If you’re a regular visitor to the website you’ll notice that I’ve made some changes recently.

The site has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years and now has far more pages and sub-pages of information than I can reasonably list in a single menu so I’ve decided to simplify things a little and feature links to the eight pages that are most often visited right at the top of the page. In the right-hand sidebar you’ll now find a menu called “Find Everything Here” with links to the site map (a menu of all my pages) and the blog archives (a list of all my blog entries by month). There’s also search bar (which I may eventually change this from a local search to a site-specific search with Google) and a few outgoing links to related websites. While this approach seems to keep much of the information here hidden away I hope that it will keep the layout cleaner and make the site easier to navigate.

As I find time I’ll be addressing a few details such as some text alignment issues I’m having, adding links to related pages within the site and reinstating the information that was originally contained in the custom sidebar the each page used to have. For some reason WordPress 2.5 totally screwed that up!

I have faith that you can find your way to the important stuff easily and that you’ll also find your way to the site’s nooks and crannies with just a little exploration. Let me know if you run into any problems!

July is just around the corner and you are invited to join The Jazztet for two lunchtime concerts at Ohio University. If the weather is nice we’ll be playing on the green at the West Portico of Memorial Auditorium. Bring a friend, a couple of chairs, and something to munch on. In case of rain, we’ll see you in the Front Room inside Baker Center.

The details:
Tuesday July 8 2008 12:00pm
Noon Jazz Series with The Jazztet
West Portico of Memorial Auditorium or The Front Room in case of rain.
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

Tuesday July 29 2008 12:00pm
Noon Jazz Series with The Jazztet
West Portico of Memorial Auditorium or The Front Room in case of rain.
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701

I need to figure out a way to create a database of songs and tag them the musical and technical challenges they present. For example, today one of my students wanted to work on “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz. This song is an excellent device for students working on mastering their E-form barre chords (since 4 out of the 5 chords in the song use this shape) and eighth- and sixteenth-note rhythms. Other examples of songs that I use to help teach specific techniques include “Dust in the Wind” for pinch-pattern Travis picking and “Wildwood Flower” for improving right-hand string skipping. A lot of the time I can remember these things but sometimes I can’t. I have to do I little updating of the website this Summer, so I may see if it’s possible to use WordPress to tag some of these ideas and make them searchable, though it would be even better as an off-line database since I don’t have internet access in my main teaching studio at Studio E Music.