In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been a serious lack of blogging going on around here over the last month or two, and no, it’s not because I’m still recovering from my stag do, it’s because every year around this time, my life turns into one constant celebration for a few weeks as all the important dates in the calendar materialise at once throughout the months of June and July.
This year however, it’s been even worse as we’ve had to squeeze a stag do, a hen do, a World Cup and my soon to be wedding in there as well.
Normally, the more parties there are going on, the happier I am, but all this fun is seriously affecting my ability to deal with all the serious things going on in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I can still provide a good service for my business, but my plans for World domination in the guitar blog stakes have gone right down the pan.
Don’t worry though, once I recover from the last months celebrations and get this wedding done and dusted, I’ll get back to the real world and stop posting useless stuff like this in my waffle section ..and I’ve not forgotten about those charity busks I’ve been promising either.
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So what have I been doing ? Well for a start – on the 10th, 11th and 12th of June I embarked on my stag do, which was a God almighty piss up with a load of my mates to Newquay, which also conveniently covered England’s first World Cup match against America, giving us all even more excuse to commit our braincells to the funny farm.
Newquay World Cup Fever
We hired a van, hit Newquay by about 2 on a Friday afternoon and after a few beers whilst checking in at the hotel, headed out for the surf on Fistral Bay. Now for a newbie surfer who’s never actually set foot on a surfboard in his life, it probably wasn’t the best idea to get beered up before my first surf, cause I couldn’t really tell if I was just crap on a surf board or it was just the beer…probably a bit of both.
I used to skate when I was a kid, (who didn’t) and after doing martial arts for a few years and also taking up windsurfuing, you’d think I’d at least have some sense of balance on a surfboard, not a chance after a couple of Stella’s and a can or two.
The best thing when you are out there in the ocean fighting the waves, freezing your nads off, getting wiped out and thrown around like a toy, is the feeling you’re getting your ass kicked by something that is infinitely more powerful than you. It reminded me of those years when I was just a kid and we moved to the sea side. We used to head down to Ringstead beach where the waves were always massive (when you’re 8 anyway) and dive in the white water to get slammed about like some sort of sadistic fairground ride. Then you’d come up for air and get hit again before you’d had a chance to breath and get smashed up again for round two.
After a few lung fulls of salt water, a change of clothes and more beer at the beach bar, we headed off down town for our pre-booked Indian.
View from Fistral each bar
It’s always a bit dodgy when you’ve booked a place to eat on the net, but when we got there it was a nice joint and the food was pretty good too. Mind you, by then I was pretty pissed so I couldn’t have told either way.
I would have gone for the vindaloo, but I stuck with the Madras just to give my a*$e a fighting chance for the weekend.
Sauce overload – I hate it when that happens !
You can’t beat a good Indian when you are getting hammered
After stuffing our faces till everyone felt sick we pissed it up a load more and ended up in the hotel bar till 5 in the morning.
You can’t beat that, a hotel that will stay open till the last man standing. By the time we left at 5 it was still going strong.
The bar staff weren’t too bad either, once you got your beer goggles on…erm..so my mates said.
After a relentless evening getting totally bladdered on beer, cider, vodka and whatever else was on offer, and unknowingly having my pints spiked with extras to wipe me out, this was the last picture I took, just before lapsing into a coma.
This picture disturbs me, cause I now know what is going to happen next.
That’s my mate on the phone at six in the morning, taking great pleasure in telling his Mrs. I’ve finally caked out and what he is going to do to me…bastard !
…
3 hours later…
Jesus ! Have I got a bad hangover
After after passing out on the floor of one of my mates’ rooms for a couple of hours and missing breakfast by literally 10 minutes, it’s beer for brecky and down to the local cafe for some swag.
And that’s the moment I realised my bastard mate Jamie had shaved my chest.
Then gave me one of these to soften the blow
She was fit !
A roam around town with the new Mrs. and a bit of fun in the arcades..
with the obligatory ‘who’s hardest on the punch bag’ competition.
then back to the hotel to wake up the lazy gits who are still asleep in their clothes.
… I turn my back for 5 minutes and
…not to fussy, my mate J.
…
Next on the list was more beer, a beach barbeque and more surfing, so with a new member of the crew, there’s only one way to carry your woman.
Following a quick spell in the bag and seeking ever more opportunity to humiliate the stag, out she came again, and after being forced by my mates to carry my new Mrs. around Sainsbury’s while getting stuff for the barbecue, I was then subsequently (and very publicly) kicked out of the store by an angry store matron, who started shouting at me for being obscene and that it was a family store.
