Let's face it, dial up any radio station the average teenager is listening to and you'll be hard pressed to hear any guitars. Such is life. Music evolves...or maybe devolves...regardless, in my experience a great many guitarists are more interested in emulation rather than creation. Don't get me wro... [More]

As you may have already heard, Beck is releasing his new "album" as sheet music (read more here). Its been a topic at several forums I visit and a great many see this as a visionary move, something I don't quite understand. It seems increasingly that in creative fields, especially in music, that vin... [More]

As a performer, I understand taking artistic license with songs, even to the point of completely rearranging and reinventing a song. I typically don't follow the "sacred" song doctrine as there have been quite a few cases in which a cover of a tune has been significantly better than the original. Ji... [More]

If there's any indication this has been a mild Texas winter, I had to mow the yard last weekend. My typical yard work routine is to punch up one of my custom Pandora stations and get to it...this week's artist: Eric Johnson. Around four or five songs into the station stream, Stevie Ray Vaughn came o... [More]

I typically can't stand hearing DLR speak for more than 30 seconds, but this is a very cool story behind the myth and insight into what it takes to put on a big touring show. [vph:36615187:Van Halen and Brown M&Ms]

When I first started playing years ago, I grabbed the thin no name pick I found in the bottom of the box housing my Father's acoustic and had at it. It was an afterthought. If I hadn't seen people playing guitars with picks before, I probably wouldn't have even known what it was. After I moved to e... [More]

On the third day of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix opened the show with what would become one of his most iconic performances; an impressionistic interpretation of the Star Spangled Banner. Hendrix, who served in the Army, later stated in an interview on the Dick Cavett show that he didn't think the perfor... [More]