root tone to create a unique sound. One way to do this is to record the interval on to a tape, wait a few seconds and then speak the name of the interval. Fill up an hour long tape and then while listening back to it you can test yourself by trying to name the interval before you say it during playback. do the same thing with chords.

Transcribe everything you can get your hands on. It may sound like an impossible feat to accomplish, but the more you write, the more you’ll understand. I use transcribing as a way to ground myself when I don’t have my guitar around. It’s a great way to think about music while you may not have the ability to jam right away. carry manuscript paper with you, and write melodies based on anything you might be thinking of. Name the notes in your head as you write them if you are using tablaure. Carry songbooks with you as well. These fit great into guitar cases if you don’t carry too many of them at once. Otherwise I recomment a backpack.

I don’t know if I can emphasise enough how important it is to play along with albums as well. This can be whatever you are working on, or whatever you already know. If you know how to play something already and you can jam along with it, you are putting your ear training into practice by playing along.

Reading Music:

Work these exercises as the next hour or 5th hour. Sequential the 15th and 25th as well. Some of the advantages to reading music are being able to play music that you have no clue how it goes and then picking it up immediately. Or being able to play an entire album from the first note to the last note back to back. Or just expanding your knowledge of the instrument. The more you pick up, the more you’ll get. One of the things that may help you even as you become a more advanced guitar player is to pick up a beginning guitar book that can give you a starting point that will graduate you into understanding harder melodies in the future. Continue sight reading until you can do it perfectly. Build up a reperotoire of material to play on a daily basis.

Sightread something new everyday. Really try to sketch yourself out to push the envelope a bit. If you run out of ideas try a random tab mentality and no matter what random track you land on, force yourself to learn it. Better reward if you play the song first and then realize afterwards that you actually knew the song to begin with but you just didn’t know what the name of the song was.

Be sure to slow down to a pace that you can understand. Use a metronome or a drum machine and then practice the piece the entire way through, speed up the tempo and then re work anything that you may have missed the first time around. Do this until eventually you nail all the tricky spots that you couldn’t get the previous runs.

Writing Music:

If you’ve made it to the 6th hour, you can practice wiriting music on the 16th and 26th hour as well. You may even want to put in extra hours into this as well if thats what you reall want to do. Writing music is one of the most rewarding things you can do as a musician. If you would like to build a catalog of your own original material you can get specific books on music notation and learn the right curves and intricacy involved in prodicing ties, stems, beams, etc. that will help you along the way.

Try using a recording device to bang out your idea. This is crucial to put into practice as once a moment of motivation and inspiration as come it is really easy to lose if you don’t get it down right away. Keep notes on which tones work best for the sound you are trying to accomplish as well. Especially if the moment of creativity refects the tone you “all of a sudden” dialed in that got you inspired.

Find a cowriter. This can be tough, but if you can find someone to gel with it could be a great thing. Even if you’re not on the same level musically it’s always a good idea to develop these communication skills and learn everything your friend knows to create something new and powerful.

Try to write from something that you are passionate about. If it’s death and dementia or butterfies, and rainbows, and moonbeams. No matter, good artwork comes from within and if you have a message you want to pass on I have no doubt that you can express that as you progress as a musician. Things that I’ve written about personally tend to be more on the destructive side, so that’s the music that I like to create. I agree with the thought that good music is hungry and is filled with pain, but since I’d rather nobody go through that I’ll throw out that you can write about political agendas, social media, humor, or really sick humor if you’re witty, and if you can pull it off something that may shock someone because it’s so out of it’s element. You’ll find that you gravitate towards what you’re passionate about natuarally.

Music Theory:

The next hour, hour seven, seventeen, and twenty seven will be applied to this science and I really believe that if you want to learn to play music that learning theory is the backbone for how to use your language. I came from the nineties though and although odds are you may not know the technical skills I posess, in an intentional way growing up I looked away from theory because I wanted my music to be passionate and what I thought was passion was really based out of angst. The idea of knowing what I was doing really kinda freaked me out a bit because I never wanted to put that much thought into it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I was doing it for so long before I actually started studying that by the time I found an interest in theory it had nothing to do with learning but rather applying what I already knew.

When I study theory I try to think in 3 ways at the same time. Notes, intervals, and patterns. If you need to pick up a book on the subject there are plenty of them out there that teach the basics as well as notation, time-signatures, key signatures, the circle of fifths, chord theory, and modes. I can say that since there are probably a lot of you out there just like me that once you get into it you’ll really get into it and use it on a constant basis. Even if you’re playing three simple chords, if you can understand the breakdown of three unique chords and thoughtfully understand why the chords sounded good where they were placed and the message created you’re doing the right thing.

Jamming:

This section should be given two full hours and we can call these hours eight through ten, 18-20, and 28-30. The techniques that you use when jamming will more than likely sound well with some of the material that I’ve already mentioned, but also may have nothing to do with a logical practice regimen. Some of the things that you can you can do that have an unorthidox approach to playing are working through techniques such as vibrato, note bending, harmonics, whammy bar tricks, and overall dynamics.

Try not to turn this into a two hour session of seeing how fast you can play or woodchopping yourself into oblivian, but use this time to learn to express yourself on your instrument and use the tools that you have internalized thus far even if it has nothing to do with anything that we’ve covered. The outside influences can be channeled here and warped, fixed, and twisted, until ultimately you are in total control of the music that you are trying to create.

Some things that might help you when jamming are working out different vamps in a variety of different genres, grooves, tempos, and time signatures. By focusing on the variety of the music you are working you can really push yourself to help discover certain techniques that you may have never even thought of. It’ll help you understand who you are as a musician because you are being forced into a reactional situation where you are reacting to your own thought process and you’ll see what really gets your blood flowing.

One of the ways that you can work while you jam is to focus on the emotion that you are using while you play. Is it angry, sad, mournful, passionate, agressive, haunting, joyous, cheerful, euphoric, loving, etc. It’s important to be in control of these emotions as you play, but to also be able to emerse yourself fully into that emotion. You may find it very rewarding if you can transmit the emotion from your psyche to the fretboard successfully and maybe even learn a little about yourself while doing it. For example, you are what you play and if you tend to focus on a lot of negative emotions try to stay balanced. A lot of times the music you play becomes your self identity and you can sort of brainwash yourself into becoming that type of person. It’s almost too easy to be miserable and agressive so working different emotions can help bring you out to be the musician you want to be.