Ejected in shame, the guys had to finish the job and once we’d got the rest of the supplies together it was back down the beach for a blistering day of beer, burgers and barbecue.
Fire up the barbie
5 minutes later…voila
..the first of about 20 rounds of some seriously dodgy nosh.
My barbecue is great, it cost me £6 about 10 years ago and has 6 bolts. It gets used about 20 times a year and is in such a state that every time I use it I am determined to chuck it away after, but all my mates persuade me that there is nothing wrong with it, it still does the job as good as the day it was bought and if I threw it away and got a new one, it would look just the same after a couple of uses anyway…so the barbecue lives on… I don’t think I’ll ever be able to ditch the bloody thing.
After another day of hangovers, beer and burned burgers, we stashed the stuff in the van and headed off for the World Cup match between England and Germany, which was another good excuse for more excessive behaviour, but as usual England played bloody awfully and it ended in a draw so the match was a total let down.
We’d ditched the camera by then so there’s no more photos apart from a few on my mates’ phones etc, but we hit the bars and clubs which were heaving as usual and even more so due to the World Cup. We ended up at the end of the night in the Walkabout which was heaving with a really good live band playing Chili’s, Muse and loads of other stuff, and when you are that wrecked and been dancing to cheese and club music all night, some real tunes are just what you need to get fired up. They had a really good sound and all their covers sounded pretty much like the originals.
By the time ‘Killing in the Name’ came on at the end of the night the front of the dance floor had turned into a massive mosh pit, which was even funnier when you realised while getting bounced off a bunch of really fat people (into a bunch of really skinny people) that the band wasn’t even playing, they’d all walked off stage and were playing a freaking cd. No one even noticed or cared cause we were all to busy throwing each other about.
…
It’s funny how when you are in a mosh pit in a club, you can get a head butt in the face, a pint spilled down your trousers and a ripped shirt and you think it’s great fun, where as if the same thing happened 20 feet away at the bar, you’d be in a scrap.
…
Once they’d kicked everyone out of the club we headed back to the hotel bar eagerly expecting to have another massive all nighter and were all absolutely gutted to find it was totally shut.
Man, it was like getting to a Slayer concert and finding out they’d cancelled and Climbe Fisher were playing instead.
We just couldn’t believe it. The problem was compounded by a distressed girl who appeared from nowhere outside the hotel in a somewhat dishevelled state, claiming she had lost her friends (who apparently were lesbians) because of an argument on a night out and they had left her there and she had no money, no phone and way of getting home.
We were like, “You think you’ve got problems, the hotel bar’s shut.”
…
Once we had got over the shock of having no more alcohol (and miraculously remembered we had loads more booze stashed from the barbecue), we did our best to try and sort her out. It seemed she was a bit of an impossible situation. We offered her our phones but she had no numbers because her phone was broken, we offered to pay for a taxi but she wouldn’t have it and said she lived something like fifty miles away, she couldn’t call her parents for some reason I can’t remember and didn’t want the police involved. In fact, she was so stuck that it seemed a bit suss.
You know the ’stranded girl outside the hotel’ gag, where you have no choice but to invite them in and then wake up next morning with all your wallets and jewellery missing.
…
The thing is, we’re all sound blokes and couldn’t leave her roaming the streets in a drunken state all night, just in case something bad happened to her, and if that was my daughter in a few years time, I’d be worried sick about her so at least she’d be safe with us. The thing is, on her part there was no doubt about it – it was a bloody stupid idea to suddenly meet 7 complete strangers in the street, at 3 am in the morning who had all been drinking heavily for two days and agree to go up to their rooms for a party.
We all knew we were fine and most of us have wives and girlfriends, but to be honest we could have been anyone and she could have been putting herself in serious risk.
…but hey…lucky for her none of us are weirdos.
As soon as we got inside, she thanked us and promptly crashed under the covers in my mates bed (on her own – I might add) and we didn’t hear a peep out of her all night.
Although I think she might have got a bit worried when we returned with the beers and the blow up doll 5 minutes later and forgetting we were no longer an all male group, announced there were three holes and we would all take one each.
Oops ! We just hoped she’d crashed out by then and not heard.
So we drank until morning and at about 7 o’clock, realising there was still almost 2 hours left to breakfast and there was no way I was going to make it, hit the deck again on my mates floor.
