If you are a guitarist, Guitar Pro is one of the most essential pieces of software you will ever use.
The most powerful and intuitive tablature editor on the market, Guitar Pro allows users to download, play and learn thousands of tabs in GP format. Create your own scores, hear tabs and midi's using the Realistic Sound Engine with real-time effects. Speed trainer, chord diagram generator, full midi support, audio conversion and much more.
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The Street Musician Top 100 Guitar Blogs lets you know exactly where to look for the best guitar blogs on the net. If you're a guitarist, blogger, advertiser or music enthusiast, just bookmark this site for the best resource on the net for your favourite guitar blogs.
If you are a guitarist, and are looking for ways to improve your playing and expand your knowledge of guitars in general, or you'd like to keep up to date on all the latest information on what's happening in the world of guitars, then check out these blogs and you'll find some incredible stuff to keep you entertained for weeks to come. The Street Musician's Top 100 Guitar Blogs is the perfect place to revitalise your enthusiasm, build your technique, and master your machine.
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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.
But the best thing about my birthday, is I get two of them.
Why is that I hear you ask, surely only the Queen has two birthdays ?
All the guitar shops in my area have shut down. So Instead of travelling miles to the nearest store every week to get new strings, I now buy mine online and in bulk to save a load of cash.
I used to get my D'Addario electric and acoustic strings locally for £5 a set, but with nowhere left to buy them I got stung £9.50 for one pack in a shop out of town. I thought enough is enough. Time to get organised, go online and get in a good few packs at much cheaper prices.
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.
We-hey It's Guitar Noize's birthday today. Get over there and say Happy Birthday. Jon's also got some great prizes from Ernie Ball to celebrate two years in the blogosphere and all you've got to do is leave a comment to enter the competition.
Today the Musequality World Busk gets underway. All this week right up untill Sunday 14th, buskers around the world will be raising money for charity.
I'm busking in my home town for a few hours on Sunday and all the proceeds I make will go to charity, but I still haven't managed to get any sponsors on my donations page yet.
I'm kicking off my donations page with £5 of my own cash and am going to be hassling my family, friends and neighbours for money all week.
If anyone out there would like to help out and donate £1 or two to a good cause, I would really appreciate it. Even the smallest donation will help save lives and make the world a better place for those less fortunate than ourselves.
If you can help out in any way or would like to take part and busk yourself, then check out the World Busk web site.
You will find loads of useful stuff including busking tips, information, maps of where registered buskers will be performing, promotional material to download and help publicise your event and there's an easy way to set up your own donations page in a few clicks at JustGiving.com.
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 be aware of before you design your power system...Read this post
If you are intent on buying a marine or deep cycle battery at some point as part of an inverter, battery and charger system to provide power for your equipment outdoors, then there are a few things you need to be aware of when calculating battery life, capacity, losses and discharge rates etc...Read this post
Powering equipment via batteries often means connecting them together in a battery bank to gain a higher voltage or amp hour rating. Series and parallel connections explained...Read this post
If you are intent on taking your band or set to the streets or you feel like setting up an out door gig where power is an issue, then there are a few good ways of getting round the problem. Generators and battery operated systems provide good alternatives to consumer mains, but if you haven't got the cash to splash out on a decent generator you may well consider opting for the cheaper and noiseless battery, charger and inverter set up.
Here we learn the differences between types of dc - ac inverter, how they work and how to select the right inverter for your rig...Read this post
Every time I venture out to do a bit of street busking, I am always surprised at the wide variety of objects people seem to offer me or place in my guitar case instead of a simple coin or two.
I have received just about everything you could imagine from melted chocolate bars, cans of beer, broken biscuits, love letters, telephone numbers, job offers, grapes, skittles, m&m's, drugs, burger vouchers, cigarettes, wine, coffee and half eaten sandwiches to name a few...Read this post Posted in Busking Stuff 24.05.09 Technorati Tags:busking, buskers, busking pot
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 guessed it - it sounds 'bluesy'.
Just about anyone, no matter how rubbish you are at playing the guitar, can have a go at twanging a few notes of the blues scale and instantly feel like you're sitting on a porch in Memphis, dog by your side, watching the sun go down and singing how your girl left you cause you got no dough !..Read this post
I've just registered to take part in the biggest busk the world has ever seen.
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 any one time.
The event is being organised by the charity Musequality, which was founded by David Juritz, an internationally acclaimed violinist and leader of the London Mozart Players who in 2007 embarked on a round the world busk to raise money for charity...Read this post
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.