Really try to push yourself during this section to try things that you’ve never heard before and try to cultivate your own sound. This may take years to accomplish, but it’ll pay off in the long term. If you catch yourself in the middle of a cliche stop immediately and go the other direction.

Record yourself playing and then listen back to hear what you played to find the tones that you really enjoy. Is there one part where you just ended up going off on a tangent and listening back where you hit one note that really works well? Make mental notes on what works and what doesn’t work even if it was just a one time spur of the moment kind of passage. Turn that into an exercise and re-work your patterns to create something that is unique to you specifically.

Vibrato:

Vibrato is an important tool of self expression that many people use as an extension of their soul. Meaning it really shows off the amount of control you have over your instrument and takes some time to master. There are different kinds of vibrato that you can use to express yourself.

Try playing a note with your index finger and start by slowly increasing the amount of oscillation you like and then transition that into something new such as a faster, or more brutal, or sublte sound until you exhaust all emotions through your vibrato. One way you can get started is by playing these in time rather than just bending a note around. Start with quarter notes, move to triplets, and sexteenth notes, until you get the feel for how to put these in to motion. Then repeat with every other finger. From here, try doing the same thing with two notes, and the three, four, and so on.

If any of you have ever played slide before you may know that there is such a thing as wide vibrato. Wide vibrato expends the pitch back and forth around the note at a larger tension such as a whole step or two whole steps. So next, take your fretting hand and work the amount of pitch bend to introduce an extra exercise into this manner. Try a half step, then whole step, step and a half, and if you can hit two steps, go for it man. One of the techniques that you can use when bending your pitch is to give it vibrato once you bend it up. For example, bend the tone up a half or whole step and then practice the same techniques I’ve mentioned. Next try the same with every finger and feel how much extra strenth it takes to pull on the tension of the string. Odds are you’ll have a weaker finger you’ll wnt to be more attentative to. Take this same approach to different area of the fretboard. You’ll notice a direct difference between the amount of tension it takes to vibrato a not on the first fret as you will on the 6th or 12th fret.

Bending Notes:

Learning how to bend notes up to a certain pitch is a process that takes some discipline and self mastery in the ear training discipline. If you bend a note just for the sake of bending it and have no idea where you want that note to go it really sounds bad. It’s comparible to someone who sings poorly and is a visible weakness if not executed right. To me, the half step bend off the perfect 4th pull off to the minor third snap up to the root in a pentatonic fashion is one of my favorite well hidden tricks that looks common but steps outside the box a little. Bending a note creates a different attitude than just holding a pitch. It can attract emotion along with it so learn to use it with expression.

If you’re down with the mehod so far. Spend an hour bending notes and work them between any distance you want to accomplish. I like to do this pitch practice exercise where I play a note first, and then bend a pitch behind that note up to that note. You can work this in from a particular scale, or just work it however you can hit that target pitch you want to move up to.

Practice unison bends. If you wanted my personal advise I would say to spend more time on these than the previous bends because it requires more strength and since you already have a target pitch in play it will be easier to develop your ear while doing so. To give an example of a unison bend, the most common one, and the one that I can’t still believe people look at me and say “what was that?” is located on the 12th fret of the high E and the 15th fret of the B by placing your index on the E and arching your ring finger to that once it’s on the D note, strike both strings simultaniously and feel the tension of the notes bend up past the major 7th tone from an eerie minor 2nd feel into a well balanced E and E on both strings by moving that D tone up a whole step with your bend. The arch on the middle finger is or primary importance so that you don’t risk muting out the string below it and ending up with one tone. However this is not a souble stop bend, the index finger should stay rooted in place.

Another practice used quite a bit in rock and roll that requires bending happens to be double stop bending. This is just done by bending two notes at the same time. This can be exectuted a few different ways. One of the more common ones I’ve played is the perfect 4th whole step double stop bends. These are just fun and add texture to your style. Sometimes you can apply that some technique to scales for example the pentatonic scale to get extra rich tones as well.

Try bending your notes in both directions to find which one feels better for what you are trying to accomplish. Minus pulling down on the high E or up on the Low E so you don’t fall off the fretboard on accident.

One of the things you can try is to do something similiar to the unison bend where you take and bend one note and on a lower string simultaniously play another note. Some of these can sound like a train moving and is similiar to the sound of a pedal steel in some cases.

When your finished with that try bending the same notes in the upper register. Test your limitations on the lower register as well. If you can bend the F# on the low E up a step and a half to an A you have accomplished a great feat. If you can’t hit it, well… atleast you tried.

Harmonics:

Do nothing but focus on harmonics for an hour. Try finding them in all areas of the neck by lightly touching your finger to the string and then work it along the string to create new textures. This can sound like a flanger or space age sound that can be related to a ray gun.

Natural harmonics and Artificial harmonics are two different things. What you were doing in the previous exercise was finding out where the natural spots on the string were to create new frequencies. The artificial harmonics involve the right hand and use a bit of thumb to make a sqealing sound that work more on the area of the neck above the pickups. Notice that if you move over to different areas of this area you’ll find new tones as well. There are sweet spots that you should mentally note while doing so.

An advanced technique you can practice is to tap a fret after sounding a note with the left hand. This is going to be a little more effective if you aim 12, 9, 7, or 5 frets above the selected note but you’ll get the tone you want with practice on this exercise. One of the things that I’ve seen a few professionals do is take the pick in between the thumb and the middle finger and place the index lightly on top of the same string to generate this effect and then work in in a linear fashion or even across the strings in a scale.

You can also step out side of the box here by sounding harmonics with a variety of effects such as a clean tone or distortion. Sustainability reguarding the tone can relect a more crisp harmonic or an endless ray of feedback depending on what you choose to do with it.

Whammy Bar Tricks:

My first guitar that I saved up for and picked up was the Kirk Hammet KH2 model that has an original floyd rose tremolo set up so that you can take the bridge and pull on the bar to raise the pitch or push is down to get the illustirous dive bomb effect that in my opinion as not been exploited enough. If you don’t have a locking nut you are more than likely going to have to be a little more delicate with the bar or you’ll go out of tune with the slippage created at the tuning keys.

First exercise is to just play the pitch and use the bar to raise and lower it’s frequency. Throw in some dive bombs if you want or just freak yourself out a bit and see how far you can pull that thing back.

