Courtesy of Jesse Sterling Harrison... 

Check out these six electric guitar designs covering price points from budget to premium...

If you visit any guitar shop, chances are there are 30 or more models of electric guitar hanging on the wall. Check out a website like Musician’s Friend and that number balloons to 1,200. You can’t test them all!

Bound by the need to buy stuff that sells, retailers may not have many of the most interesting designs in stock, preferring to stick with the basics and throw one or two radical instruments up in the window just to intrigue passing musicians. How do you get a playable guitar with a cool design for a fair price?



Budget
Dean ML XM


The beauty of electric guitars: you can get a hardcore electric axe with through-body stringing, twin humbucking pickups, and a design inspired by BC Rich and Gibson classics all for only $159. If you’re going low-price, why not go low-price in style? Put up those devil horns and rock out with this beast for the cost of three tanks of gas in your dad’s Silverado.

ESP LTD F-10

It’s amazing what you get for under $200 in guitars these days: a single coil in the neck position with a humbucker down below, dual-cutaway body with a spidery sci-fi design, and playability beyond the price. This ESP will take beginner guitarists far beyond the typical starter guitar. And we hope you like black, because that’s the only color it comes in.



Midrange
ESP LTD EC-401


ESP has another high-value offering: the LTD EC-401. A fast, dual-humbucking electric with a high-tech nut and high-gain pickups, this Les Paul knockoff promises high-speed picking and both the look and tone of Gibson’s classic for a fraction of the cost.

Fender Classic Series '60s Stratocaster



This is still one of the ultimate versatile rock tools and, along with Gibson’s Les Paul, the standard by which other guitars are judged. This '60s edition features the unmatched combination of Fender’s alder body, maple neck, and rosewood fretboard, making it light, toney, and playable. The aged hardware and gorgeous finish on this one make it a must-have at this price point.



Premium
Gibson Firebird Non-Reverse Limited Edition

 
A unique but vintage look. The warm and full sound of a full mahogany neck. And the opportunity to own an instrument that’s usually big bucks at auctions. The Firebird is back, equipped with a SlimTaper Gibson neck and two mini humbuckers. Suitable for blues, classic rock, and modern sounds of all kinds, grab this rarity before the 2015 run is sold out forever.

Ernie Ball Music Man Steve Morse Signature Model


If you’re in the market for a premium guitar, this one bears a look. Besides that jaw-dropping finish, this monster also brings a standard Floyd Rose tremolo system and an adjustable truss rod that can be turned without loosening the strings.



Other cool features include a poplar body and a translucent pickguard so the full sheen of that Ferrari-quality paint job can shine through. And, of course, it has a blistering fast maple neck with a rosewood board.

Jesse Sterling Harrison is an author, recording artist, and part-time farmer. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, three daughters, and a herd of ducks.

Courtesy of Rob Lanterman... 

Most of us tend to fear the unpredictable. Improvisation is the embodiment of unpredictability in music, but you most certainly shouldn't fear it...

The unknown can be a cold, dark, and unfamiliar place, even though it holds a wealth of fresh ideas waiting to be found. But venturing into the unknown is always a large risk to take. It's this risk that tends to keep musicians from exploring creativity in every possible way. Instead, they'll stay in the warm comfort of familiarity. They'll repeat the same standard licks heard all across pop music, turn down risky career ventures, and generally stay away from opportunities that may present them with failure.

It sounds like a terribly boring way to approach music – and it is. It doesn't have to be like that, though. With these five tips, you'll be on the way to exploring improvisation without any fear.


1. Create a plan of attack
The best improvisers venture into the unknown with seemingly effortless vigor and bravery. However, it only "looks" this way because of the hours of practice they've put in beforehand.

Improvisation is not all about throwing the music rules out the window and diving in head first. Even the best free-form jazz and fusion musicians have some sort of plan. There's a difference between mindless noise and meaningful improvisation, and having a course of action will help you fall in the latter.

If you're new to improvising, ask yourself, "What do I want to accomplish with this music? Am I doing it to find new ideas? Tell a musical story? Do I want the music to end in a certain fashion?" Whatever ideas /questions you many have, write them down.

It's perfectly fine to have some basic goals to start from. Those initial goals won't destroy the nature of improvisation. In fact, it will only help improve it. When you're not worrying about where the music will end up, your brain can remain in the moment. As a result, you can better focus on the music itself.


2. Learn to trust your instincts
While a plan will help ease anxiety, don't go overboard with it. At some point, you'll have to trust your instincts. Despite the planning you've done, forks in the road will come up. Sure, you could freak out, but that won't benefit the music at all. Instead, have faith in your abilities. Dive into the music and try not to worry about the end result.