Jamie had caked out half hour earlier and it took a lot to keep my inner demons at bay and not to take my revenge on him for the night before. To be honest, I was happy that I hadn’t been strapped naked to a lamp post and left there so after thinking about it some more, I decided to let him off.
…
Waking again 30 minutes after breakfast and missing it for the second time, I was gutted and realised that over the last two days, I had not slept in my own bed even once and had missed breakfast on both days, what a waste of £80, I might as well have kipped in my van.
My other mate who never sleeps no matter how smashed he gets was still up and had been all night, just in case anything untoward happened. Apparently she had awoken and left half an hour before with simply a polite thank you.
…
Even more brain dead and all with double hangovers, we got back our deposits, headed out for breakfast around town, bought some prezzies for the misseses and headed home – another surfing session for me after two days on the piss was just not going to happen.
We thought we’d been pretty good and not got into too much trouble over the weekend, until my fiance discovered the photos of the girl asleep our beds and the hotel barmaids. That didn’t go down too well I can tell you. We then spent the next two days trying to explain our way out of it.
…
The stag do was then followed up over the next 3 weeks by the rest of the World Cup, Father’s day, more barbecues, my Mrs’ hen weekend, my birthday, my fiance’s birthday, the Weymouth Seafood and Music festival and next is my wedding, which is happening in a couple of days…. I think I’d better get on and write my speech, or I’m going to be in deep s#*t.
It’s about time I posted another competition here on Street Musician – so this time instead of giving away free beer money, I thought I’d go a bit more upmarket and give away one of these.
Aymara Jacaranda Quena Flute
This is a genuine Andean quena flute made of Bolivian Jacaranda wood and is one of my best selling instruments on my Bolivian website.
Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a guitar blog, but I’ve not yet got the cash to start throwing guitars at my viewers, so maybe next year.
These flutes are amazing things and you can’t get any more genuine than this one.
Sourced from the hands of the maker ‘Mr Mamani’ himself - high in the mountains of the Andes, this flute has already travelled over 6,000 miles to get here and could be travelling another few thousand to any one of my readers across the globe who enter this competition.
This flute is one of the best makes you can get and comes with a free woven quena cover of your choice. I’ll post some pics of those in a day or two.
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It is worth at least £25 £32 not including shipping costs and that’s from my own web shop, it should be worth a lot more. Many of my customers who buy these Aymara Jacaranda quenas end up coming back for more, and they’ll often also buy one of my Wayacan wood quenas to try out the difference in sounds produced by these wonderful South American hardwoods.
Being a guitarist, I never thought playing one of these would interest me, but once you give it a go you’ll find they are completely addictive. The main challenge is just trying to get a note out of the thing in the first place, never mind the three octaves they produce.
They say the Andean quena is one of the hardest flutes in the world to play and for a beginner you’ll probably find that is completely right. For the first few days you’ll probably spin out a few times and get major head rushes while you struggle to get the angles and air flow to split just right over the mouthpiece, but once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll find it gets easier every time you pick it up and it’s really good fun just to mess about with.
How to Enter
Entering the competition is easy, just use the comment form below to post a few words on why you want one of these Andean quenas, and who ever I judge to have posted the best comment wins.
I’ll be posting the winning entry later this month on 29th June (my birthday in fact), so who ever wins we should both have a great day…or two as in my case.
My last competition only had one entry and that was me, so I got to win my own cash back. Let’s see if we do a bit better this time.
Just so I get a crack at it, incase no one else does – I’ll post my comment first.
Cheers.
Competition Update
After marketing these things at ridiculous knockdown prices for months, I’ve just introduced a long overdue price rise across my entire range of flutes ( can’t keep selling all my stuff for peanuts you know ! ) making this amazing quena even more valuable and an even better prize.
…not only that, but instead of the beautiful woven cover that I was going to include with this prize, I’m now upgrading it to one of my special ‘deluxe’ woven covers, providing extra thickness and added protection for your quena. These deluxe covers have been made especially for Original Artisan by our luthier’s own wife…how cool is that.
…aren’t I good to you ! Eh ?
Birthday Winner Announcement
Right, I was going to announce the winner this afternoon, but I’m being dragged out for a birthday celebration…so the chances are I won’t be in a fit state to judge in a few hours time.
I’m going to keep the competition open till 12 midnight so you can get the last of your entries in and tomorrow when I’ve sobered up a bit, I’ll announce the winner.
Stay tuned cause someone’s going to have a very lucky day.