Another thing you can do and this a relative to a lot of metal are harmonic bends and squeals. Push the bar down, strike the note and then let the harmonic come up. If ya want the pitch to keep going, pull up on it once it reaches its resting state at the same tempo you let it up in. You should be able to get some really sick tones by doing this and if ya wanna work it into the ground you can get some really far out addicting tones that could probably keep ya busy for an extra hour or so.

Try to create everything from nice, sublte tones, to brutal and abrassive sounds, using single notes or chords and then go from a sheer violent catastophy into a full on warbble. The more anarchy the better in my opinion.

One of the things that my friend taught me when he borrowed my axe to record a song in the studio was to produce a “boinging” effect by sounding a note and then almost like your doing it on accident letting it your hand slip off the bar as you depress it. It seems to have made it’s way into the mainstream a couple times, but I’ll let you try it out first to see if you can catch both genres that have pulled this one off as of late.

Keep working the whammy bar for enough time without stopping to really capture some of the uniqueness of the tool. I can assure you you’ll find some secret treasure tones by doing so.

Dynamics:

One of the greateest things about the guitar is the ability to take a sound that can be tough and abrassive and agressive and then the next second be soft and melodic. One of the things that people can repect about an aritst or a song is the shift between the two ideas. Sometimes the more extreeme the cut the better.

Practice gradually going from a heavy, soft, heavy, soft sound and then repeating it by working the sound through the different extreemes.

Create different strumming patterns to reflect the mood that you are trying to produce, try moving from a light strum to a sharp attack and then everywhere in bwtween. See how the atmosphere changes when you arpeggiate the chord.

Play as loud and as heavy as you possibly can, and then take that same progression and do the exact opposite.

Solo on one string only

Solo with souble stops only and then work in three, four, up to six string chords.

Solo on two adjacent strings only, and then solo on stings that have 2 or 3 stings between them.

Record or have someone play a root tone and while that is going on work a scale that you’ve been trying to master using added texture to maintain variety.

Pick one note or chord and play it in as many different ways as you can for one hour. Make it sound like music. An example of this could be as simple as a breakdown.

Come up with atleast one new idea or riff each day.

Improvise with your left hand only using hammer-on and pull-offs. Make the notes sound crisp and clean as opposed to sloppy.

Play as fast as you possibly can without stopping.

Play as slow and soft as you can.

One things that I haven’t touched too much on is trying alternate tunings. Rather than take the open chord approach, try tuning the guitar randomly into something that you’ve never tried before and playing it that way. Just don’t do it in public for the first time with someone you don’t jam with that often.

Rest:

If you have tried and put yourself through all thirty plus hours, you’ll need a break. Don’t feel guilty, or too guilty if you have missed a practice session. Unless you should, and you have my permission if that’s the case. A lot of times there are responsibilities that occur beyond our control that take away from our time to make music. If you start these exercises at a younger age it’ll work to your benefit when you work into playing the guitar when your older because you will have already put in the time.

There are a lot of muscles in the hand that will need time to recover as well. Tendens are widening, muscles are cramping, etc, etc, so take the time to take care of your hands and they will thank you later on. If you are just starting out it will be tough to go for any amount of time without some callus on your finger tips so keep playing as often as possible to prevent these from going away. Lastly, protect your ears. If you are playing loud gigs especially, but pay attention to the decible factor of your headphones as well. You might need some ample recovery time from the loudness for example if you goto a concert and for some reason cannot hear well afterwards.

Play With Others:

Sharing music is a great experience, if all you ever do is jam with someone you’re not doing that bad. One of the things that you will learn with playing with a great musician is not only how they emote their personality through their playing style, but also how well they can interact accordingly. In order to play with someone else you need to be able to let them into your musical psyche or world that you’ve created. The same thing goes for you as a player, be sure to be intent on what the other person is doing by being respectful and keeping an open ear for their technique. You’ll get farther a lot faster by respecting that person and by being non-judgemental even if it’s not what you normally play. This will help spark chemestry and you’ll be able to make those magic moments happen almost without even trying.

They say you are the company that you keep, so if you want to be a musician you need to leave your bedroom for a while to create a circle of friends that do the same thing that you do. The world is full of musicians and most of them just want someone to jam with. Make friends with these people, these are your peers and introduce yourself in the same way. It’s not going to be easy to spot a musician in public unless they carry their guitar around in public. In which case, you may wanna steer clear of a few of those guys.

Back when I was in high school I had started playing with others during the formation of what became Atomic Bob by playing covers of songs by Metallica, Nirvana, Manson, Korn, the Smashing Pumpkins, etc. and then started creating original songs during those moments of spontinaity that was just honest and pure. Being in a band is one of the most important aspects of being a musician because it keeps you involved and sharing experiences with each other. The bands that you form early on will create the foundation for your existance as a musician later on. Enjoy those moments even if it doesn’t wind up gettin’ you on MTV in the first month.

Discovering Yourself:

This entire blog may have been a bit much for most of you and may have been looked at like “I already know that” in a few cases, but it’s not really a class on songwriting or intended to be one. There are just a lot of tools or aspects that you can use here that are fundamentally important that may help you on your path to becoming a great guitar player. It’s a guideline for a path of discovery that you may even experience subliminally if you don’t get the message directly. The amount of time you put into your instrument will greatly be reflected in your playing ability, so if you aspire to become a great guitar player, or even the greatest guitar player, you need to constantly be thinking about your craft. There is no way to become a professional baseball player or football player without letting that consume your time the same way that to be a great musician you need to eat, sleep, wake, breath every minute of your day and dedicate all of your time to your instrument. You’ll need to overcome all the hurdles that your mind creates and be able to mentally take on all of the challenges laid before you. All of your attention needs to come back to your instrument without letting what others think or feel affect you in any critical way. If anything, the times you are being called out are when you really need to step up to the plate and show off your vision.

Try to stay positive about the whole thing as well. Don’t let the intensity of being a musician turn you into being something that people can’t respect you for. Always be sure to support and compliment your fellow musicians. Be encouraging to others and bring others up around you. We’re all in this together and with enough appreciation for what others are doing now it’ll come back to you when it’s your time later.

I use the story of how I quit playing guitar for two weeks growing up because of the importance it is not to quit your instrument. What discouraged me, and it’s okay to get discouraged is the whole identity that comes with being a musician. The more I played the more I could see myself being identified with the instrument until well, nobody really knows you as you anymore. That’s a little frightening at first, but really it’s worth the rewards in the end and who you are after you are a musician is far more interesting that you you are before you are a musician… in my opinion anyway.

