Guitar tabs,electric guitars,acoustic guitars

I love guitars, you already know that. But from time to time, my eyes slip to something else, to some other instrument. I don’t speak about playing drums, bass or singing. I remember in high school I really liked the idea of playing the sax, even I had never had any tentative of learning to play one, just the exotic idea of playing one. But it is not about the sax this time. No.

It is about another relative of guitar (I guess), I think since a couple of years to buy myself a…mandolin!

Well, not quite suited for rock music(even if there are cases, see REM, see Zeppelin), but hey, it’s interesting!
At least if you watch this guy here:

What do you think? Did you ever think of playing a mandolin, a bouzouki, a banjo, an ukulele or anything else just for the fun of it? Personally I would also like to try a bouzouki.

So, what would it be for you?

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It seems that I have some unfinished business here on this site, I mean I started my 6 months dare for 5000 visitors per day, I published 5 reports, but never managed to publish the 6th, so today, due to the fact that I caught a nasty cold and I am not very inspired, I decided to put up a short post about this. So here it is, my 6th report:

As you may have already realized this, I haven’t reached my target, 5000 visitors per day. Or I haven’t YET reached it. My stats at this moment, as reported by Google Analytics for the last 30 days, look like this:

• 15666 visitors
• 22000 pageviews
• 1,41 pages/visit
• 69% come from search engines
• 24.66% come from referrals
• 5.76% direct traffic
• 220-230 RSS readers

It’s true, I haven’t reached my target, but

• I have learned a lot about social media and blogging while promoting this site
• I have learned a lot about guitars and, one of the things I am most happy about, I have regained my passion for guitars. For a couple of years, due to the fact that life strikes you when you least expect (damn, I must be some kind of a philosopher if I write such things!!) I forgot my guitar passion buried somewhere under my work and family tasks. Thanks to you, guys, I have rediscovered the joy of playing the guitar! For me that is the highest reward when it comes to this website.
• I have met A LOT OF GREAT PEOPLE passionate about guitars, with some of them I speak also by email, instant messaging, etc and I tell my offline friends about them.
• I have a steady traffic of 500-600 visitors per day. It’s not 5000 but it is a decent traffic and I’ve worked hard for every new visitor so I deserve it, OK?!
• People point to my site from various places on this big internet saying nice things about me and GuitarFlame.com. Thank you, you should know that makes me feel very good!

As a conclusion to all the people who fight for traffic on the internet, I must say one thing and one thing only: the traffic for such a blog is the value of your proactive attitude! Period. SEO is OK and you must do it, but it won’t work for a blog the same way it will work for a static website. Here the value of your posts and the fact that you are proactive will bring you more visitors than anything else.

Be proactive, write with passion, visit other sites, comment on other people’s blogs, make friends, comment on forums, be active in social media, join or start a community, all these things will mean something and traffic will come to you. In the first 3 months of my quest I have been this way, I have done all these things and as you may remember I had high traffic spikes from social media. In the last 3 months, the traffic settled around a decent value, without spikes and there is only one explanation for this: I was not as proactive as in the beginning.

Be proactive, show you care and you will build traffic! Also, my dare goes on, without trying too hard now. I will keep you posted from time to time.

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I don’t know why, following the 2 articles of a few days ago about Metallica, I started to ask myself a few questions like what is Jason Newsted doing now? So I looked on YT and found a couple of videos with him playing with Ozzy and then from a suggested link, I found this video, a short overview of how Metallica found the new bass player, Robert Trujillo.

Very cool video, I must admit, I had a great time watching it so I said why not share it with you here? So, here it is, in case you don’t know it already!

I found it very interesting that the guys from Metallica were not looking for skills, since I guess at that level, they are all there, but they were looking for THE VIBE…

By the way, considering the fact that there are other bass players in this video from well known bands, isn’t it a bit embarrassing for them to be in that video? I mean, man, I saw you in that video…you didn’t make it…

What do you think?

Hey, I just realized, the blond guy in the video, with the band, is the same one that sleeps on the sofa in Nothing else matters, right(Bob Rock)? Man, watching again the video of Nothing else matters made me remember why I love Metallica…

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You know, I have this question that bothers me since a while…how do you learn to play a fretless guitar? Or a fretless bass…

I guess it is the same as learning to play the violin, the double bass or the cello, but to me, playing a fretless instrument seems like a very difficult thing to do.