Research shows that unconscious reasoning (as in our gut instincts) delivers more positive results. Even if it doesn't work out, you got to an interesting place musically that you probably never would have otherwise. The thing about creativity is that we never really know where it will take us. By trusting in our instincts, though, we can be confident that our creativity will take us somewhere special.


3. Go overboard on idea generation
The whole point of creativity is to create something new. Improvisation is great for this, but you won't create many ideas if you stifle some of them. Don't be selective with idea generation. Good or bad, ideas are ideas. Allow yourself to have as many as possible.

Idea generation is a simple exercise in probability. If you only have two total ideas, the chances of one of them being a really good idea are far less than if you had a thousand total ideas.

Try not to criticize your ideas. Just spit them out regardless of what they are. This is especially helpful when practicing with a jamming /soloing partner. Perhaps an idea you thought was bad is a gem to someone else. Improvisation is a team activity. You never know what someone else can do with your discarded thoughts.


4. Have fun with experimentation
Remember, this is music. It's supposed to be fun! Adopting a playful approach to music will keep your mind limber and open to ideas. This will also help you separate the good ideas from the bad.

For example, if you're recording a segment of improvisation and then listening back to it over and over again, it could go two ways. If you're dreading the process, you won't listen attentively and just want to get through it. Having fun with it, though, will make it a pleasurable experience and you'll find joy in listening to the music, picking out good ideas, and fixing the bad ones.


5. Never give in and Never give up
What it comes to improvisation, perfection is impossible. There will be good days, and there will be bad days. The only way the good days will pay off is if you actually have them. That won't happen unless you try in the first place. Regardless of the outcome, it's important to strive forth and remain determined.

You may have a bad week, month, or maybe a year of music. The good ideas are out there, and it's going to take some hard work to find them, but you can absolutely do it.

Anthony Cerullo is a nomadic freelance writer and keyboard player. In his spare time, he can be found reading, hiking mountains, and lying in hammocks for extended periods of time.

NEW: QwikLicks Series - Video (014)

The latest QwikLicks video is, "Mark Knopfler Licks" Available in the FREE members area. Includes a PDF handout!

QwikLicks are a FREE lesson series for all membership levels at Creative Guitar Studio.com. Lessons in the QwikLicks Series will run through a short collection of guitar licks in all kinds of different playing styles...

Episode 014 runs through four Mark Knopfler style licks. The licks include two examples of licks you'd find in "Sultans of Swing," and two as you'd find from "Lady Writer." Each lick explores different concepts from melodic phrasing to pedal-tones. An emphasis is placed upon Knopfler's use of melody and phrasing devices like legato and bending. 

Sign into the website with your free members account to watch the lesson, and be sure to download the PDF lesson handout. 

If you're not currently a FREE member of the website, sign up today!

Courtesy of Rob Lanterman... 

Wanna be a successful musician? Stay humble and keep a few important things in mind...

This last spring, I watched the band Culture Abuse play the Boise Knitting Factory opening for The Story So Far. Sometime during the set, vocalist David Kelling addressed the crowd, comprised mostly of starstruck teenagers waiting to watch TSSF, with a speech unlike any I would expect to hear at a show that big. “Hey, nobody in a band is better than you!” Kelling said with a wide grin on his face, and you could tell he meant it. “Anything you see us doing on this stage, you can do, too.”

His message was important and one I’d love to hear from artists at any level of success. Memories come to mind of local support bands leaving once they play (and taking all of their friends with them), or stories of touring artists demanding fans to refill their drinks, as if fans should feel lucky to be in their presence (a good friend of mine actually was on the fan end of this).



Promoters are doing you a favor by booking you
Whether you’re a headliner or local support, promoters put a lot of effort, time, and money into getting people out to your performance. Often, this is at the risk of losing money or not breaking even. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be upset with promoters who do bad jobs, but respect that they’ve gone out of their way to book you.

Most promoters I know, “big time” or not, don’t make their living off of booking, especially for bands like yours and mine. If you’re a local artist, thank everyone who allows you onto their events and try to maintain a good relationship with them. Do your best to get as many people out as you can and promote yourself to the best of your ability.

If you’re from out of town, be grateful that someone went out of his or her way to get you in front of people. Whether you have a draw or not, there’s still work that goes into setting a show up. A promoter often books artists on chance their show will be profitable, not a guarantee of it.



Everyone you play with is your equal
It’s natural to talk about other bands behind closed doors and to dislike their music or their personalities sometimes. But as a musician, a performer, and an entertainer, they're your equals. If you’re a local band, every other local you play with is part of your local scene. They're your peers whether you like it or not.

