The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) announced today that Sean Perkins has been named chief marketing officer and senior vice president of Global Connections and Events (GCE), where he will oversee marketing efforts for NAB Show and NAB Show New York. Perkins will drive strategies aimed at increasing engagement and visibility for NAB’s premier events, reporting to Karen Chupka, managing director and executive vice president, GCE.

Do you work for your students or what others will think?

Music classes are different from most other classes. They are performance based classes. This means that multiple times through out the school year we get to put on public display what we are doing in the class room.

This is not always easy to do. I would love to see a math teacher or science teacher put all of their students work on public display to be scrutinized. And they can't only put the best student work on display it has to be all skill levels. Sure, it is not a perfect analogy but you get the idea.

The point is, it is easy to allow public opinion to sway what we do in the classroom.

Our groups, while we strive for the best are not professional groups, they are school groups and the intent is to deliver a balanced education to all students. When we let public opinion that is based off of our performances sway what we are doing in the classroom we need to assure that it is not at the expense of education.

Vocal Point is a collegiate group from Brigham Young University and is one of the worlds best.



This last Thursday night they were performing in a nearby town where my wife and I got tickets to go and watch them perform. It was an amazing performance and afterward i went to give their sound man the proper kudos he deserved as the unsung hero of the night.

When I talked to him I learned that he was also the groups manager/arranger. I right then and there invited him to stop by my classroom the next day. He said the group was busy and wouldn't have time which I understood. But before I left I told one of my students who was waiting in line to talk to the performers to ask them if they wanted to come to the class the next day.

Fast forward to 10:00PM that night. I get a call from the manager saying a few of my students also asked if they could stop by and the group would like to do it if they could come in the afternoon. :)

Luckily I have a great principal who agreed to let me get my choir out of their 5th period class at the last minute to come have a clinic with Vocal Point. I have great administration.


This was at the end of an amazing/inspirational last minute clinic.

Just Ask!

Image via CrunchBase

A year ago I wrote a post about creating a Class Facebook Page. After a few tweaks I think I found the Facebook setup that works for me.

Shark Tank 3 (Photo credit: Sakurako Kitsa)

I really like the show "Shark Tank"

I think it would be a lot more fun to watch if it was more like "The Voice" where the sharks picked their mentors, invested in them and then we got to watch as their companies either succeed or bust. Then we could really see what companies were good ideas and which sharks really know their stuff. It could even be fun to have some of the ideas that were rejected come back in and see where they are by themselves.

I think this would be a fun show and who knows if they could get the products into market fast enough we as an audience could vote via our purchases.

Come on ABC make this happen :)

What bumper sticker would I put on my dashboard/music stand or t-shirt for the world to see?

Bumper sticker car parked in Santa Cruz, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

• The pathway to hell is paved with it will be fine at the concert.

• It's not your fault but its your problem.

• All music must dance.

• Character is more important than talent.

• Hell is when the person you are meets the person you could have been.

• We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act but a habit.

To be continued....

Please add your own in the comments.

Can you believe that the most unlikely of heroes actually saved that day? I should add this guy to my ongoing series of personal guitar heroes. So who is the mystery man? Well, he's not that big of a mystery!


Chris Llewellyn who is the guitarist for the hip hop artist Asher Roth was on a plane Wednesday that was headed for Los Angeles, when a bit of a ruckus broke out. Apparently a very disgruntled man had all he could take, and shoved a stewardess to the ground. It didn't stop their, as the man claimed to have a bomb, and rushed to the exit door, making an attempt to open it in mid flight. Llewellyn heard the commotion, saw what was going on, and acted.

The 26 year old guitar player tackled the disturbed Delta passenger, and with the help of several other passengers, restrained the man until the plane could safely land. Soon after the man was taken into custody, and no bomb was found on the plane, but thanks to the efforts of Chris and other passengers aboard the Delta plane, any other troubles were quickly avoided. However, the man was not restrained in a perfect scenario. Chris told the Los Angeles Times that everyone was struggling to keep the man pinned, because he was acting insane.