One of the ways that I think about music when I don’t have an instrument around is by not only thinking about it in my head, but also moving my fingers around almost as an air guitarist would. I tend to drink a lot of Rockstars and coffee so although it’s not an invaulentary twitch most of the time if I’m even just walking down the street my fingers will be moving or I’ll be stretching out my forearms just so that I can stay pumped for when I do pick up my guitar later on. Odd enough I’ll do the same thing with my right forearm, but instead of moving my fingers about I’ll just bend the pick back and forth between my fingers kind of like a tension reliever. Thinking about music when your instrument isn’t there is great for focus and by the time you have the instrument in your hand you should be able to lay it out simply by willing it onto the fretboard. Idealistically that is… a lot of times I know what I want to say before I say it because of my vocabulary so when I’m ready to rock some minor 3rds and flat fifths I can throw down a squeal, trill, and sweep without hesitation.

Disclaimer:

With great mental power and focus you can accomplish whatever you are trying to do no matter if it’s becoming a rockstar, business executive, college graduate, fire fighter, or whatever. The amount of energy you need to put in to get the results you are after take a lot of hard work and dedication. Not everone has the natural talent to play the guitar and so you have to learn to work hard to develop your chops on every level. It’s not just about becoming the best shredder on the planet. Although, that may be the most fun there are plenty of other things you can say without having to pick lightning fast to say so. In some cases it’s important that you don’t play fast, this is why it’s important to take each task and master it effectively. There are some players that can’t seem to play anything accurate but when it comes to attitude they come across with their message apropriately and that’s what gets heard. Then again some players just have it all.

In my opinion, being a musician is one of the most cool things that you can do and I’m really lucky to be able to continue on this path creating music and constantly working my craft. Everyone should be passionate about something. My passion just so happens to be that I play the guitar and love to create music.

Whatever message you get from reading this, I hope that you end up learning that you get out of something what you put into it and that is reflected in your art. Being able to come out on the other end it’ll help you discover a lot about yourself and your dedication, so as long as you keep playing you should keep coming out learning a bit more about yourself each time you play.

I hope you check this post out cause more than likely it’s directed at you and if it’s not then keep reading cause it could possibly be for you anyway. My reason for tonights post is just to welcome everyone to the studio this fall for some really killer sessions that just wouldn’t be possible without you. If I could tell you in one post what goes on in all my sessions it would be longer than my other endless post I blogged a couple months back.

This summer was flood-filled with a lot of changes around the studio and things are continuing to evolve into a much more positive direction than I’ve ever seen possible my entire career as a musician. Being in this industry takes a lot of hard work and it almost feels like if you stop for one second it can end up costing you everything. I know I mentioned teaching out at the Day Jams program in La Jolla this summer and I introduced a lot of technologies that were embraced by other teachers and one of those was written about in this months 3D issue of Guitar World. If you know what I’m talking about you’re already on the right track and have things under control.

My philosophy on what I do is evolving as well. There has been a really positive response to music theory this month and I think one of the reasons for that is my approach with using color tones. Color tones not only help you learn to spell but can also help you develop a sense of how music is spaced intervallically as well. The speed at which you can recognize exactly whats going on in music will grow at such an exponential rate that you should be able to play anything in just a matter of minutes.

I also wanted to emphasize what a great gig it is to craft from so many different genres in one day as well. Each time I share something that I’ve mastered I can see how that sparks another influence of creative energy that snowballs until really you (or I) know exactly what you want to do with your music. That being said, not all of you have the same interest and I believe that there are some of you that have no idea what to be interested in. Realistically, I can’t tell you what you like and what you don’t like. But I wanted to share with you what I have going on in just this one week that might help you take a look at what you’re doing, stop, and realize that there is a ton of work to get done and as musicians there is absolutely no reason to stop practicing.

Today I had a student come out that not only wanted to learn theory but also wanted to learn about reggae, rock, and ska. Some of the bands that we covered were Pepper, Slightly Stoopid, and Incubus. This session sparked next weeks session where we’ll be working on Sublime as well. Tomorrow I have a session where I get to play some Lucio Battistifo followed by Green Day. If you haven’t heard of Battistifo he is an Italian composer that plays a lot of technical material that should be pretty fun to work out. The goal for the Green Day request was to master not only the electric parts, but also the acoustic guitar as well. It’s great that as you keep playing that you continue to find bigger goals. My evening session is going to be exciting because the goal for the week is to find out what exactly you are influenced by. Wednesday should start strong with a glimpse of Audioslave and another glance at Green Day following that. The best part about that band is that when I was starting off as a guitarist, my very first guitar book was Green Day’s Dookie. The day steps from there right into Paramore, Switchfoot, Queens of the Stone Age, Flyleaf, and Muse. What I really like about the choices for this session is how many techniques you can find in these artists songs. It’s not just chords, octaves, drop D, arpeggiated material… it’s all wrapped into one and that should be really cool to see where that evolves. By mid-afternoon I’ll step into the realm of my other primary influences as a guitar player: Metallica, Megadeth, the Misfits and a newer but equally cool band Municipal Waste. From there it mellows out a bit into an acoustic set involving the Eagles, Tom Petty, and Cat Stevens. Should be a nice way to avoid any noise complaints anyhow, right? Thursday I’m going back into classic rock with some Led Zeppelin, Sublime, Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis, followed by Modest Mouse the Strokes, Wolf Parade, Devendra Barnhart, and Elliot Smith. That session goes straight into a powerhouse hour involving Guns N’ Roses, Poison, Motley Crue, Kiss, Poison, and T. Rex where I get a break until I head into a session where I introduce the Gorillaz and John Mayer in the same session as Journey and possibly some Taylor Swift. The next day follows with some Type O’ Negative and Sunday not only do I get to help a student learn to write songs, but review a classic 90′s Everclear song as well. I finish off the week with a slide guitar review dealing with two different keys and a look into hit songsby Dave Matthews, AC/DC, the Killers, Stone Temple Pilots, and Def Lepard.

When I’m not wrapped up in all the madness I’m a student myself. I get asked a lot about what kind of material I went over in college and my answer this week was that I finished the entire courses material in a couple of hours. I would hope that none of you run into this issue as we continue our sessions. There are days when I go through 40-45 new songs before I even jump in the shower, there are days when I study nothing but scales and modes, there are days when I craft guitar techniques all day. From that perspective it’s really easy to see why I haven’t put out a new song lately, but I can gaurentee that when I do, it’s going to becoming from a new level.