The program installs without a hiccup and everything seems normal until the application is started.
As the start up splash screen appears, the program loads as normal and about twenty seconds into the start up, the application quits with an error message.
'Adobe has detected that the application Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 has unexpectedly quit'.
Attending jam nights, or come and have a go nights are without doubt the best way amateur musicians and new bands can prepare themselves for a first gig or stage performance.
You might be able to play perfectly in the comfortable surroundings of your own home, but it's a completely different ball game when you're suddenly flung in front of the lights with an unfamiliar set up in front of a bunch of strangers...Read this post
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...Read this post
As I mentioned earlier, you can learn the entire minor scale pattern across the fret board in either 5 or 7 sections.
In my guides to scales I have chosen to use the Gm as our working example and to learn this in 7 positions instead of 5. The reason being that I find 7 steps easier to learn due to the smaller transitions between each position. The fact that there are also 7 notes in the minor and major scales (not including the octave), means each position is only one scale note higher than the previous one, making life simple...Read this post
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.
You may have noticed there is one small area in all our 7 Gm scale positions that hasn't really been covered...Read this post
As I stated earlier in my post on scale runs, you may find the positions I use slightly differ to those shown in other people's guides i.e some prefer to cover the minor scale in 5 positions instead of 7.
Here is a quick example of a commonly used alternative fingering for our minor scale position 2...Read this post
I was recently asked a good question by one of this sites regular visitors. 'Why do I need to learn scales and what are their practical application in music ?'.
After 9 months of slogging my guts out on this web site, Street Musician has finally made it into the Top 20 best guitar blogs on the planet, and I haven't even got going yet.
Assuming it's not just a fluke and the Alexa rankings have started to settle down, I reckon I'm pretty happy, but the meteoric rise of the (soon to be) best guitar blog on the planet has not come without a price...Read this post Posted in Site Notes 16.04.09
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 keys and octaves on the fret board...Read this post
If you asked most amateur guitarists whether they tend to sit or stand when they play, I reckon about 95% of them would say they sit.
Sitting is all very well if you just play the guitar as a leisurely hobby a couple of times a week and have no real aspirations to take your music to a dynamic stage level, but if your goal is to start or join a decent band, then you really need to start considering getting used to playing from a standing position...Read this post Posted in Guitar General 07.04.09 Technorati Tags:guitar, guitar advice, guitar lessons
The real goal of any guitarist learning scales is to know the scale so well that he/she can move anywhere they like across the guitar from one spot to another with no effort at all and without even thinking about it.
If you have tackled the positions we mentioned earlier, you would have learned how to move across the whole fret board side ways, in 7 positions across 6 strings. That's the hard work done. Now we are going to cross the neck from top to bottom, backwards and diagonally in varying patterns and strings to solidify your knowledge of the minor and major scales to even greater levels.
Here's a couple of exercises guaranteed to improve your finger strength, stamina and stretching abilities...
...Once you reach fret 15, or higher if you prefer, your fingers should be getting pretty tired. Now reverse the process and use pull off's to get you all the way back down to frets 1, 3 and 5. By the time you reach the end of your exercise, your fingers will be aching like hell and have been stretched to the limit. Give your hands a shake and a bit of a stretch to relieve the tension before you try the next exercise...Read this post Posted in Guitar Stuff 26.03.09
Technorati Tags:guitar warm up exercises, guitar lessons, guitar tuition, hammer on exercises, pull off exercises, guitar
I've just revised this post with quick explanations on each video for those of you who don't want to trawl through each one to find out what's on them.
These exercises may sound weird and make you look stupid while you practice them, but this is how the professionals do it, and the results you will achieve will be well worth the effort, as long as you stick with it.
Just added a new vocal warm up video for guitars to go with the previously posted tab. This one's the third in the set and will really get your fingers and mind working while you practice your vocals. It stretches over one and a half octaves and 5 strings. It also comprises of 3 different fingering patterns and is quite tricky 'till you get to grips with it. I have also re-done the exercise 2 vid. Take a look at vocal warm up scales to check them out.
Pink Floyd section added to our Music Zone. Browse this site while listening to some great music or watch some amazing live performances from one of the worlds greatest bands...View this post
Chromatic scales play a huge part in building a guitarists finger strength, speed, agility and co-ordination and their importance should not be underestimated.