It's my belief that you should try to catch at least part of each artist’s set. You, in all honesty, are a part of their draw and their audience. If you can’t do that or are leaving early for some reason, at least try to talk to them a little bit or grab some merch.

If you’re on a touring circuit, I’d argue the same actions are good, even though they're not always essential. It can be draining to watch a local band every night for two weeks in a row, especially when they often aren’t very good. And, of course, you could have been driving for eight hours and haven’t eaten since last night, so you’ll want some food before you play. But at least thank the locals for playing and for bringing people to see your sorry self. You’re not any better than them because you’re from out of town, and they showed up to help you have an audience.



Fans and show-goers are the fuel for your career
People who watch you and buy your music are the ones who keep your career going. You could be the most talented musician ever, but without people to watch you or buy your music (i.e., no demand), you’d just be playing for your stuffed animals forever.

How many venues have shut down due to people not coming out to shows? How many tours have been unsuccessful because people weren’t buying merch or sticking around to watch the bands? Fans and showgoers are just as important as the artists they go to watch. So when they’re watching you, thank them for coming out and say it like you mean it. Showgoers being there isn’t something you deserve – it’s something you’re very lucky to have.

To the self-entitled musicians: do you see yet that there's no room for your ego in this game? Every player contributes and is essential for a win. Everyone offers the scene and industry something valuable and necessary to keep it going.

Rob Lanterman is a writer and musician currently living in Boise, ID. He also runs Hidden Home Records, which is the love of his life but also a gigantic money sucker.

Courtesy of Jesse Sterling Harrison... 

Musicians' jobs keeps getting broader. You might be a guitar player, but you’ll probably end up a producer /engineer /booking agent, and chief negotiator, too. One other thing you’ll probably be called upon to do sooner or later is write some lyrics... 

Even cover bands usually work in a few originals, and most bands that make it big focus on writing all of their own material.

Lots of players bring riffs and ideas to the table but don’t feel as comfortable with the written word. How do you start writing lyrics, especially with no background in poetry or prose beyond writing research papers in school? Try these methods on for size.


1. Don't write too much
Yes, writing great lyrics is hard, but to hit on something great, you have to just keep doing it. Creating effective, appropriate lyrics isn't as hard as you think. Why? Well, for starters, you don’t need that many words.

Take a look at the lyric sheets of some of your favorite songs. Unless your main genre is hip-hop, the wordiest of pop styles, you might be surprised to find that the average song has between 100 and 300 words. These aren't novels; the music carries much of the narrative weight.

Lyrics play their role, but they need to be well chosen and hard hitting, not voluminous and overly explanatory. Three or four paragraphs, or less, about a topic you’re passionately interested in? You’ve got this.


2. Concentrate on the music
How do you start writing lyrics? Start with the music and listen to it. Remove distractions. Turn off the phone. Really listen, and see where the music takes you.

Most songwriters don’t stand around saying, “I’d like to write a song about that fake robbery at the Olympics.” Instead, the music carries them somewhere. In a meditative mental exercise, they follow that path to a real emotion, experience, or story that they relate to. If you relate to the story of your song, so will listeners. If one piece doesn’t take you anywhere in particular, find one that does and work on that.

3. Turn words into notes
While you’re following the narrative your music creates, words might spring to life with a melody already attached to them. Great! These little snippets, just a few seconds long, tend to form the vocal “hooks” that make songs catchy.

If that doesn’t happen, no problem. Just speak your lyrics over the music. Try slower or faster tempos. Vary the rhythm of your speech. Sooner or later, a melody takes hold. And once it starts, it’s easier to excavate the rest of what’s lurking in your subconscious and create an entire song.


4. Emancipate your emphasis
Don’t be bound by the accents in a spoken word. Using a delightful get-out-of-jail-free card we call artistic license, you have blanket permission to change the pronunciation of any word you like. Just ask Eminem, who can rhyme things with orange by bending pronunciations.

If nothing in the dictionary seems quite right, you can go ahead and invent a word. For example, if you’re writing about a confused, and possibly stoned, individual, you can write:

He might have marijuana

And then rhyme it:

And he might have brain trauma

Neither of those is a real word, but their meanings are clear in context. As long as the listener can grasp what you’re driving at, it’s all good.

5. Don't worry about rhyming
You can write in rhymed couplets in which line one has a similar cadence to line two, and the words that end the lines rhyme. You can also write without rhyming, and if you do, your lyrics will feel spontaneous, as though the singer is having a conversation. One is not better than the other. The important thing to remember is that there are no rules to lyric writing other than to not steal copyrighted work. After that, be guided only by what sounds amazing.