I hope you’re all rockin’ and look forward to having a great week.

Shred,

Jason

Just wanted to stop and take a second to update everyone on whats goin’ on in the world of Atomic Bob.  Thanks for checkin’ in and I’m hoping that you’ll all check back again soon to find out whats new in the studio, or wherever else I might be rockin’ at the time.

The most recent news is that I just finished a week of summer camp at this National guitar Workshop/DayJams gig up in La Jolla.  I had an awesome time instructing students of all different ages on how to play a lot of styles of guitar and also helped form a couple bands to get a performance down in a week time.  Nothing could have been more exciting and although it was a lot of hard work and comprimise it really puts all this rock and roll into perspective a bit.  One of my bands was voted Best Metal Band, and another one had the most Impactive Band Name.  Pretty Killer, eh?

In the studio things are going great.  I’ve discovered how to operate ProTools and am still shaping my sound and figuring out which direction I’m going to take next.  If you’ve been following my career you probably already realize I’ve already jumped into most genres.  Although it might be the easy route to just make something that sounds good, I really want this next work to be impactful more than anything.  I’ve been dealing a lot with interval and theory practice this last year and a half and idealistically the only direction I want to head is into something that when disected looks like a full figured work of art.

As far as stayin’ busy, if you don’t have me on one of your social networking sites you might not be aware I AM BUSY ROCKIN’.  That’s all I gotta say, and now it’s time to get back to it.  I’ll post some pictures up here as soon as possible to show off some of my photography skills.

Keep it up!

Jason

The first one is the Misfits “Some Kinda Hate” off Static Age coming in @ 2:08.  I really just had this song in my CD player and wanted to give you something up to speed with what I’m listening to right now.  Truth is, I hated the Misfits the first time I heard this album.  I thought the production sucked and I took it back and got Danzig’s “How the God’s Kill”.  But I missed the point entirely.  Punk rock would not be punk rock without an essence of middle finger in there somewhere.  I really like the chord changes and the solo is simple and melodic.

#2.  The Revolting Cocks “RevColution Melody” from the album Cocked and Loaded @ 4:43 … I really like this track cause it has all the different elements from Jimi Hendrix to Queen to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.  The way it was pieced together to mock everything that came before it is pretty killer.  I like the rebellious lyrics and line-up of charachters on this song.  The opening line and riff are stand out to anything that this band had done before this.  I also think this there’s a line in there that asks “Is anyone here from Alaska?” But sometimes I just hear things.

#3. is Static-X “Destroyer” off the album Cannibal @2:45 and really, I could just choose any song off this album because they all sound exactly the same and they all rock just as hard.  The way this band took industrial metal to the next level is respect worthy on all accounts.  It has a really big sound without being too noisy and what makes it so heavy is the chromatic factor blended with simple chord structure.  It’s not too much and it’s right in there with the perfect blend of electronics and lead.

#4. Devil Driver “Before the Hangman’s Noose” off the album The Fury of Our Maker’s Hand @ 3:51 This I chose because I introduced a lot of people to this band when they first came out with this album and it was right about the same time as the rebirth of heavy was coming back around.  The sound is incredible and makes ya wanna say “Carpe Diem” as well as put the pedal to the metal if you’re drivin’ anywhere.  I don’t play them in any of my sets so I don’t know what their tuning is, but it’s just fun stuff man.

#5. Probot “Centuries of Sin” W/Cronos off the self titled album @ 4:09 This one I do play and it rips.  It takes me into that zone where I can feel how hard the band is hittin’ their stings when they’re rockin’.  If you’ve never played this one before, first attempt through your forearms gunna feel like it wants to fall off.  This is due to the amount of changes on the lower register the main riff has… you’ll wanna quit by the end but your forearm’ll be so pumped up by the end of the song that you won’t want to.  This is a really physical song to play and takes a lot of stamina.  Hang in there and everything else’ll be cake.

#6. Queens of the Stone Age “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” off the album R coming in @ 2:43 The opening line to this one is a classic as well as the main one note riff that also happens finishes off the album Songs For the Deaf.  I’m a fan of most of the projects that Josh Homme ends up in from the eary Kyuss to the newer material with Them Crooked Vultures.  I think a lot of that punk rock metal attitude do-it-yourself mentality as it carries into a lot of my own music.

#7. Metallica “The Small Hours” from The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited coming in @ 6:43 This was always one of the harder cassettes to get growing up and when I got my hands on it I played it till I practically wore the tape out.  Because it was so rare there wasn’t any way to learn how to play it other than by listening to it.  I think internet tab existed but I didn’t own a computer.  Later on I would read that Kirk uses a major 2nd to a minor 3rd shape, but really it’s just got a dark and eerie lead intro riff that I really enjoy.  The riff that comes in after is just as heavy and the song takes me everywhere I need to go.

#8. White Zombie “Electric Head Pt. 2 (The Ecstasy) off the album Astro Creep 2000: Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head comin’ in @3:53.  To me, this song kinda rips off “I’m Your Boogie Man” that they would later release on the 2nd Crow soundtrack but ya know… it came out before that track so it wasn’t really a rip off.  It used to be one of the first songs that I would jam when I picked up a bass but the main riff has a lot of fun things going on in it.  For example that little chickin sqwak Yeunger does after the first 2 power chord chugs into the 2nd riff.  Dum Dum sqwak! Dum Dum squak! Dum Dum sqwak! Dum Dum sqwak!  Pure adrenaline goes into all J.’s riffs and sometimes I think Rob was an idiot for ever gettin’ rid of him…. but ya know, I’m a John5 fan too.

#9. John5 “Damaged” from the album Songs for Sanity at 3:04 This was the first John5 album I bought and this song was the first one that I transcribed.  The use of 32nd notes buy this guy is really enduring to write out but somehow I’m always inspired to finish whatever I start.  I like this song because it reminds me of where we’ve come from as guitar players and due to the fact that it’s purely instrumental I can relate to that side of it.  John does some really interesting things with multiple guitars at various tempos and throws in some really spectacular technique.  The good news is that it all seems to make sense in some twisted way if you can wrap your head around it.  Tonaly, the guys just a genius.