Happy Birthday people.
Kier
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Ok…So thanks to everyone who entered and special thanks to Sarssipius from who gave my competition a huge boost by announcing it on his excellent competition site G.A.S. a Gogo. All your comments were so good I couldn’t decide which one deserved to win so I thought I’d choose another method to select the winner.
Check out my vid below to see how I chose the winner, and yes… I am a bad shot and no, I didn’t know the horse – I think it was just hungry…and yes, I did have a birthday hangover.
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That crazy horse wouldn’t stop hassling me as I was packing up and was chewing everything in sight, we made friends in the end. I don’t know why but I seem to get hassled just about everywhere I go nowadays. If it’s not buy some nutty tramp, it’s some crazy animal.
…
So ‘Congratulations’ to our well deserved competition winner Cédric Lechevrel, your Jacaranda quena and deluxe cover will be on it’s way to you as soon as you mail me your shipping address and tell me what colour cover you would like me to send with your flute, red, green or blue.
Fate decided who kept the prize this time but stick around cause there’s going to be loads more competitions to win more cool stuff like this here on Street Musician over the next few months, (if I can afford it that is). If any of you guys or girls who entered the competition would like one of my Andean quenas, just for entering you get %15 of any of my Andean quenas from my shop Original Artisan, just drop me a line and I’ll give you a discount code.
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Thanks to everyone who entered, your comments did crack me up and the fact that so many of you entered just made my day.
Take it easy and keep an eye out for more competitions coming soon.
Here’s a quick post about something I learned form my dentist after I visited him a while ago which might be useful for anyone needing excessive dental treatment or procedures that usually cost a bomb – like crowns, bridges, special teeth whitening treatments or dental veneers.
With the World Cup coming up and the first England match being smack in the middle of my stag do in Newquay, it’s gonna be a blinder…if I’m conscious enough to watch it that is.
I thought this would be appropriate. If you want a chance of winning £50,000 check out the [...]
I sell quite a few Andean flutes here on Street Musician and go to great lengths to make sure my customers get the best quality quena flutes, quenachos and traverse flutes that I can source from the skilled Bolivian luthiers of La Paz, via my family in Boliva.
It’s about time I started thinking about doing another mission for the 100 charity challenge.
I’ve promised to do another charity busk to promote Niemann Pick Type – C, sometimes known as childhood dementia, but this time I’m going to try and do something for the U.K branch.
This week was supposed to be really productive and I was intent on getting my massive backlog of web work out the way so I could get out and start doing some proper busking.
Like a lot of p.c users, my laptop is seriously crammed full of stuff, with just about [...]
A couple of weeks back we’d been in Essex visiting family, and after my recent wash out of a charity busk I’d been working on getting my skills up to get out and do some more busking for the coming Summer.
I’d been strumming in the garden and paid a couple of [...]
Years ago, when I first started learning to play the guitar, I used to have so much trouble just getting a tune out of the damn thing that I used to be in total awe of anyone who could string a few chords together or pull off a few [...]
Every guitarist knows the only way to achieve real success with the guitar is through sheer grit, determination and thousands of hours of painstaking practice, but if you really can’t be bothered with all that blood, sweat and tears stuff, there is another way you can go about it.
If you are thinking of planning a charity event to raise cash for your cause, whether it’s a small personal challenge or a big public event, the one thing we must ensure is that we are fully aware of the legalities involved in collecting for charity, especially [...]
Last summer I took part in the World Busk, which was an event to raise money for David Juritz’s charity – Musequality, the event was also a world record attempt to get the most people busking simultaneously around the world at any one time.
If you’ve been watching the news unfold over the last fortnight you’ll be well aware that twelve days ago on the 12th January, a massive earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale tore apart the tiny Caribbean nation of Haiti, devastating the populated district of Carrefour and the capital city Port Au Prince, [...]
The last few days has put me back on course for the new year and I’m (almost) back on track with the blogging and practice that I’ve been neglecting for weeks. There’s still a hell of a way to go till we’re back up to scratch but with it being freezing outside and [...]
Welcome back people, it’s 2010 and another great year is upon us.
Firstly I’d like to thank all our faithful readers who’ve been supporting this site over the last 16 months since Street Musician went online and wish all our visitors, new readers and fellow bloggers a great new year and a [...]
Street Musician is now proud to be able to offer our readers a small range of handmade classical guitars from South America, made by the same expert luthier and musician who has been touring South [...]
