Just What the World Needs: A Guitar Comedy Routine
There’s a joke that floats around online guitar hangouts from time to time. It goes something like this: A woman goes to court for beating up her boyfriend with his guitars. “First offender?” asks the judge. “No, first a Gibson, then a Fender!” And there we have it: a saucy little pun that deserves to fade into […]
Book Review: “Guitar Rigs” by Dave Hunter
“Guitar Rigs: Classic Guitar & Amp Combinations” by Dave Hunter is an amazingly in-depth look at guitar/amp rigs that have produced some of the most recognizable and classic electric guitar tones in popular music. The Big Take-Away: it is sheer folly trying to recreate the exact tones of your guitar heroes. Why? Because there are SO many […]
QUIZ: Initial Thoughts on Guitar
This guitar quiz is all about initials and what they mean (or don’t mean). You have five minutes, and no looking stuff up–honor system! You must get 7/10 right to pass. BOL! (Best Of Luck!)
New Ebook! Number One with an AXE!
My latest ebook comes out July 9, 2016. It is called “Number One with an AXE! A Look at the Guitar’s Role in America’s #1 Hits.” The book’s premise is simple: I listened to (and watched videos of) all the Billboard #1 hit songs of the second half of the 1950s–starting with the first rock […]
Book Review: “For Facts Sake” by Bob Daisley
What a terrific autobiography! Bob Daisley is an Australian bass player who has enjoyed a decades-long career playing with a staggering amount of rock bands and artists: Bands: Uriah Heep, Mungo Jerry, The Blizzard of Ozz, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, and many others. Artists: Ozzy, Randy Rhoads, Ritchie Blackmore, Gary Moore, Yngwie Malmsteen and many others. “For […]
The Crossroads of Music, Math & Poetry
Leonhard Euler (pronounced Oiler) was a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician. His was a life full of contributions to mathematics and the sciences. Among mathematicians he is admired for, among many other things, an equation called Euler’s identity: This equation is famous for the elegant way it pulls together five mathematical constants (e, i, pi, 1 […]