Big Picture


Advice for Jazz Beginners

"I'm already a competent player and I want to learn jazz" is a common position for people to find themselves in, at least if online forums are any indication. Here's my compendium of advice I wish someone had given me when I was starting out.

Advice for Guitarists from Two Magicians

Here's a video of two well-known stage magicians talking about advice for younger aspiring performers. If you can translate what they say into musical terms you'll find some useful insights here.

New free ebook: Spectral Analysis of Scales

There's a brand new entry in my series of free eBooks: Spectral Analysis of Scales. This one's a bit more technical than the others, but I think it'll be of interest to advanced musicians looking for a way to expand their vocabulary of scale and arpeggio ideas a little more easily. It's completely free, so download it and spread the word. This is the first edition, so as always please send me any errors you find!

Performance Advice from a Bodybuilder?

Just now I'm slightly obsessed with the amount we can learn from sportspeople about practice and this article struck me as interesting. Replace "competition" with "gig" and you're most of the way there.

Some Ornette Coleman Heads

Ornette Coleman is revered as an important and prolific composer, perhaps the only one from the free jazz tradition who's so widely-acknowledged in this field. So why aren't there big books of the hundreds of tunes he's written over the decades? Who knows, but I did manage to find some transcriptions on the web and thought I'd collect them here as a service to the next person who goes hunting for them.

What Does It Mean To Play A Scale?

We all think we know what it means for me to play, say, the D Natural Minor scale. The scale contains the notes D, E, F, G, A Bb and C, so if I play D Natural Minor then I play all and only those notes. Simple. Or is it?

Four WaysTo Play With Your Guitar

I see a lot of students asking how they can improve their playing, what they should be working on or which books to study. What many seem to forget is that we don't work the guitar; we play it, and we should just play with it sometimes.

Two New Albums on Soundcloud!

I've gathered up the electronic pieces I wrote over the last year or so and pulled them together into an album, entitled New Work. I've also put together Phi Point, a collection of archive recordings that are now unavailable and of which I'm still fond. Both are free to stream or download.

R.I.P. Captain Beefheart

As you probably already know, the great Don Van Vliet passed away on Friday. If you don't know his music you can and should start searching YouTube or Spotify or whatever you preferred source of such things is and check it out.

Fun With Ring Modulators

As I mentioned before, I've been playing with Usine lately and doing some free VST effect processing on the guitar. This has enabled me to indulge my love of ring modulators, so I recorded a demo of two free ones you can try out.