The Chasing Sound Song Challenge
Plus, Practice Rooms Coming Soon on Discord
Chasing Sound Announcements!
Oh man, I’m just done cracking up from all the different April Fool’s guitar pranks - there were some good ones this year. As April has finally arrived, I have two fun announcements this week that should help you create a lot more music and get better at guitar!
The first one is that in May I’m bringing back the song in a month challenge. I felt like I should give us April for me to explain all the fun stuff that’ll go along with this challenge, and then we could put the work in, in May! The jist of it is that the first two weeks we’ll be working on constructing a song and making it as good as we can, week three will be for recording, and week four will be for mixing. I had a blast doing this a while back, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun. We’ll use the #songlearningchallenge channel in Discord to talk about what we’re doing in May and in the lead up throughout April.
Speaking of our Discord, that brings me to my second announcement. The Chasing Sound Discord has always been about text channels, but starting in April I'm going to be trialing some audio channels in there, and it's going to be based on different Practice Rooms. I'm going to start off with 4 practice room audio channels in the Discord, and as the name implies, it should be a place for you to pop in and practice your guitar, with the hope that other people would pop in and listen, make some comments, give advice, etc. You can do this with an interface, or you can do this with your computer or phone's mic. If you have any questions, just let me know!
I hope you’re as excited about these two things as I am. I’m looking to have a lot of fun with both in the next couple of months.
Guitar Books
I finished two awesome books this week. The first was Pat Martino’s autobiography ‘Here and Now!’ If you’re not familiar with Pat, he was a jazz legend who learned to play at a high level not only once, but twice after he had an anuerysm. His story about growing up in Philly, working in NY, around NJ and elswhere was truly inspiring.
The other book I finished was ‘Eruption: Conversations With Eddie Van Halen’, where both Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill interviewed EVH, band members, friends, family and more throughout his entire career. They talk about the ups and downs of Van Halen, working with different guitar manufacturers and ultimately making his EVH line of gear, and so much more.
Both books were great in their own way, and I’d recommend them to any guitarist who’s even remotely into either player.
This Week’s Guitar Links
- UNLOCK Your Sweep Picking Potential! - Ben Eller shows us a solid way to get our sweep picking chops back in action. And if you've never tried sweep picking before, this is a great exercise (with tab), that uses 5 strings, which I find always gives me more time to really hone in on my right hand technique.
- Banish Anxiety for Guitar Practice Wins! - JustinGuitar breaks out a concept from the book ‘The Inner Game of Music’, that he calls the objective observer. I enjoy lessons like this, where teachers show us the mental side of practice - I think this sort of exercise would help calm down any anxiety/emotional response to practicing. A lot of this stuff is common sense, but sometimes even if we've been playing for years, we need to hear this type of advice again.
- I Used ChatGPT to Write a Guitar Solo and IT'S INSANE - AI chat bots are everywhere! ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm over the last few months, and it's been insane to see all the different things people are draming up to throw its way. With a bit of back and forth through different prompts, Tyler from MusicIsWin worked with ChatGPT to create a pretty interesting guitar solo.
- Marshall Amps sold to Swedish speaker company, bringing an end to family ownership - Big news in the gear world this week, as Marshall Amps has sold to Swedish company Zound Industries. I'm hoping this won't affect guitarists too much, and it seems like it might not. According to the Zound CEO: “We haven’t done a single product from Zound that hasn’t been approved by the acoustic engineer at Marshall Amps… It’s a complete continuation of what we do, except now we’re one and the same.”
- Martin Miller - Web of Lies (Official Music Video) - Martin Miller's latest single and video just dropped for his “Web of Lies" song - along with that, his brand new EP just came out this Friday as well. I'm so happy Martin is back on the scene. The EP is great, and features him not only playing incredible guitar, but singing too.
- James Hetfield says “if there was a guitar that changed the course of my history” it was this one – and it’s a cheap copy - Countless guitarists could've been fooled that James Hetfield's early V was a Gibson, however it was actually a cheap $200 copy that he used for years. Hetfield talks about this and more in his upcoming book, 'Messengers: The Guitars of James Hetfield'. There are multiple versions of the book with various extras, and it comes out in the fall. Really looking forward to this one!
- Learn All the Notes on the Fretboard in This Easy-to-Follow Lesson - Guitar Player got together some great resources if you're new to guitar and are trying to learn all the notes on the fretboard. It's a simple lesson that includes some nice cheat sheets, exercises, and more to get you going with memorizing notes across the entire fretboard.
- 3 Reasons Why Guitarists CAN'T Sight Read (And How To Fix It) | Ben Eunson - Ben Eunson put out a helpful video with 3 reasons why guitarists can't typically sight read, and how you can fix each issue. Following the lesson above from GP should help some of these issues - so you can find notes all over the fretboard, which will for sure help with your sight reading. But Ben gives us some other helpful advice too - like trying some new sight reading each day, and more.
Hey did you know, not only do I talk guitar each week, but I also teach it!
Try out a half an hour to see how much you can learn when you know the right things to practice. Whether you want to learn guitar, recording, mixing or more, I can help you out!