Just imagine that, really, try to imagine that, REMOVE ALL THE FRETS on your electric guitar and now try to imagine how it would be to play it. Well?

Also while writing this I have asked myself two other questions. They go like this:

1. Can you play chords on a fretless guitar? I mean if you really want to, can you use it for regular guitar playing in a band or you can only use it for virtuosity moments? Can you play with a singer?Now, try to imagine a chord where you really need to stretch your fingers…Man, I need frets!!
2. How do you find the right tone on your effects for it? Sounds totally different than a regular guitar…

By the way, can you actually play…flat on a fretless guitar?

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I was listening a radio show in my car while coming here and the guy there war reviewing Metallica’s new record from his personal point of view and I realized that I haven’t listened anything from that record so far. I think I just missed it. Also I don’t watch that much music oriented television these days due to the current trends in music so if it was on TV(and I guess it was), I missed it also.

But intrigued by the review of this guy, from which I strongly remember 2 things, the fact that the record has an intentionally rugged sound, not heavily edited, to preserve the spirit and that guitar solos are back, I looked for a video on YT and I found this one, The day that never comes.

I must say I love Metallica’s ballads, I even liked the sound change on ReLoad, but this song…I don’t get it.

It doesn’t have anything, doesn’t bring anything to me, I think that if it wouldn’t be the video I would not even have the patience to listen it to the end. To me, it sounds like something done in a moment when they had no inspiration to write a good song. I will try to listen some more songs, maybe I just don’t like this one but I will find others that I will like, but this one, being promoted, it should be one of the representative songs for the album, one to make you buy the new record.

Is it me or you feel the same about it?

PS: However, something’s going on, 8 minutes song, rock solo, thrashy/speed riffs, rock feeling. No melody, but hey, maybe it’s just me.

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This morning I was driving to the office, thinking about the things to do today, without paying too much attention to what was playing on the radio. However, at one moment it was that verse that sounded very familiar to me, without being able to put my finger on the song in the first moment…

Very familiar lyrics, but the damn obsessive squealing that was on top of everything was really driving me nuts, reminding me of Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the membrane” and I really hated that song…So at first I thought it’s the same song (it was on another radio channel a few hours earlier and I switched to something else) and I was ready to switch the channel again, when that lyric took me by surprise plus that I recognized a very bluesy pattern…man, something’s cooking here!!

I started to pay attention to the song and suddenly I recognized it: Johnny Cash! Well, not quite Johnny Cash (but a cousin, as a friend of mine used to say) but one of his songs. To be honest I didn’t know the name of the song, I just knew the song at that moment, now I know the name too, Folsom Prison Blues. I like Johnny Cash but I only know a few of his songs by name.

And I started to think again about my post of a few days ago about being original in playing blues. I think this is one of the most down to earth examples of how you can take a song and give it your own interpretation.

This is not exactly the point I tried to make in my previous post, I referred to something else when I spoke about being original in blues, but this song comes to show me that there are ways to do it and you can always bring something new into this game.

I am sure a blues savvy would not be part of the target group for this song, I guess this is more of a way to bring older songs to new public, but it does the trick very well.

Everlast, Folsom Prison Blues

Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

And just for the damn squealing, Cypress Hill’s Insane in the membrane. Damn!

What do you think? Can this be considered a way of being original in blues?

PS: I know this is not blues, but It works on similar basis.

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I must admit I didn’t know Sonny Landreth until yesterday, so when I found an article about him on npr.org naming him a guitarist’s guitarist, I just had to find out who this guy was.

Also, I am not a big fan of slide guitar, I like to listen when used in a good song but I am not much into it, I guess also because of the alternative tuning. Whatever. But Sonny Landreth got my attention with his style of playing right from the start. As npr.org says:

Most guitarists rest the slide on the strings over the frets to create a quavering, fluid sound. They pluck the strings above the guitar’s sound hole. Landreth does that, finger-picking in a Chet Atkins style, but he also plays chords, as he says, on the “wild side” of the slide — up on the neck — creating what John Hiatt calls “ghost notes.
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But there’s more. Landreth has perfected a tremolo using the palm of his hand as a baffle over the sound hole, which he combines with the notes behind the glass. “Kind of an accordion effect,” he says. “So you can manipulate the sound with the motion of your palm.”
(Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95101083)

This made me dive a bit more into this guy and I looked for him on YT. I found a couple of videos that are quite amazing, him playing with Eric Clapton, with Jeff Beck, with Mark Knopfler and also a lot other great solo performances. Actually he released 9 CDs of his own already so he has a lot to say I guess in a solo performance.