#10. Marilyn Manson “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” off Antichrist Superstar @ 4:17.  Back when I saw this band back in 1996 the same year I saw White Zombie they were still pretty contreversial.  With the line that makes you contemplate your beliefs ”I hate love, I love hate” the chant builds into a really heavy riff that starts off with an F#.  And I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed this, but a lot of Manson goes back to the F# chord.  Great song… love the tempo and despite anything you might think about the band, this one just rocks.

#11. Nine Inch Nails “Wish” from the album Broken @ 3:46.  I love this song.  I used to play this song quite a bit growing up and the simplicity of the riff is what makes it so cool. It’s just a half-step hit from the D to D# and really all about the angst here.  The lyrics hit really hard and I really enjoy the electronic industrial sound that comes in to compliment the distorted guitars.

#12. Ministry “The Great Satan” off the album Rio Grande Blood at 3:09.  When I saw this song was gunna be on guitar hero I was pretty stoked.  My impression of this song was that around this time they had found a formula that worked and this is one of the grammy nominated pieces that shows that they know how to do what they do best.  I really dig on Al’s vocals for this one and the kick drum going at a break neck speed is really what it’s all about.  Or rather “bringin’ down the U.S.A. is what it’s all about”  The riffs that Ministry was using towards the last few albums were really pretty incredible, and the same for this song.

#13. Pantera “Cowboy’s From Hell” of that same album @ 4:06.  I shouldn’t really have to say much about this track. It takes a lot of dexterity, but what makes it cool is that the opening riff comes in over a backwards guitar and then plays the same thing from 12th position down into open position.  The verse riff although it chugs switches around so that it takes a lot of memorization to master a hundred percent.  There are days where I’ll just jump the opening riff around until my forearms can’t take it anymore just to see where my breaking point is.  I suggest everyone do the same, or just crank it for kicks.

#14. Slayer “Raining Blood” from the album Reign in Blood @ 4:17.  I think this song has done more for me as a musician than any other song recently cause of my experience playing with Kerry right off his first appearance since his last appearance on the tour with Manson in San Diego the previous year.  Slayer has always been one of the bands that I didn’t learn cause the riffs just seemed too chaotic.  The last few years since I’ve had more fun learning these riffs cause I can finally make sense out of them.  If you take a look at the video where I’m on stage with Kerry, you can almost see my eyes pop out of my head when I watch how fast his fingers are moving during the 16th note shred part after the main riff.  I like everything about this song now.  The b5th in the intro, the insane speed, awesome hammer-on pull off technique and rhythm changes are something I can’t believe I missed out on for so long as a guitarist.

#15. Black Sabbath “Electric Funeral” off the album Paranoid coming in @ 4:50.  This hour wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t have some Sabbath in there somewhere.  Really, this song is one of my favorites and you can hear reference to it in one of my own songs if you listen closely.  The wah involved with the heavy main riff and reference to the atomic really makes me feel at home here.  It doesn’t have the greatest speed, but Sabbath was one of those bands that didn’t have to play fast to be heavy.  The song creates a dark imagery and if you wanted to listen to it one more time after this hour is over you would have a hard time regretting it.

Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution man.  Take it easy!

What is Punk Rock?  Is it freedom, religion, rebellion… Punk rock is about being able to do whatever you want regardless of whether or not it’s good as long as it has passion.  I learned that when I was 15, and I was told that by a 15 year old today.  Which means in context, everything that I learned about music in the 90′s still holds true.  The 90′s was a great time for music for a few reasons… the first obviously being Kurt Cobain.  Kurt single handedly turned the music industry upside down and taught us all that conformity is for posers and commercial rock sucks.  This left an opportunity for an entire generation of music to emerge and long story short has brought us to this point today.

As a guitar player I don’t want to make this a blog about punk rock… it’s not about grunge, metal, rap-hop or ska.  I really just wanted to address the things that happend in the 90′s that carries that inspirational stand point that drove us to the point to where the X generation can look back and say, “we did that right”.  The slacker generation, whatever you wanna call us.  It won’t have a starting point and I’m not sure where it’s going to end so I’ll just dive right in.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what music was in 1990…. I was 10.  I listened to the Beach Boys and the Fat Boys and my favorite song was “Wild Boys”… it’s cool, laugh.  I didn’t have a clue.  My dad used to listen to a lot of blues, so when Stevie Ray Vaughan died on August 27th I was affected quite a bit but I still didn’t really know what was goin’ on.  I remember watching his performances on Austin City Limits and being amazed at how he could play the guitar behind his back and head.  It wasn’t Hendrix playing, but it sounded almost exactly like what I had heard Hendrix play from songs like “Voodoo Childe (Slight Return)” and “Little Wing” among others.  His playing would later affect me as a musician, but like I said before…. I still knew jack about what was about to happen.

In 1991 Metallica released the Black Album.  “Enter Sandman” hit the charts and my first taste of real music had occured… It’s not that is was overplayed, but it was really the first song I remember getting sick of as well.  Don’t get me wrong, I still rock the solo to this day… but at the time that’s still all there was for me when it came to Metallica.  I imagine it had something to do with the emergence of CDs as a new way to listen to music rather than cassette and I was too young to buy my own music and had yet to own a CD player.  Led Zeppelin released a 4 album CD and I still had no clue who they were.  Lollapalooza or as we might more have recently called it the first NIN/JA tour was going on and I might very well have not even been born yet.  Looking back… this was a monumental festival.  Nine Inch Nails was still breaking and Jane’s Addiction was still contreversial.  They played that tour with Ministry and the Butthole Surfers who later would be a huge influence on my music.

In 1992, I remember things really started happening.  I got my 1st subscription to BMG music and also my first CD player… there was this thing where you could sign people up for the disc club and for each person you signed up you could get 3 CD’s.  I remember actually taping a penny on their little postcard and ordering like 8 albums or something like that.  1st 2 BMG albums I ordered were Guns N’ Roses Use Your Illusion I and II.  I had already went out and bought the Beastie Boys Liscence to Ill from one of those cardboard box things they used to put CDs in so people wouldn’t rip em off.  Nirvana’s Nevermind album came and I got one of the editions that had the extra secret song at the end that was 13 minutes into 7 minutes of dead air.  Grunge became the thing and I still wasn’t cool… I’ve never been cool, but anyone who knew anything about what was going on was about to buy a flannel t-shirt.  Pearl Jam released the album Ten and I knew it was supposed to be awesome but I never bought it, I didn’t like the Jeremy song either.  Soundgarden I was into… I wouldn’t have the Superunknown album until ’95, but I thought the album had a brilliant sound and I guess it wasn’t by chance, but I had no idea how awesome these guys were before I had heard this album.  This was right around the year when all the shit went down with the changes with the Big 5 dropping all their artists after gobbleing up all the record companies.  I remember there being tons of bands out there that I wanted to get into and they were really gone before I knew they existed.

