Is that a new guitar I see…?

I searched, low and high, far and wide and lo it came to pass that I found it.

After many many years I now finally own an Ibanez Jem GMC!

To celebrate the arrival of the GMC I decided to make a quick recording of myself playing Vai’s ‘For the Love of God’ with the guitar. As I had learned it for Wigan anyways I thought I’d share it, the mp3 of the recording can be found here.

For The Love Of God

After learning this Steve Vai piece for Wigan I decided to make a quick recording of my ‘version’ :).

The song was recorded over a backing track with the main guitar being my GMC going through the Carvin Legacy miked up with a Shure SM58, wah courtesy of the fabulous Jim Dunlop 535Q. Miked amp was fed through the Behringer mixer into Cubase SX for slight tweaking.

For The Love Of God [Download MP3 - 5.62MB]

UKMG-NPU-3: Report

What a weekend!

I’m still buzzing after a weekend of chatting, drinking, guitar noodling, gear demos, workshops and of course live playing.

On Saturday night, the ‘main’ event of the weekend, the Guitar Idol performances got underway with regulars of UKMG showing how seriously talented they are by playing through a multitude of fantastic songs with little or no rehearsal at all. I’m still amazed at the sheer musicianship on display - and the mighty Steve White who played drums for the whole evening!

As mentioned previously I was down to play a couple of Vai related tunes, ‘For the Love of God’ and ‘Tobacco Road’. Getting up onstage to perform ‘For the Love of God’, I was struck by an attack of the nerves and played through the song in a haze. I fluffed up at various points but thankfully on the whole the performance came across quite well :). ‘Tobacco Road’ on the other hand was simply fun!, playing the guitar parts in unison with Clive was a blast!

A big thankyou to James, Greg, Rick, Clive and Steve for providing a seriously professional backing! and to all who made the weekend what it was, unforgettable :D.

You can find my pics of the weekend’s event here

UKMG-NPU-3

And so another guitar related event is nearly apon us. This weekend many guitarists from around the UK and beyond will be congregating in Wigan for the UKMG National.

This will be my second time attending and I am very much looking forward to it. This year, apart from the usual workshops and gear demos, there will be a ‘Guitar Idol’ performance on the Saturday night where UKMG regulars will take to the stage to perform a song.

I will be one of these poor souls, getting up to perform a couple of my favourite Vai related songs, David Lee Roth’s ‘Tobacco Road’ from the classic album Eat ‘em and Smile and ‘For the Love of God’ from Vai’s ground breaking Passion and Warfare. I am both excited and nervous at the prospect of playing these songs in front of many other guitarists, though I decided to ‘go for it’ as a personal challenge and provide a focus for my playing, which can only benefit me in the long run.

I have been fiddling around with more video footage from this year’s Jemfest and have now uploaded some footage of “our very own magnificently-maned Clive Murray” ( Copyright Guitarist Magazine ). The 26 MB *.wmv file ( located here ) is a video of Clive performing “Until the End of the World” from his solo CD. Enjoy.

Update 22/11/03 - Video of Clive has now been removed to free up some needed webspace, sorry!