Alexi Laiho is a pretty popular guitarist these days so I thought I would go through some of his stuff that I have been learning. Alexi likes to use a technique called sweep picking. Although it is a “picking” technique, it takes both hands to do this guitar trick.
Sweep picking is like strumming a chord, [...]

A big announcement at this year’s NAMM Show was that of the release of the Stratocaster VG, Fender’s first modeling guitar. After spending a few days researching Gibson’s digital guitar, I figured I might as well take a look at what Fender is offering.
The Guitar
This guitar starts off like any other American Stratocaster. It has [...]

Although Chuck Schuldiner is known by many, I really think he is one of the most underrated guitarists of the past 50 years. He is considered by many to the founding father of death metal. Chuck was the founding member of the band Death. In fact, the bad was more or less just a front [...]

I have had several people ask me “Have you heard Don Ross??” after learning that I love to play guitar. Well aside from others asking me that question, no, I had never heard of him. I finally decided to check him out, and I wish I had earlier. Don Ross is a Canadian guitar player [...]

Zakk Wylde, love him or hate him, has developed quite the product empire. Despite never really breaking into the mainstream with Black Label Society, even as much as other similar bands like Lamb of God and Children of Bodom, Zakk has an amazing cult following. Because of this he has been able to build up [...]

Create Digital Music has a post on Ubuntu Studio. Apparently it is an all-in-one package of audio/video/imaging tools for Ubuntu. Right now it sounds like it is a standalone distribution. This is interesting to me because I actually use Ubuntu as my main OS. I will be giving this a test drive April for sure [...]

Biréli Lagrène is an amazing Jazz guitarist. He sort of plays his own breed of gypsy jazz and I like it. You hear me talking on here from time to time about “acoustic shredding”. Well this guy can do it… but jazzified.
First emerging as a 13-year-old guitar prodigy in the 80s, Lagrène was often compared [...]