In 1993 I remember all this stuff going on with Eric Clapton and thinking he had an amazing sound.  The Unplugged album was great and I really like the “Tears in Heaven” song.  Megadeth was doing well with Countdown to Extinction and I was still trying to figure out what the hell music was. This would be the last year that would occur.

1994.  Everything happend.  I got my first real job and spent my first paycheck on Metallica’s Live Shit Binge and Purge album.  9 hours of Metallica.  Amazing… By far the best introduction to music I could have possibly had.  It had everything from old Metallica to bootlegs, tons of swearing, boobs, the whole works.  I saw they had a song called “So What” that I really enjoyed, so when looking through CDs at the record store there was this band called Ministry that had a song called “So What” on an old live album called “In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up (Live).  I can’t really remember if I bought the VHS first or the other way around, but both rocked harder than anything I had ever heard before.  I also went out and bought the Pantera VHS Cowboys From Hell the Videos VHS… They had a song I really like called “Heresy” and while once again going through CDs at the record store I found a band called Nine Inch Nails that had a song called “Heresy” on a single called Closer to God.  That was it… it had like 7 different versions of the same song and none of them sounded the same and it was heavy!  I also had it before the Downward Spiral came out so by the time everyone had heard the song on the radio I knew they still had no idea what was up.  I became an eliteist at that point I guess…  liking bands that I thought I had discovered first and then hearing other people were into that same thing… (keep in mind I had no clue what music was when Lollapalooza came out).  I bought Danzig’s “Thralldemonsweatlive” and it really took me places in my mind that had never really thought about.  Not that I became a full blown satanist, but his music was just really dark and moody… something I could relate to and I was into that.  Vulger Display of Power came out that year and then THAT was the heaviest thing I had ever heard.  I remember thinking the vocals sucked and how can you ruin such great music by screaming over it, but I was too young to understand what the message was.  Woodstock ’94 was really a huge influence as well.  There were so many bands on that bill that it was hard not to be affected by it.  By that time I had gotten into both Primus and Green Day and it was awesome to see the Mudsliding going on and seeing how f’n muddy Trent was during the NIN set.  Watching them destroy all their gear was my first glipse of “dude, their destroying all those keyboards… that button isn’t gunna work anymore it just fell off!”  Kurt had died earlier that year and I just felt like it was too soon.  His music was the voice of our generation and whatever model he created still lives inside my soul today whenever I pick up the guitar.  Anthrax released the album Sound of White Noise and to me, this album was incredible.  From beginning to end it was straight up rockin’… ” I I i I I i I I i i i I , who, what, where, when, why ” I dunno man, that just says it all for me.  It was also the first year that I remember not really liking Bon Jovi or Aerosmith.  Get a Grip had all these hit songs and none of em sounded like “Dude Looks Like a Lady”  I was starting to get into Metal Edge magazine and Bon Jovi was on the back cover… so I think I had bought a Bon Jovi album that came out around that time, Livin’ on a Prayer maybe… I dunno, but it bored me and it wasn’t metal.  Nothin’ against Bon Jovi… still dig the talk box thing and it’s cool today seein’ ladies go nuts down @ Lahinas during the sunset in the summertime.  I just couldn’t see placing that dude with the guys that released “Fucking Hostile”.  Concrete Corner was being put out on constant basis.  For those of you who don’t know what Concrete Corner was, it was a sampler cassette that had like 10 songs from all these really heavy bands and I always did my best to get one before it got grabbed up.  Great year… Offsring Smash came out and that was when I really started to question the music industry and the whole idea of being trendy and liking things that other people were into.  Liking music became a club.

That being said, don’t call me on shit if I didn’t get the right year.  This is the year things really started to happen… 1995.  I picked up the guitar.  Now, before I go on you can almost see how this had developed.  But maybe not or we’d all be playing guitar right now, right?  I, to be honest…. didn’t really come up with the idea of playing 1st.  I saw a friend of mine jammin’ “Seek & Destroy” and remember that as being one of the coolest things.  It was there that I began my journey as a musician.  All those other things I’ve already mentioned… they were all about to start making real sense.  I started trying to learn notes on the guitar and remember I had no clue on how to get it to make a sound.  My dad had an Urban Blues book, and after thinking I had learned the notes I remember trying to play a song for on this beat up old Stella guitar and trying to show him that I knew notes and he was just like… “not quite, J”.  Turns out the book sucked for teachin’ me how to jam some blues.  But I knew I liked Metallica, so I went out and bought a Live Shit Binge and Purge tab book from the music store and turned it right to “Seek and Destroy”.  I by this time knew I needed an electric guitar so somehow I ended up with this beat up hunk of shit Regal and a crappy little Peavey amp…. but I thought it was awesome.  I learned how to read TAB right away and although I wasn’t getting the songs at full speed, and I knew for some reason the guitar wasn’t in tune that I was doing what was right to get things done.  Turns out the guitar was never in tune for more than 5 minutes… I remember trying a song like “Whiplash” and just watching the tuning key roll backwards.  But whatever ya know, I was rockin’ and that’s what mattered.  I bought my first Guitar World magazine this year.  I believe it was the September issue with “Creeping Death/It’s the End of the World/and the Man Who Sold the World”  That was also the same exact time Guitar One came out and had Kurt Cobain on the cover.  These two magazines taught me a lot of really important stuff right off the bat and without any formal training I was jamming songs… or rather pieces or riffs all on my own.  Music became my life… and that was right around the time I decided to buy my first real guitar, The KH2.  It had been about 9 months and I still didn’t have a clue what a chord was… but I knew how to play the intro to “Sad But True” and that opening A chord opened up the heavens the first time I heard it.

