Another year in the bag and a great year it was too! Here’s a ramshackle rundown of some stuff in 2007:

Albums

Alter Bridge - ‘Blackbird’: Truly immense epic rock. A great follow up to their debut album.
Robben Ford - ‘Truth’: A modern blues master doing what he does best. Awesome tones and playing.
Cosmosquad - ‘Acid Test’: Dark and brooding fusion rock from Jeff Kollman and Co.
Dream Theater - ‘Systematic Chaos’: Hard, heavy, fast, mind boggling. Well it’s Dream Theater innit.
Symphony X - ‘Paradise Lost’: A surprise hit for me. Great tunes and great playing from Mr Romeo.
Andy James - ‘In The Wake Of Chaos’: A new UK guitar hero? Great technique is commonplace these days, being able to write good music is a different matter. This album has both. Fantastic stuff.

Gigs

Didn’t get to many gigs this year but the ones I did go to rocked mightily. Of course went to see Mr Vai again and throughally enjoyed the new slant he brought this tour playing material from ‘Sound Theories Vol.1 “The Aching Hunger”‘ with duelling violins etc.

Also went to see Ray LaMontagne, stunning life performance. Brilliant songs of course, but his voice is amazing to behold live.

My Music n stuff

Continued to have a pop a Recording Collective tasks when I had the time. Apart from that, not much in the way of recording my own tunes this year, what’s changed there? .

Most of my time of course is dedicated to teaching and continuing to record videos for MasterThatRiff!

Teaching has continued to be a success thanks to the support of my students as does MasterThatRiff thanks to its subscribers and those who manage stumble across it. It’s still a big surprise and a thrill to have had the videos feature in two publications. The Finnish newspaper Keskisuomalainen and the magazine Premier Guitar.

So what’s in store for 2008?

Well we’ve got new albums from Joe Satriani and Paul Gilbert to look forward to as well as a tour with them both! \m/. Also, new Extreme album and tour hopefully!

Exciting new material from Bluesjamtracks featuring transcribed solos from Guthrie Govan. Very much looking forward to stealing some licks .

Hopefully I can continue to record material and maybe if I have the time ( which seems unlikely ) actually start to do ‘proper’ recording!

But I suppose the big project for 2008 is to start recording the pre-recorded lesson material I’ve been thinking about since I started teaching. Now that I’m a bit better at using the video camera ( there is still plenty of room for improvement ).

Watch this space .

Just been checking my webstats for this month and came across a referral to mastertheguitar from a magazine website called www.premierguitar.com.

Looks like the MasterThatRiff series has been picked as a ‘Hotlink’ for January 2008!

Blimey!

Calling all students, calling all students….

I’ve just created a mastertheguitar group on Facebook for those ‘Facebooking’ students who wish to join. Current and ex-students all welcome.

Not sure where we can go with it, but we’ll see

Just found out that good ol Neil has managed to get the finnish article on MasterThatRiff! translated via the Mike Portnoy Forum!!

Full text of Article here.

Big thanks to Neil and Borlag!

Looks like the title ‘Riff’ Of The Week’ is causing problems.

Now I’m still not sure about the legality/copyright issues of using such a potentially common phrase but I shall be renaming my “Riff Of The Week” to “Master That Riff!”.

There will be a short delay before the next riff as I redesign the mastertheguitar.co.uk site and rename all the videos.

I’ve just this very minute finished uploading the first video to a new section over on mastertheguitar.co.uk called Master That Riff!

With this I’ll be ( hopefully regularly and with improving explanations ) looking at some cool and famous riffs for the guitar and going through how to play them .

For the first vid I’ve opted for one of *the* all time riffs, AC/DCs ‘Back in Black’ …\m/.

You can also check the vids out on the new and shiny mastertheguitar youtube channel.

Enjoy!

Chris recently pointed me to a very cool link previewer called Snap and being suitably impressed I installed the Wordpress plugin on the site.

Shiny.

The move seems to have gone rather smoothly. Wordpress does indeed rock mightily. As I mentioned far friendlier to use than Movable Type and, as you can see by the things littering my sidebars , plenty of plugins.

Hopefully everything should look nice in IE, Firefox, Opera on Mac/PC etc. But if anyone spots any probs let me know and I shall see if I can remember any more CSS.

Yes indeed, I have moved markmcguigan.com from my old Blueyonder webspace to the lovely webspace provided by the good people at 1and1 who currently provide space for mastertheguitar.co.uk.

I have also decided to change from using Movable Type to Wordpress for all blogging needs. It is rather nifty, far easier to use and has a load of cool plugins!

Normal service will resume shortly once the nameservers have updated so that markmcguigan.com points at the correct location .