You might not think it, but preparing for a gig is a logistical nightmare, especially if you are a solo artist.
For those in a band it should be a much simpler process with each member bringing their own gear and (in theory) being responsible for their individual equipment. Serious musicians are usually [...]
Don’t worry, you’re not not going crazy, Street Musician has changed for the better.
We’ll still be going through a few more changes over the next few days while I get things finished off, but don’t fret, all our old articles, posts and guides are still here – they ‘re just in [...]
Every now and then I get confronted with a song that has either a ridiculously long set of lyrics containing about twenty verses or one that does not make any sense at all, making it extremely difficult to learn.
Most people think learning lyrics is easy. An average person will assume they [...]
One thing that really bugs me about myself is my ability to get drawn into a new task and become so completely immersed in whatever it is, that I do nothing but that for weeks at a time.
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An age old problem encountered by beginner guitarists battling with bar chords is which way to finger them.
The most common method of fingering an average bar chord is to stretch your first finger across all six strings and finger the chord with your remaining 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers.
The Street Musician Top 100 Guitar Blogs is the best resource on the net for all the greatest guitar blogs on Earth. Each blog is listed with Google PR, Technorati and Alexa rankings and updated daily.
The Top 100 has been going strong now since July 2008, and over the last 15 [...]
Check out the shred master kick some ass on stage (not!)
This cracks me up more every time I watch it.
Ok, before we start receiving any death threats over this one, it is of course a complete fake. I assume it’s completely obvious to most people, but after reading [...]
Here’s something for you vocalists out there. This is a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody performed by comedian, actor, vocalist and playwright – Rick Miller. He has been named as ‘one of the 100 most creative people alive today’ by Entertainment Weekly.
In this video, he performs the song mimicking 25 of the [...]
Here we have two hand made professional charangos for sale. These charangos were crafted by a professional Bolivian musician and luthier who has been making fine concert grade instruments for over 20 years.
These particular charangos were made in his traditional Bolivian workshop and I have been lucky enough to obtain these [...]
Featuring beautiful native South American flutes for sale. The quena and the larger more deeper sounding quenacho.
Quena (Kena) Flute
The quena or kena as it is also known, is a traditional Andean flute used commonly in all areas of traditional Peruvian music. The quena produces an exceptionally beautiful sound [...]
So how did this site come to sell handmade Bolivian instruments ?
Since the creation of this blog, Street Musician has spread itself out in many different directions over the last year and being a relatively new blog I still have many great things in mind for it’s future. I guess [...]
The charango is a small traditional South American stringed instrument that resembles a ukulele and has 5 sets of paired strings.
The charango is a member of the lute family and is said to have descended from the Spanish vihuela which had six pairs of double strings and was most commonly used [...]
It’s my birthday today and I’ve had a great day. I got a few prezzies, been out for a Mexican and got tickets to see Nine Inch Nails at the O2 in a couple of weeks.
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I used to get my D’Addario electric and acoustic strings locally for £5 [...]
We are constantly hearing in the news about the current global economic downturn and how every day thousands of people are loosing their jobs and local shops and businesses are being forced to shut their doors and close down for good.
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Just got back from my Musequality charity busk in town.
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There are many different types of battery you can use to power your equipment, ranging from small 6v hand held rechargeables for small busking amps to huge deep cycle RV and forklift batteries capable of powering full out door gigs and lighting systems. They all have different uses and characteristics which you should [...]
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Probably the most widely used scale in the whole of modern day music. The blues scale is used extensively in rock, jazz, blues, metal, funk, country and almost every other type of music you can think of.
The most obvious feature of the blues scale is that – you [...]
If you enjoy any of the articles, advice or guides on this site, please help support this blog by having a go at one of the following. It only take a few seconds and a couple of clicks and you really will be helping me out and doing this site a big favour. [...]
I’ve just registered to take part in the biggest busk the world has ever seen.
UPDATE : STARTS TODAY 8th JUNE
The World Busk is a charity event which will raise money for good causes and attempt to break the world record for the biggest simultaneous busk around the world at [...]
Since posting my guide to installing Adobe CS4 products on Vista, I recently tried to install Adobe Premier Pro CS4 on my laptop and encountered a major problem.
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Pentatonic minor scales are extremely popular 5 note scales most commonly used in modern and classic rock, blues and jazz music. They are widely embraced by beginners and shred masters alike and are great practice scales for those learning to improvise.