6. Find the inherent richness in your lyrics and bring it out
Literary devices delight English teachers. Symbolism: it rains when a character is sad. Good cowboys wear white hats. Evil knights wear dirty armor. Foreshadowing: some small thing early in the narrative gives a clue to what’s coming next. Allegory: the text points to some hidden meaning or widely known story. Satire, metaphor, political statements – the list goes on.

All of these strategies can be deployed in your lyrics, but it’s easier to tease out what’s already there than to try to clumsily insert them. Of course, your lyrics can simply say exactly what they mean, but richer lyrics that have more than one meaning are more interesting for the listener and tend to encourage repeated plays.

For example, you might find you’ve written a song about losing your job. Is there any parallel between your experience and those of others? This might be a time for a political statement. The content is already there in your song; it just needs to be polished a little.


7. Lead your listeners to meaning
Most pop music listeners don't want to have to “deconstruct” lyrics for meaning unless they can be made extremely thought-provoking or so bizarre that they startle people and beg further investigation. Being just slightly enigmatic is a more consistently successful strategy. By using imagery that clearly points to your meaning, you can make the listeners aware of what’s taking place without beating them over the head with it. That’s poetry. For example:

Taxi in the rain,

And half an empty bed

Is a little bit more artful than:

He left me

I am crying

But no meaning is lost; what’s going on is still obvious. And attacking it at an angle is more likely to conjure real emotion in your listeners, because it has images that people can relate to. And relating is what lyric writing is all about.

Courtesy of Jesse Sterling Harrison... 

If you’re a violinist, tone comes from wood and your fingers, and that’s it. If you play electric guitar, there are several more stages in the signal chain that run from your fingers to the listener’s ear... 

Pedals are so important that many players would rather use a house amp with their own pedals than bring their own amp along and leave the stomp-boxes at home. But there are so many to choose from, and you can’t buy the whole store. By category, here are some of the best choices in guitar pedals, with a budget option and another choice if cost is no object.

Wah-wah pedals: 

Dunlop Crybaby

Luckily for you guitarists, in this category, the price range isn’t huge. While there are wah-wah pedals that retail for $200 and up, the old reliable Dunlop gets the job done for under $100 and can be dropped from a plane without effect.

SoulPress


Meanwhile, just slightly upmarket, the Hotone Soul Press offers multi-functionality with volume and expression modes and “cool LED lights,” according to the manufacturer.




Distortion pedals:
 
Big Muff

Two iconic tones good enough to plug right into a mixing board. Two satisfyingly retro paint jobs. One unit known for its extreme adjustability that will have you marking the sweet spots on each knob with a pencil.

Ibanez Tube Screamer Overdrive



And another one known for… screaming. At more than twice the price of the excellent Big Muff, you’d better really love that Tube Screamer tone. And lots of players do.




Delay/reverb pedals: 

Behringer Digital Reverb DR600

At only $39, this Behringer unit is the steal of the article and one of the best buys out there. It sounds clean, clear, and is highly adjustable.

Strymon BlueSky


What do you get for $299 with the Strymon? Lots of modes, including modulation, “shimmer,” three different reverb modes, damping controls for EQ, and on and on – a full reverb studio suite.



Harmonizer pedals: 

Behringer Ultra Shifter
 Yet another solid, low-cost product from Behringer, the Ultra Shifter allows for all sorts of harmonizing effects, from close harmonies to an octave down or an octave up.

Eventide Harmonizer H9


The monster H9 pedal, by comparison, does pretty much everything: its secret weapon is that it comes loaded with presets from other Eventide pedals and has room to load in more, so it’s endlessly customizable.


Whammy pedal: 

DigiTech Whammy


This metalhead and modern-rock favorite creates high screams and note-bending effects, and we can’t find another one like it. You may have to go to the used listings for the original, but it’s probably a steal at $100, since there’s no generic version. Pick one of these up and get your whammy on!

Vibrato Pedal:

Boss VB-2W Vibrato Effects



Jesse Sterling Harrison is an author, recording artist, and part-time farmer. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, three daughters, and a herd of ducks.

GUITAR BLOG INSIDER...

MUSIC & MONEY:
Why So Many Musicians are Always So Broke?
 
In today's market it's not enough to just be a master musician, you also need to be a master-thinker when it comes to the in's and out's of money and your music career... 

Learn how improve your thinking and shape your own processes involved with making money as a musician. 

For every musician, events can occur daily that (without the proper financial skills), may lead to poor choices and bad outcomes. Each bad financial decision could lead to a loss of income for professional players. A more comprehensive plan is required by musicians in order to approach their musical endeavors more productively. 

With enhanced ways of being financially creative and by using a refined system of personal financial leadership, musicians will not only communicate better with themselves, but also with others when it comes to money related career issues. Learn the core principles that can help shape you into a highly successful musician financially.

Why So Many Musicians are Always So Broke?