So here we go.  1996, the year Atomic Bob was born.  The year I went to go see White Zombie off the Astro Creep 2000 tour.  J. Yeunger hit my in the head with a guitar pick, and then I grabbed the next one that came out off this bikers shoulder of his leather jacket. The same year I saw Marilyn Manson off the Antichrist Superstar tour.  I was well into buying albums, studying music, playing songs, jamming with friends, starting bands, and discovering who was who in music.  SRV was gone, but his music lived through my guitar.  Hendrix started coming out of the new ESP andeverything got really dark.  All this rock and roll was happening and I got into bands like the Pumpkins and Bush and Filter.  I got into the obscure stuff as well…. if it was twisted, then it was for me.  My attitude was really very punk rock, very metal, and very ready to kick everyones ass with my guitar.

By 1997 I had bought my first real amp.  I got the first model Line 6 that had all the synthetic tones that were modeled after tube amps.  Kirk Hammet used one and so did a friend of mine so somehow it just made sense.  Things were starting to fall apart in the music industry.  It’s almost hard to tell you which albums were released cause it was still off the wake of Cobain’s death that no one really knew what was gunna happen.  Korn was getting bigger and bigger, and ya know… I loved “Blind” man, that song sent chills up my spine the first time I heard it but because they were still around somehow everyone started sounding like them.  And nothing against Orgy or Coal Chamber, but they really sounded like a mix between Korn and Manson.  Which is probably why I liked em both, but I don’t think it was coincidence.  The industry has always had a way of surviving.  Trends in this business last a minute… and somtimes they last 3 and a half minutes.  If there was anything I had been taught from the industry so far it was don’t do this because you want success quick.  I remember a lot of really shitty music coming out that was just transparent.  I’m not immune to it, I think I’m just like everyone else.  When sold the same product seven to fifteen times in a row things start to grow on ya.

In 1998 I started taking my first theory courses at a local college.  I was still jamming with others and playing out when at all possible.  My view on music was starting to become more solid and with everything I had just learned in the last 2 years I had little doubt in my mind that I would be doing this for a long time.  I started to grow distasteful though.  I started to hate things.  Not that I didn’t think things sucked before, but I really started to thrive off a bitter feeling.  Pain became inspiration.  Shredding became my outlet.  And with a well developed ear, I could hit almost any pitch I wanted in a matter of micro seconds.  I wasn’t just into metal, I was into the attitude that came with it.  I was still feeding off that Cobain mentallity, it’s stuck that heavy for years now that it became just who I was.  I was both an artist and anti-social… that’s just the way it worked.

In 1999 I graduated college with an art degree and an emphasis in music and business.  I knew what I was going to do even if I didn’t know how I was going to do it.  Most of that year was spent in a downward spiral and I wasn’t really regressing my CD collection, I was flooding the gates of everything that was coming out.  Jamming all the old stuff, all the new stuff, anything I could get my hands on I’d play.  I had it all… any new album, any old album.  If it didn’t suck tastefully, I’d have it.  Radiohead’s Ok Computer was one of my favorite albums that year.  This was my 90′s in retrospect.

So what makes it punk rock?  Say it… “Jason, you just told me your version of the 90′s.  That’s not punk rock.”  Well, here it is.  Punk rock is freedom, punk rock is religion, and punk rock is rebellion.  Punk rock is about being able to do whatever you want… even if it sucks, as long as it has passion.

Punk rock is what I do.

There are a couple things that I’m thinking about when writing or composing music that I’d like to share with you tonight.  The reason is that I don’t think many guitarists put much thought into what they’re actually doing when rockin’ other than just sounding cool. 

The first thing before anything is to learn how to make shapes on the guitar.  Obviously that makes sense, but try to figure out which ones work best for what you’re trying to accomplish for what you’re creating.  There are tones that fit certain styles and tones that are placed best within context of certain parts of songs that click together like a puzzle when making it all happen.  These are the shapes I want you to master right off the bat.  Starting with the 5th fret on the low E make a power chord and work it one fret back at a time A5, Ab5, Ap4th, AM3rd, Am3rd, AM2nd, Am2nd, and AUnison.  Going the other direction starting with the same power chord A5, A#5, A6, A dominant 7th, A Delta 7th and last but not least A Octave.

Now, they’re not all gunna sound like the “Star Spangled Banner” so don’t think that’s what you’re getting into.  The reason why I want you to learn the shapes is to recognize the tones to see if they strike a resonancy with what you wanna do.  Some people like really crazy dissonant sounds that create chaos.  The 2nd tones work wonders for this as does the flat 5th chord.

Next I want you to learn your key signatures and your circle of 5ths.  This is goin’ away faster than the music business is crumbling.  Back in the first few years starting out as a guitar player there were transcriptions in Guitar World that would have a 5 line staff attached to the 6 line tab to help generate both rhythm and sense of Key.  Now with the modern day Euro-tab, the attached tab to rhythm makes the Key signature less necessary but it’s still important when trying to develop the side of the brain that wants to create chaos out of order.  Don’t get me wrong man, I’m built to make noise and I dig on all that Euro-tab myself… Just learning the Cycle of 4ths is enough to put some sense into your writing.

Next I would like you to learn your basic modes.  Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian.  The simplest way to do this is to assign a number or degree to each and then just plug and chug the Key signature.  In the Key of C, C would = 1 D  =2, E = 3, F = 4, G = 5, A = 6, and B = 7.  In the same Context Ionian = 1, Dorian = 2, Phrygian = 3, Lydian = 4, Mixolydian = 5, Aeolian = 6 and Locrian = 7.  The reason why you don’t see any sharps or flats is just cause the Key of C doesn’t have any sharps or flats.  This should be enough to help you figure out you’re just using all the same notes but starting on a different degree to get the modal sound you’re trying to achieve. 

That should have been easy.  From here I want you to breakdown the interval structure and transpose that to every other note.  For example the Major scale is always going to be spelled Whole Whole Half, Whole Whole Whole Half.  The formula is solid and when throwing it into the Key of G for example where you have your 1 sharp (F#) G, A, B, C, D, E, F#, G … your Ionian (or Major) scale is still spelled the same.

So if you decide to learn this then can you play like me?  Yes and no… knowing the notes is important but showing that you can defy all sense of logic while making sense is the ultimate goal for Atomic Bob. 

I’ll end this segment with E. 

[E Phrygian: E F G A B C D E] [E Aeolian: E F# G A B C D E] [E Dorian: E F# G A B C# D E] [E Mixolydian: E F# G# A B C# D E] [E Ionian: E F# G# A B C D# E] [E Lydian: E F# G# A# B C D# E]