When learning a particular scale across the whole neck, in our case the natural or pure minor, is it best to ensure there are no vague or hazy areas left on the fret board that leave you unsure of where to place your fingers in order to play the correct scale notes.
In our previous scale guides you have been learning all seven positions of the minor scale right the way up the fret board and should now be pretty fluent in crossing the neck just about anywhere you like.
As I stated earlier in my post on scale runs, you may find the [...]
Welcome to Street Musician’s new competition section.
Over the next few weeks and months if I get a good response from this sites readers, I’ll be posting a few competitions every now and then to win cash prizes and other various goodies to make your day go with a smile.
Now we are going to take our previous run highlighted here in blue, and play it in various other G root note positions and at different octaves on the fret board, indicated in yellow and red.
The tab shows pretty much the same run (with slight alterations at the endings) [...]
Below is a full scale diagram of the G minor scale. We are going to work on some runs from one end of the fret board right the way to the other and back again.
First we’re going to take an easy minor scale run on strings 5 and 6. [...]
In Parts 5 and 6 of our easy guide to scales, we learned that the major and minor scales are closely related and that they also contain the same notes. This means each one can easily be changed into the other and any key you choose can be easily transposed to a different [...]
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Vista Home Basic – Dreamweaver – Photoshop – Master Collection – Acer Aspire
Error 1603. Fatal Error During Installation.
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These next few exercises are really good for building your finger strength, stamina and stretching abilities. As always, they are best performed using some form of metronome as this will help to improve your sense of timing. If you don’t have a real one, then try the internet as there are many available [...]
Playing the guitar places an enormous amount of strain on the muscles, fingers and tendons in a player’s hands and also requires a great deal of finger strength. It is for this reason that it is vitally important that all guitarists, from beginners to expert, should perform some form of warm up routine [...]
Now you’ve got the hang of the first few exercises, here are some more combinations that start with your 2nd, 3rd and 4th fingers.
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Chromatic scales play a huge part in building a guitarists finger strength, speed, agility and co-ordination and their importance should not be underestimated.
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For this scale we will be starting on G (3rd fret 6th string), work our way up to C (13th fret 2nd string) and back down again to G or below. Follow the exercise shown in the video and start with a gentle humming.
This second exercise uses an octave and a half scale range. This is slightly more difficult and takes a bit of concentration to get right. Match your fingers with your vocals.
Check out my Vocal Warm Up Techniques page for details on how to hum and perform lip rolls and tongue trills.
This 3rd exercise is the most awkward until you get used to it. The scale spans one and a half octaves and 5 strings and as you move up the fret board and across the strings the fingering patterns change as the scale ascends and descends with your vocals.
Pink Floyd live shows are legendary and their music has broken through the boundaries of reality for over 30 years.
Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters are two of the greatest songwriters the planet has ever known and here is just a small section of some of their best songs.
This page is dedicated to Pearl Jam’s epic first album Ten. It is one of the greatest albums of all time and as the name suggests has ten incredible tracks. Alive and Black have to be two of my favourites, but every track is a classic and the album totally rocks.
This page is purely for this sites Metallica fans, and has a good mix of the best tracks from Metallica’s 4 best albums, Master Of Puppets, Ride The Lightning, Metallica and …And Justice For All.
Choose a song, then click this link to pull up another page and you can surf this [...]
Here is an amazing set of videos I found on You Tube with virtually the complete set of vocal training exercises from Seth Riggs, the actual founder of the speech level singing method. This guy has taught over 120 grammy award winners including Natalie Cole, Janet Jackson, Sinéad O’Connor, Barbra Streisand, Luther Vandross, [...]
For those of you thinking of designing your own website, apart from using web editing and blogging platforms such as Dreamweaver and Wordpress etc.. there are a few other helpful tools and utilities that can help you along the way.
Most web editors, whether free or commercial give you the ability to [...]
A domain registrar is generally a body or company that sells and registers domain names to people.
When you visit an on line registrar with the intent of purchasing a domain name for your web site, you must first perform a simple search to see if the domain is available. [...]
Now you can handle the natural or pure minor scale in all twelve keys, by simply learning the Gm, as shown in parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this no nonsense guide. It’s time to use these minor scales to play all twelve keys of the [...]
Ok, by now you should be completely familiar with the 7 overlapping patterns of the G natural or pure minor scale, as shown in parts 1, 2, and 3 of this no nonsense guide.
If you’ve been practicing them for 20 – 30 mins on a daily basis for a couple of [...]