As a beginner, I used to think there wasn't much point in practicing chromatics as after spending 5 minutes playing them, I concluded they were so easy that they were probably not worth bothering with. I never realised the importance they play in training your mind and fingers to be able to cope with the much more difficult and strenuous tasks a guitarist encounters as he or she progresses up the skill ranks.
If I had spent a little more time and delved a little further into the subject, I would have realised that once you get passed the first couple of obvious ones they become a complete nightmare, and to master them, your brain must be trained to work in perfect harmony with your fingers, and at high speed.
This song from Pink Floyd's - The Wall, was once described by Roger Waters as a 'mood piece' and is the second track on CD 2 of the album. It is an extremely emotional and moving piece of music and the solo classical guitar playing provides us with a great finger picking exercise that uses the thumb and all four fingers to create a brilliant song working from two simple chords of Am and C...View this lesson
Here's where we find out everything about you and the visitors to this site. The whole point of this page is to give us musicians, singers, bloggers and webmasters an idea of what every one else is doing.
Hopefully, in time this will give us all a better understanding of what we should and shouldn't be doing in our lives and how to make a success of our own personal goals.
I've also added the tab, midi, pdf and Gp files for guitar vocal warm up exercise 2 for anyone who's interested.
You'll be glad to know the recent Alexa troubles seem to have been fixed now. Here's a recent e mail I received after contacting them about the ranking problems.
If you want to listen to some good music while you are browsing this site, check out the new Music Zone. It only features three of my favourite bands at the moment, but it will be expanding every week till we've got a whole juke box to jam to. Pearl Jam and Metallica pages were posted a couple of days ago, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are now ready to go. Pink Floyd are up next in a couple of days. Stay Tuned.
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, Stevie Wonder, John-Mark and Michael Jackson.
I've updated this post with a few new vids and sound bytes as some of the previous ones had stopped working.
Hopefully you should find these tutorials extremely useful in improving your singing technique, showing 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...Read this post Posted in Vocal Stuff 06.02.09 Technorati Tags:vocal warm up, singing lessons, vocal lessons, vocal scales, lip roll, tongue trill, breathing techniques, vocal tuition, how to hum
As you can see, by learning the 7 positions of the minor scale earlier in this guide, you have already learned all the necessary shapes required for you to play the major scale right the way across the fret board...Read this post
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, it's time to use these minor scales to play all twelve keys of the major scale as well.
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 weeks the patterns should be thoroughly engrained in your head.
The next thing I want you to do, is take a look at the scale below in relation to the Gm scale above it...Read this post
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.
That depends on what town or city you're in, where you pitch, what you play, how long you play for, what time of year it is and most importantly, what mood the people are in.
You will often find people approach and chat to you while you are busking, especially in your own home town. If this happens a lot you can easily find that you have only played for about half the time you've been stood there. You can't really ignore people or tell them to bugger off while you're playing, but if you spend to much time chatting, this can seriously affect your earnings. People will only throw you a coin or two if they think you are putting in a good effort and heard a couple of songs they like. The less songs you play, the less you'll...Read this post Revised in Busking Stuff 13.01.09 Technorati Tags:busking, buskers, busking earnings, busking advice
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 in different towns and cities around your area, you'll find you become almost immune to just about every form of distraction around you as you get used to dealing with the everyday goings on in the street...Read this post Revised in Busking Stuff 12.01.09 Technorati Tags:busking, buskers, busking advice
Most people don't understand the importance of these amazing nutrients in our bodies.
Minerals are only needed in small quantities in the body, but they play a huge part in the maintaining the correct functions of just about every part of our complex systems.
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 day can solve many of these ailments and as a musician, you need to be on top form 100% of the time.
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 external organs, muscles, joints, bone structure, eyes, blood cells, brain and everything else that goes on inside your body should function properly, and your ability to fight infection, ward off colds, turn the food you eat into energy, regulate your blood sugar levels and create red and white blood cells etc. will be greatly increased. Your body should run like clockwork.
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 using different chords, keys and scales, where should you start ? What chords should you learn first and why ?
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 happiness. Please pay your last respects...Bid farewell to I.G Posted in The Great Blog In The Sky 24.11.08
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, never venturing past the 3rd or 4th fret into the middle and upper sections of the guitar. This caged mentality, effectively renders 3/4 of your guitar useless, stifles your creative ability and makes playing just about every song in the book, extremely difficult...Read this post Posted in Guitar General 22.11.08 Technorati Tags:bar chords, chords, major chords, minor chords, guitar chords
WARNING
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 !..Watch this post
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 a couple of vital points to follow to ensure you don't buy a turkey...Read this post
We'd like to bid a fond farewell to IG blog which has now been officially taken off line. This is a real blow for the guitar blogging world as IG Blog has been enjoyed by thousands of readers over the last two years and stood at number 3 in the Top 100 blog ranking. A real shame but apparently IG has grown tired of blogging and instead of leaving a dead blog online (like so many others), has decided to delete it from the system.
