This post contains a collection of quotations from some excellent books. You can find other roundups of the best books about different fascinating topics in the Best Books and Quotations section. If you have the Kindle app, the Location links at the end of each quotation will take you straight to the relevant section.When I […]
Read more »The idea of learning to sing, for many of us, is more than a little bit scary. For me, it seemed like a somewhat magical skill that some people simply had (and which I lacked). I learned very early to avoid Karaoke, and never even did much singing in the shower. A friend of mine […]
Read more »One of the most common warnings you’ll hear when you teach yourself guitar is that “you’ll learn bad habits.” I can’t deny this is true. Without a guitar teacher, it’s easy to fall into a number of traps like playing too fast or too slow, using bad positioning with your hands, and so on. If […]
Read more »A couple months ago now, I decided I wanted to learn a thing or two about music. I evaluated different music learning tools, and ended up deciding to start my quest by learning the guitar. I expected that learning music would be interesting and perhaps a bit of fun, but nothing prepared me for the […]
Read more »Last week, I began using the guitar-teaching game Rocksmith as I prepared to write my review of it. Pretty early on, I noticed something strange: no matter how hard I focused on the little notes moving towards the line, the game was counting them as “misses.” What was going on? Was the game broken? Was […]
Read more »Learning the guitar is hard. Or so you may have been told. Nobody likes endless drills. Most guitar classes might as well be boot camp for your fingers. Imagine what it’d be like if there were a fun way to learn, instead, where you start by playing real songs that you recognize on day one. Guitar […]
Read more »One of the toughest things I’ve encountered in learning music so far is just how fast music feels like it is moving when I am first attempting to play something. It doesn’t matter if I’m playing scales to a metronome or notes to a song: my brain is having a hard time coordinating all that movement […]
Read more »After a week of exploring music, I needed to start getting into the business of learning how to create music if I wanted to make real progress. There are tons of educational tools out there all aimed at musicians, especially at guitar players. I needed to decide which of them, if any, were right for […]
Read more »As I prepared to learn to become musical in just one year, I needed to figure out where to start. Here’s the inside look at how to go about the very first stages of learning any new skill. Without a doubt, preparation is the most important part of learning anything. Diving straight into doing is like putting […]
Read more »An Audacious Goal My goal is to compose and produce a song (with my own vocals and an instrument) within 12 months, starting from musical scratch. There. I said it. I’ve flip-flopped on this more than a few times in the past couple months. Finally I decided that I simply had to do it. Music has been […]
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