Here’s a collection of vids featuring some of the worlds most famous (and not so famous) people busking.
It’s nice to know that however much cash these guys have got or how famous they are, none of them are too proud to hit the streets and play for the people.
Here we have our videos section. If you are too lazy to look for them or read the articles and lessons you’ll find all this sites own vids from various pages here in one place. Click the links to view the full articles.
Street busking is a great way of building up your confidence as a musician and gives you just about the best training you can get in dealing with people and overcoming any fears you may have of performing in public.
Once you’ve been busking a few times and got used to playing [...]
Nowadays, town and city councils are clamping down on unauthorized busking in an attempt to clear the streets of unsavory types hassling people for money. You often need a permit to perform or busk and if you don’t have one you will be removed by the police, even if you are really good.
The amount of money you can make when you are out busking greatly depends on many things, such as what instrument you play, what town or city you’re in, where you pitch, what songs you play, how long you play for, what time of year it [...]
Vitamins and minerals are essential nutrients the body needs to function properly and stay healthy in your every day life. Trace elements are also vital to the body’s well being, but are needed in much smaller amounts.
If a body has a good supply of these nutrients, then all your internal and [...]
If you have read my previous post on vitamins and minerals and how important they are in our daily lives, you’ll know that vitamins perform crucial biological functions in the body and without a replenished source every day, we can fall foul to a huge number health problems. A few vitamins a [...]
Most people don’t understand the importance of these amazing nutrients in our bodies. If you’ve already read my post on vitamins and minerals in our everyday lives, then you will have some idea of how vital they are to our health and well being.
Minerals are only needed in small quantities in [...]
There are many sites out there dedicated to web site creation, design and troubleshooting, so you should have no trouble finding some form of help to solve your problem.
Millions of web sites are created every year and there is always somebody, somewhere who has encountered the same problems as you and [...]
This is subject to a matter of opinion and there are many web editors and design programs on the market that will do a great job. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, from cheaper packages that will accomplish the basics, to complex design programs that give the user almost unlimited potential to [...]
Here are some products myself and many singers use on a regular basis to help improve the quality of our vocal performance. Some of products below can be taken immediately before we perform as a standard preparation when we sing or go on stage, others can be used for occaisions when we may [...]
Any beginner guitarist has to face the daunting task of learning a huge bunch of chords in order to familiarise themselves with the guitar, help them play their favourite tunes and enable them to write and play their own compositions.
But as there are tens of thousands of songs out there all [...]
The problem with being a singer and a guitarist is you have to do two jobs at once. This means that before you practice or perform, you have to warm up both your fingers and your vocal chords.
I used to get frustrated when going into practice as doing my vocal warm [...]
The time has come for I.G Blog to finally leave the Top 100 and head off for the Great Blog in the Sky. (sniff !) The place where all blogs go to spend their final resting years in peace and [...]
Most new guitarists begin their training by learning and practicing the usual standard 10 – 20 open chords such as E,D,G,A, Am,F,Dm etc.
Once proficient with these, many players tend to stay within the confines of these open chords at the lower end of the fret board and never venture past the [...]
My name is Kier and I’m a self taught musician from the UK. I have been playing the guitar on and off for twenty years and a few years ago I decided to quit my job as an electrician to become a full time musician.
Next time you hit the road, watch out for the phantom freeway fret wrecker. This latest attack caught on film by Channel 5, wiped out six lanes of traffic on a busy highway, killing 15 people and injuring 42. You have been Warned !
Here’s a quick beginner’s guide for those of you thinking of buying a guitar. If you haven’t really got a clue what you are doing, or even what type of guitar you’d like i.e an acoustic, electric, strat or spanish etc. there are a few things you need to look out for and [...]
Most guitarists actually string their guitars the wrong way by winding the string around the top peg a number of times and then through the hole. This actually causes unnecessary stress to the strings and contributes to tuning problems and string snapping. This vid from D’addario’s Musician Hub shows you exactly how to [...]
I often get people complaining to me that they are no good on the guitar and that however much they try to play a particular piece of music they just can’t get it right. They will often give the excuse that perhaps their fingers aren’t long enough or maybe they’re just not naturally [...]
Here’s a great vid proving that even the best musicians have bad days. It doesn’t matter how good or famous you are, we all have to break down our songs, patterns and riffs into small manageable chunks until we get them sussed. It’s only once we have them burned into our brains by [...]
