Summer Song - No Internet

Hey Shred Fiends! I've been away for most of the Summer in France and managed to survive no internet access for a whole month...the first few days of cold turkey were tough, but then I started doing some really weird things...

For example instead of surfing the net looking for new music, tabs, tips, guitar porn and forum chat I treated myself to a Korg Pandora and grabbed my trusty old strat (my first real guitar that I bought in '89) and sat down to actually play! So what was I doing? Well I spent quite a bit of time setting up loops and jamming around neo-classical type phrases using the harmonic and melodic minor and some of their various modes. There's no substitute for practising with a beat and the Pandora is very cool for that! I also explored playing over different types of beat, reggae, hip hop, dance, etc and had some amazing fun using the guitar synth patch. It was loads of fun to plug the pandora in the hi-fi at a post surf party, crank up a hip hop beats and knock some Scott Henderson style licks...nobody complained at all! In fact people were dancing. Wow, why is it when I changed to a metal backing track and started to 'shred' everybody shouted at me...

I met lots of French folks who really love their shred guitar, many of you probably know that guys like the late great Shawn Lane, Ron Thal and Greg Howe are really well known in France, no coincidence that Ron has been playing those awesome Vigier guitars for years, not to mention Shawn Lane. My copy of Guthrie Govan's 'Erotic Cakes' was listened to intently by many French shredders and surfers too. I expect that a few orders from France have been received at http://www.cornfordrecords.com/shop.php

Of course I was spreading the Shred Academy word too, so maybe we have a few new forum members too.

Anyway now that I'm back home it's time to kick off my new covers band, Metropolis, so I'll be sharing some thoughts on that of the coming months.

More importantly, after 9 years from concept to completion, on the 12th Sept I'm taking delivery of my own design guitar from the genius luthier and all round good guy, Colin Keefe http://www.keefeguitars.co.uk/ watch this space! I hope I like now it's finshed - EEEK!

Finally, over the coming weeks and months I'll be recounting my conversations with all sorts of interesting guitar related folk.

See ya

Shred Bloggs