Talk about a hero!

Its almost like there are two worlds in guitar playing. You have the guitarists
who like to use a flat pick, and then you've got the guitar maestros who use
a strict finger picking technique.

Getting the dexterity down for acoustic guitar finger picking can be a bit
of a hassle, and it almost seems as though the fingers don't want to budge.
With some simple exercises, the obstacle can be removed from the road.

Before we continue to explore finger picking, we first need to establish something. In the classical guitar world, where plucking the strings with the fingers is quite common, there is a labeling of the fingers. The labeling is simple, and knowing it will help you to guide yourself when you start working with these passages.

P = Thumb
I = Index finger
M = Middle finger
A = Ring finger



The abbreviations come from the Spanish words of Pulgar, Indicio, Medio, and Anular, and its a very easy system to work with.

By the way, one of the best beginning guitar books has always been
Frederick Noad's First book for the guitar

I even have it in my collection, and it helped me get started with classical technique.

Now that we know that the fingers are labeled as P,I,M, and A, we can apply this identification tool to simple guitar tab.

For this lesson we're going to simply focus on getting our fingers warmed up
with some simple plucking, using P and M for the chords and I for the single
notes. This is also a similar approach to the Beatles song Black Bird.



A word of advice. The key thing here is to take your time, because you want to
put your focus on syncing up the chord changes with the picking. I know that
seems obvious, but the plucking helps to keep a really good rhythm.

Stay tuned, because in the next lesson I'll show you how to put a little more "pep" in it ;)

So in the last guitar finger picking lesson, we learned about the finger labeling system of PIMA. Remember, it was P = thumb, I = index finger, M = middle finger, and A = Ring finger. If you need to, you might want to check out the last finger picking lesson, because this lesson will be an expansion of the piece that we were working on previously.

In the last lesson we were making use of the thumb and middle finger to pluck simple two note chords with, while using the index finger to insert some single note action, which helped to keep a good rhythm and produce a nice melody.

In this lesson we're taking it a step further, by not really doing much more with
the piece.

We're going to divide our chords up a little differently, and add more single note finger picking. By doing this, it will sound a little fancier and have a better rhythm structure. This produces a more interesting appeal, because the arrangement gives us a bass line as well, creating the effect that there are two different guitar layers happening at once, and yet - oh my gosh! its only one guitar player!!

Oh yeah, notice the last note where I goofed and had to erase it later and replace it with the correct note - sorry about that guys. Enjoy.

When I first started getting into recording my own music, I tried every way to find the best free solutions in recording software. I can remember like yesterday, scouring the internet for the most mediocre of recording programs. I would download and use them, but still the results were always limited, and probably because of the times. Now why did I choose to do this? well the reason back then was because I didn't know anything about recording my music, and especially not by way of direct, digital methods, so I didn't want to waste any money at this time.

I can now honestly say that I am a proud owner of Ableton Live, which I use religiously, and would recommend to absolutely anyone. However, the program is a little pricey AND it requires months of experimentation just to get the basics down. Is this recording program worth all the money and effort? yes it is, but a lot of people want something that they can use immediately, without having to spend hundreds of hours devoting their time to reading through training manuals, and investing just as much time by way of trial and error.

I recently found a great solution to this problem. Though this is a guitar
instructional blog, I have no problem talking about recording software or anything related, because recording your own music also benefits the expansion of learning and recording musical art, well....duh!

There is a beat creation program that is now available called Sonic Producer. This beats program, mainly assists a musician in creating music of a hip hop or rap flavor, which you would think would only benefit those who are interested in hip hop music or similar styles. I beg to differ.

I have a drum set, yet I do not have the space, amount of mics, equipment, nor acoustic set up to facilitate the process of recording live drums. This is great if you have a drummer to work with, but if you are an independent guitar player such as myself, and you want an easy solution, then a recording program like Sonic Producer is the way to go.

