Just recording some acoustic guitars from my home studio for a friend’s project. Really pleasantly surprised by using a sm57 pointed towards the body to get a bit more ‘bottom’…I had never used a dynamic mic to record acoustics before, and it seems to add quite a bit of ‘weight’ to the sound, so I think I will do this again. These are featured guitars, in a solo piece…it might not work for ‘strumming’ where you just want the presence and the top end to add some sparkle to the track…I guess it’s all about experimenting and judging on a song-by-song basis. For this particular project I have combined the DI sound with 2 mics, one AKG condenser mic and the usual SM57.
Month: March 2011
Strumming ‘In Four’ With Bassline
In this lesson I explain how to comp in four strumming with a bass line. Usually this is done quite easily in finger style but I find the strumming to change the feel quite a bit, adding a nice groove to the whole thing.
Larry Carlton Guitar lesson
I could listen to Larry play all day. I also think he has a great way to deliver the message with subtle irony that I always envied as a teacher…great stuff.
Working on the new blues book
Just a quick update on my work on the new blues book, this is going to be vol 2 of ‘Contemporary Blues Soloing’ and will deal with chords and comping.
Again this is going to start from very simple comping concepts to go towards more complex stuff, not only in terms of chord choice, but also rhythmically.
I might post some preview soon…still early days…
I am thinking ‘Contemporary Blues Chords and Comping’ Â as a title…again, it might change.
Obviously this is going to be available in English and in Italian.
Swing Technique – Jazz Articulation on guitar
In this video I explain how to approach right hand technique to have a better ‘swing’ when playing jazz solos…obviously this works well for any style of music that has back beat (blues, rock and so on…). The idea is to PICK the note on the UPBEAT and SLUR the note on the DOWNBEAT, using hammer-on, pull-off or sliding to the next note. As I show in the video, this is not to be done constantly, but with taste, mixing it up to create a lot of different rhythms.