Some cool google vids

People have been talking about video.google.com for a wee while now, but here’s a few little guitar related gems I found on there:

Scott Henderson

John McLaughlin & Paco De Lucia

Greg Howe

Shawn Lane – Power Solos

Shawn Lane Masterclass

Paul Gilbert playing Colorado Bulldog

Billy Sheehan & Paul Gilbert Solo spot

Liquid Tension Experiment Live

Steve Vai

Nuno Bettencourt ( Population 1 )

Become a Guitar Hero with 5 buttons?

Gamespot Guitar Hero Review

Check out the video review.

UKMG-N-PU 5 Prep

In 17 days time I will be attending the 5th glorious annual ukmg get together aka notWigan.

Since my blog has been *very* sparse of late I thought I’d share how I’ve been preparing for the ‘Guitar Idol’ part of the notWigan weekend’s events.

As with every year there has been a flurry of song suggestions and people putting their name down to have a go, understandable as playing a favourite tune up on stage with mates in front of many mates is a blast.

So this year I find myself involved in six songs! So much for taking it easy .

In no particular order, the first is ‘Viking Kong‘ by Racer X. The fleet of finger Mr Paul McCrone came up with the idea to do this piece, a great tongue-in-cheek Yngwie-esque metal piece for two guitars.

I love the harmony guitar parts in this tune, really looking forward to playing it live, just something very cool about playing harmony parts with someone else. It took me a wee while to get this under my fingers, not technically out of reach, just seemed to have ‘brain’ issues at the time I first started to learn it. Now it’s like second nature, well apart from a bitch-ass picking line near the end .

Next on the list is ‘Wanted Dead or Alive‘ by Bon Jovi. Now for the record, I have loved this song from the 1st time I heard it in what must have been 1986/87 so I am pumped to be on acoustic duties for this song.

I’ve always loved playing acoustic though a couple of years practice took me into more and more electric playing. With the addition of a stunning acoustic to my ‘collection’ this year I’ve been getting back into that side of things and looking forward to playing it live, strummy strummy stylee. I’ve known how to play this for a very long time, Bon Jovi tablature book was one of my very first , so didn’t take long to brush up on it. Should rock big style.

Numero three, ‘Sad But True‘ by Metallica. Ah the return of Wigtallica. At last year’s UKMGNPU, myself, JK, Ian, Rick and of course the unstoppable Steve White played Enter Sandman at Guitar Idol which was tremendous fun. This year we ( who I’ve dubbed Wigtallica ) will be tackling Sad But True. Funnily enough like Enter Sandman, I played this in front of my school at some Christmas school bash many many years ago. Dropped tuned mayhem, what a riff!

Once again another tune that was already buried in my brain somewhere, so didn’t take too long to revive even though the chorus parts aren’t that straight forward. To be honest I’ve been spending most of the practice time trying to play it with my guitar slung very low \m/ >Gaybar‘ by Electric Six. I love this tune, great funny lyrics and guitar parts. Myself and JK are playing guitar with Greg on bass and vocals, nevermind the actual playing it’ll be hard enough trying not to pi** myself laughing during this! Thankfully the tune didn’t take long to work out and the vibe is very loose and has a general ‘have fun’ vibe, I intend to relax and enjoy this one. In fact I had originally intended to drop this from my quota, as the song list was getting very long for Guitar Idol and thought some space would allow others to get up and have a go, but looks like we’re going ahead with the 69 odd songs anyway. Mad I say. MAD .

Ok. A couple of UKMGNPUs ago I set myself a personal challenge of getting up and playing ‘For The Love Of God’ by Steve Vai. I have never been more nervous when I got on that stage, to this day I still can’t remember what happened, it was a haze. Since then I have played live for the Ceilidh band many times and I feel that my fear has lessened a bit so this year I decided to kinda go for it again and highlighted my intention to play ‘The Animal‘ by Steve Vai at this year’s Guitar Idol.

It’s weird like others I imagine we all go through days of high confidence in our playing where everything just clicks or days where nothing comes off and experience sheer frustration. The highs and lows like anything else I suppose.

When I opted to do this piece I was in one of those confident days . Since then I’ve had ups and downs when attempting to play this. There are a couple of specific areas that just seem to be foxing me. Now, getting up and playing is great fun, one of the best feelings in fact and I do look forward to that but personally I like to get things ‘right’ if not for others then for definitely 100% for me. It’s a fine line to tread. Once you nail something then, for me, that’s when you can sit back slightly and enjoy the moment as it’s under your fingers as they say.

So another personal challenge . One that I *will* nail and have great fun playing for everyone.

Last we have a beautiful classical duet piece entitled ‘Cancion Arabe‘ by Enrique Granados. As another little ‘branching out of the comfort zone’ move I volunteered to play some classical with Matt for the Sunday chilled acoustic session. Matt managed to find this beautiful duet fur us to play and I’m very keen to play it, whole duet thing again .

It’ll be a challenge to me in a few ways. Firstly in reading the music when learning the piece. I learned to read music when I studied Clarinet at primary school but it has become very very ropey since then, so reading the notation for this will be great fun and a good way to brush up on these skills.

Secondly, playing my nylon string ‘for real’ if you will. I bought my nylon string years ago and had a brief phase of playing classical pieces and attempting Flamenco in my usual self taught no clear path way. This will really focus my playing in that genre even though I have no formal technique, hey I don’t even have any right hand nails .

Lastly the timing of the piece is very loose and it’ll be interesting to see how we interact and get into the ‘feel/mood’ of the music when playing it live. No drums here matey, just two guys with two guitars .

So fair bit of waffling there but there is one thing for sure, I always look forward to the NPUs, meeting everyone for a chat over a beer or two and rocking out to the stunning depth of talent of UKMG’s members during the Guitar Idol ‘concert’.

Roll on the 18th!