I do have Ableton Live which is in my opinion the most phenomenal recording program ever to grace the face of the planet, and is pretty much the cream of the crop for beats, but I know that it isn't the cheapest solution. With the release of Sonic Producer, I can seriously say that this is the cheapest solution for creating backing tracks to compose to or jam over that I have ever seen. Sonic Producer contains thousands of samples to work off of, and if you are more traditional, you don't just have to work with new age hip hop beat sounds. Yes, it can deliver exactly what you want, no matter what your style is. Its 30 bucks!!! my God!!

I can't believe this, because anything of this high caliber is always in the multi-hundred dollar price range. I'm really thrilled, because though it can't do what a program such as Reason or Ableton can do, it isn't that far away from the quality of these programs.

I look at it this way, and from the perspective of a mainly lead guitar player - the drums and bass are the bones of the song, and the rhythm guitar is the meat. What's the candy of this operation? lead guitar of course! It doesn't matter what your deal is, you gotta have the bones to make this music thing work. Sure, you can turn the bones into the candy of your masterpiece, but you still gotta have 'em!

There is nothing tastier than creating raw beats to either practice guitar over, or to recording with. How do you think I practice or find inspiration? I gotta have beats and bass!! with my recording program, it takes me five minutes to get a good, basic backing track down. Sometimes I just practice over a set of drum beats, but a lot of times it amounts to a complete song.

I also like the fact that Sonic Producer is so easy to use, and it the necessity of it easily fits in with other plugins or bits of recording software.

If you feel that rhythmic backing tracks are what is lacking in your arsenal, then definitely check out Sonic Producer.

Its typical for any guitar player to want to isolate techniques and work on each one separate from another. For instance, we tend to work on sweep picking, and then when we're finished doing that we'll move on to something like alternate picking. Here's the rub - most professional sounding guitar players will combine such techniques. There are two strong reasons for this. One, it makes playing the advanced stuff on the guitar easier, and two, it gives a guitar player more room for expression.

So in this lesson we're going to work with an outstanding exercise that I use to warm up with personally, that combines two techniques. What are they? alternate picking and economy picking, but with more focus on alternate picking.

One more thing before we get started - I truly believe in the power of limiting yourself to working with just two exercises per technique. One big and one small, and I'll show you exactly how we're going to do that. We're going to build a small exercise, and then gradually turn it into our larger exercise.

Watch the video, then consult the tab.

Its been a little while now, but roughly a month ago I went to the Alice Cooper Theater Of Death show, and I would have written about it then, except that things have been nuts lately. I must say, if you enjoy Alice Cooper's music and you want to go to the best show that you've ever been to in your life - check him out on tour.

I had seen video of him and his famous, eccentric stage shenanigans before, but seeing the master himself live blows everything else out of the water. There was no shock rock vaudeville stone left unturned as he truly commanded the stage like only a mascara running, self resurrecting, bad boy can.

My brother had always described to me the atmosphere of the show so I did have a little bit to go off of, but then when you are actually witnessing the flow of an Alice Cooper concert, you really don't give an F about any other show. Seriously, everything else is just boring to me now, and the man is in his early sixties now, so now is the time to enjoy what he has to offer, because again - his work is made to be spontaneous, or in other words - live!

Don't let the early sixties part fool - Alice is like a fine wine - he gets better with age.

I've got a pretty cool (I think) sweep picking lesson that I just added to GSS.com. It is definitely directed towards beginners, but advanced players can get some good out of it too.

It starts off with a more manageable pattern, and then expands into something really hot at the end. I've been jamming with this one a lot late because I think its a lot of fun to play. Its very simple in sound - nothing too fancy, and its not a barre sweep either, so it may be a little easier for some of you to tackle.

Read through the text guide, which explains how to develop and practice it. If you like it, let me know and we'll work on some more sweeps together! I bet we can get pretty crazy with this stuff ;)

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