Hands down, the best thing you can do for your guitar playing & musicianship is this: Stop looking up TABs. Stop searching YouTube for tutorials. Start learning songs BY EAR. But Josh! I’ve Never Transcribed Before! Where Do I Start? Photo by Josh Sorenson on Unsplash About ten years back, I switched from multi-blade Gillette razors to old […]

hate reading? skip ahead to the video For years now, I’ve been using (and recommending) the app Transcribe for people trying to learn songs by ear. It’s still a decent choice, but with each passing year, it gets a little further behind the times (and its interface has always struck me as unreasonably ugly). Lately […]

When we talk about music theory, we tend to get spun up in our minds. What notes are in a Bbm7b5? What scale can I use to solo over Fmaj7#11? But at its core, music theory is about giving names to commonly occurring things, and using those names to do two main things: communicate with […]

photo by Daniel Chekalov I’m a guitarist for hire—a sideman. Many of the potential gigs I get calls for involve singing harmony. Sadly, I have to turn those down, because I am awful at singing harmony. Given a clearly defined part and ample time to practice it, I can manage some basic vocal harms.  But […]

[In a hurry? Watch the video at 1.5x speed to get the gist.] Down the street from my apartment they’re building some new condos. For an entire year workers have been coming and going. But to a layperson like me, there’s been no visible progress.  Then, all of a sudden, in the last couple months, […]