Maybe some of you know him, maybe some other don’t, so here are two YT videos, pay attention to his right hand….

PS: I really like the song in the first video and I also like his voice. In the beginning I wanted to only add a video, then I’ve got charmed by this song so I just put both here.

Also, here’s Sonny Landreth’s site, www.sonnylandreth.com.

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I was always very intrigued by bands (rock bands) that grow as economical entities, and here I could think here of Iron Maiden which is told to own quite a bit of possessions (lands, investments), the plane that Bruce flies, etc.

Another example is Metallica which took their business very seriously and restricted the usage of their name (which is trademarked, OK, no issue here) in a very aggressive way. Maybe you remember the lipstick issue of 1-2 years ago, with that lipstick manufacturer that named his latest product Metallica. Bad business idea…

The reason I started this post is a news about Robert Trujillio who had a business deal with Fernandes Guitars long before joining Metallica, Fernandes Guitars being allowed to use Trujillo’s image in promotional materials, while providing him a load of custom bass guitars.

I don’t know the exact terms of the contract, but I do know that Metallica has a long going contract with ESP Guitars, which you probably are already aware of (who wouldn’t be!); I remember a large poster I had on my room wall about 10 years ago with Hetfield playing an ESP, moment when I was actually very interested in ESP guitars. Whatever…

Now, coming back to the point, Metallica sent Fernandes Guitars a cease and desist letter demanding them to no longer use Robert Trujillo’s name…

Here in Romania we have a saying: what came first? The egg or the chicken?

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Some time ago in this post here I had a video with Stanley Jordan playing Stairway to heaven in his unmistakable style.

Today I decided to post another video of Stanley Jordan playing Autumn leaves.

I really like that song and I am impressed with his style a lot, from the first second I have seen him playing, however I can not stop asking myself if he really plays guitar there. I guess he had a secret passion for playing the piano…

By the way, I don’t like the suit. Is it a jazz thing or what?

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A few days ago, during a Skype conversation with Danny from GuitarPlayersCenter, he asked me about embedding audio in your WordPress posts. Since we all run guitar or music related blogs, most of them based on WordPress, and I guess everybody wanted at one moment to embed a song in his/her post , I have decided to speak here a bit about how you can do this. The fact is that is not a difficult thing to do, so, in case you are interested to add in-line audio to your posts, read on!

The solution I propose here is based on a WordPress plugin named Audio Player WordPress Plugin. Pretty straight forward, don’t you think? I installed here on this blog the beta version, Audio Player 2.0, which you can find here. For WordPress, download the first one, for everything else, go with the second one.

Being a plugin, it can be easy installed on your blog, I won’t go into installing WordPress plugins, but just in case you don’t know how to do it, it comes as a zip file, unzip it and copy the whole folder (named “audio-player”) into your plugins folder, usually in “BLOG_ADDRESS/wp-content/plugins/” so you should have it like this “BLOG_ADDRESS/wp-content/plugins/audio-player”

Then you need to activate this plugin from your Plugins page in your admin panel in WordPress (usually BLOG_ADDRESS/wp-admin/plugins.php), just click the Activate link near the name of the plugin, and you should be ready to go.

How you can actually embed music into your post? Well, pretty simple, when writing your daily guitar posts and you think you need an mp3 song in there, use the small icon that says “Add audio” when you keep the mouse over it, the 3rd one just about the editor area in your blog, the one looking like musical notes, pick your song, upload it and wait for the progress bar to reach the end.

Then write all the information you want about your song, then press the 4th button on the right, below the information area, where it says “Audio player” and then “Insert into post”.

That’s all it needs to be said. In case you already knew about this, well, no harm has been done, I guess. In case you didn’t know, well, enjoy, comment and…embed more songs into your posts!

Warning: every song you upload on your server will consume space, if an mp3 has abour 3.5M, then 10 songs will have around 35M. You should check to see what’s your available space on the server before running into space problems. Just to be sure…

And to illustrate my point, here’s a song I like from Alice Cooper, Somewhere in the jungle.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Enjoy!

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