Ok, you’ve got your guitar, you’ve got your books, you know the song, but you’re sick of learning twenty different strumming patterns for every verse of every song you want to learn.
When you see an experienced guitarist strumming away on the acoustic, they look good, sound great and never seem to [...]
For all you people out there who are thinking about creating your own web site for what ever reason, there are many web based resources that you can use to help you get up and running.
If you are feeling lazy and couldn’t be bothered to read the next few pages, then [...]
Generally, any musician’s web site or blog worth it’s salt, sooner or later will have to add some form or means for the public to communicate it’s views and opinions to the web site’s owner or creators. This is a great way for band members, fans, musical students, other blog owners and whoever [...]
Having made it through our no nonsense guides parts 1 and 2, you should now be well on your way and have a firm grip on the first 5 positions of the natural minor scale.
You should see now just why I divide the scale up into 7 easy over lapping parts as [...]
If you are considering singing as a full time occupation or intend to be singing as a hobby over a long period of your life time, it is vital you learn how to do things the right way. You need to ensure you don’t pick up [...]
Here are some video demonstrations of the most important vocal warm up techniques used by professional singers today. The humble ‘Humm’, the mighty ‘Lip roll’ and the dynamic ‘Tongue trill’. These techniques play absolutely vital rolls in any successful singers daily practice routine.
By now, if you have been following the first part of our no-nonsense guide to scales, you should be very familiar with positions 1 and 2 of the natural or pure minor scale. You should have spent at least two days learning the first two positions and should be able to move [...]
Someone recently asked me which of the two open G chord shapes they should learn and practice as standard considering they are both fingered differently and different song books and tablatures seem to switch between the two shapes depending on the groups and styles of music they are transcribing.
In my opinion, about 90% of you should probably be considering a shared hosting package. This will be ample for your needs and if you decide you want to upgrade to dedicated hosting in the future, it should be easy to do so. Just ask your host provider.
This weeks pick of the week is an amazing bit of guitar lap tapping by the canadian composer and guitarist Erik Mongrain. His debut album Fates is an brilliant piece of work and has been described as ‘unbelievable’, ‘original’ and ‘an incredible achievement’ by his fans and the music press.
This weeks totally unrelated yet amazing pick of the week is a piece of 3D anamorphic art by street artist Julian Beever.
His mind blowing pictures have earned him the nickname ‘ The Pavement Picasso ‘ and he has traveled the world creating these works of art for over twenty years.
This guide may not be 100 % theoretically correct, but it will be everything you need to know to get you through the theoretical nightmare of scales that’s been haunting you for years.
Scales represent a huge barrier to many musicians and dealing with the mass of information that comes with them [...]
Traveling light and just taking your acoustic guitar busking can be great if you are planning on playing in a subway, a pitch with great acoustics or in a narrow street, but if you want to play in a city or crowded street on a Saturday [...]
Dedicated to helping you become an all round better musician and guitarist.
Street Musician recently celebrated it’s first birthday in July and over the last few months has gone from strength to strength hitting the Top 20 guitar blogs across the planet after only 9 months on the scene.
The reception you get from an audience will generally depend on quite a few things. Obviously it matters how good you are but being a great guitarist doesn’t mean you’ll always get a great response. What counts is what sort of music you play, the clientel, [...]
A web host is a company that provides space on it’s servers for you to keep your web site, almost like a locker in cyberspace. They promise to keep your site online 24 hours a day for the whole time you pay for their services. If you have a web site that your [...]
There are many things you should and shouldn’t do to keep your voice sounding good and your vocal chords in good condition.
Warm Up
First and most importantly, you should always do a vocal warm up before you sing or go on stage. Many artists do not do this and risk doing permanent [...]
If you’re bored with playing at home and want to take your music to a different level and get out there and do some gigs, there are a few steps you can take to bridge the gap without having to throw yourself to lions in one big step.
Welcome to the Street Musician – Top 100 Guitar Blogs
Over the last year or so Street Musician has been scouring the web for the best guitar blogs on the net and placed them all here in one place for you to check out.
Street Musician is brand new and will be constantly growing and changing over the next few months as we continue to expand. Some of our pages are still empty but we do have some great articles on busking, gigging, web design, vocal stuff and the first part of the Street Musician No Nonsense Guide [...]
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If you enjoy any of the articles, advice or guides on this site, please help support this blog by having a go at one of the following. It only take a few seconds and a couple of clicks and you really will be helping me out and doing this site a big favour. [...]