Just wanted to pass on a quick recommendation of jazztrumpetlicks.com, a trumpet site by Greg "Sweets" London. Yes, I know, it's a trumpet site; well, we can learn from players of all instruments, and there are some very cool ideas here in "lick" form.

I always play with a thumbpick, and have for decades. I get asked about this a lot because it's extremely unusual for someone who doesn't do a lot of acoustic fingerpicking. I believe the thumbpick can be a very good choice for electric guitarists, and here I'm going to say why.

I see a lot of students asking how they can improve their playing, what they should be working on or which books to study. What many seem to forget is that we don't work the guitar; we play it, and we should just play with it sometimes.

I'm very pleased to report thtat since I made it freely available exactly a month ago, Scale and Arpeggio Resources has been downloaded 1046 times. If you don't already have your copy, get it here!

Just a quick post to mention the hybrid picking exercise I've been working on for the past few days. I'm actually playing different variations on this up and down but I'm sure you can figure those out for yourself.

I've been revisiting some old jazz tunes lately and, yet again, remembered how hard Monk's tune Epistrophy makes you think. In this post I'm going to describe some approaches that try to avoid "running the changes" and instead find scales that "work" over whole sections of the tune.

Something a bit different this time -- I've collected a few instructional videos for pianists that I think guitarists could learn a lot from.

I've decided to make the electronic version of my book on scales and arpeggios available free to download, forever, under a Creative Commons license. The paper version is still available to buy as normal.

I've put up two new audio-only tracks on YouTube demonstrating different approaches to outside playing.

I've created a video for my piece "New Work VI" and uploaded it to YouTube. I'm hoping this will be the first of quite a few as I'm enjoying playing with the video side of things and it's inspiring me to finish some pieces that have been languising for a while.