As a mark of respect, we will leave you at your well earned position on the Top 100 for a while, and hope that one day you will return and grace us with your presence once more.
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, by the string makers themselves, shows us the best way to do it...Read this post Posted in Guitar General 06.11.08 Technorati Tags:restringing guitar, string guitar, daddario
I often get people complaining to me that they are no good on the guitar, or that however much they try to play a particular piece of music, they just can't get it right, perhaps their fingers aren't long enough, or they're just not naturally talented, and the one reply you can give to just about any excuse a person makes on why they can't play is...Read this post Posted in Guitar General 05.11.08 Technorati Tags:guitar practice, guitar
...I'm going to teach you a method that is going to change your guitar playing forever and is guaranteed to massively boost any beginner guitarists playing abilities within a few days of practicing the technique, as long as you stick with it.
Any street musician out there will tell you, we haven't got time to learn all that down, up, down, down, up stuff for every song and verse you play, especially when you've got nearly a hundred busking songs to keep up with... so you have to use a combination of technique, style and improvisation to get you through those troublesome songs and awkward strumming patterns...Read this post Posted in Acoustic Stuff 29.10.08 Technorati Tags:strum, strumming, acoustic guitar, chords, busking, improvising, chord patterns
Installing scripts on your server to run things like comments can be quite a process if you've never done so before, and you'll often find that the guys who design and write these amazing utilities are great at what they do, but completely useless at writing manuals to install their software. These guides tend to miss out stuff, assume the user is a guru in the first place and generally expect everybody who comes across their software to be able to work it out for themselves even if you have to pay for it..
If you are willing to invest some time in the process, it can be quite an eye opener, as you often have to implement many other features such as changing file permissions, creating .htaccess files on your server and dealing with mod re-writes in order to accomplish this seemingly menial task. However, if you just want the job done quick, it can be a pain in the backside. So for all you noobie script installers out there, here's my guide on installing a comment script on your web site, which one to use, and how to do it. So check it out for a perfect install...Read this post Posted in Web Design 27.10.08 Technorati Tags:comment script, gentlesource, installation guide, web design, web site creation, htaccess, html, php, linux, hosting, godaddy
I've heard different versions of this story many times before in my singing career and each time you hear it, it's being told about different members of your local community, or singers in the public eye, or even famous people who's lives and careers have been turned upside down by serious vocal problems that have arisen due to vocal negligence and bad technique.
The next pub you're expecting the same sort of reception, you walk in and you can hear a pin drop. It doesn't matter what you play or how hard you bust a gut to please them, it's like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone just to get a clap from the miserable bunch of...Read this post Posted in Gigging Stuff 01.09.08 Technorati Tags:gigs, gigging, good gigs, bad gigs, gigging advice
..It's the space, transfer, email accounts, email forwards and unlimited web sites you need to be aware of. These are all things you may need to make the most of in the long term future.
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 damage to their vocal chords every time they sing. Your vocal chords are muscles and need to be treated with respect to avoid damage. Damaging these muscles can be extremely painful and may stop you singing for weeks or months at a time. or even stop you singing altogether...Read this post Posted in Vocal Stuff 26.08.08 Technorati Tags:vocal chords, vocal health, singing, smoking, alcohol, caffeine
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...Read this post Posted in Gigging Stuff 22.08.08 Technorati Tags:gigs, gigging, jam nights, busking, stage
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 to Music Theory for you to look at, and also our brilliant Top 100 Guitar Blogs which provides a great resource for all you musicians out there to help you find your favourite guitar blogs and improve your skills. If you want to know more about the Top 100 then click here.
Keep those blogs coming in.
Every few days here on Street Musician, we'll be adding more free lessons, guides and articles. Our acoustic, electric and health sections are empty at the moment but will be up and running in a few days with some great stuff for you.
Don't be surprised if you find this site changing all the time as we mess about with images, graphics and content. It'll settle down in a few months when we're happy with it, but until then - who knows what's going to happen next.
Stay Tuned !
Check out our Top 100 Guitar Blogs for the best guitar blogs on the net.
