John Horne Guitar Studio

Music Around The Web 03-07-2013

John Horne — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:05:57 +0000

Adam Rafferty’s 10 Tips for Healthy Guitar Practicing
POST OF THE WEEK! Please read and take this to heart. Tip number 9 is especially powerful!

Ron Carter Masterclass at Loyola
I’ve never heard Carter speak before. Interesting video. Some of the Q&A seemed a bit combative.

Robert Fripp’s Diary
I never really got into Fripp or King Crimson, but I have always found him fascinating.

History As Symphony: The African-American Experience In Jazz Suites
Awesome music from the giants. I’m an especially big fan of Oliver Nelson.

10 Great Johhny Marr Riffs
I’m not very familiar with his entire catalog, but I love everything I’ve heard form Marr. See this article also.

Tom Dempsey’s 50 Jazz Masters Licks from TrueFire
Tom is a amazing player and teacher. If you’re into jazz guitar this is definitely worth the price.

Flatfoot 56 “Black Thorn”
Not my usual thing, but I’m really kinda digging Flatfoot 56.

Blues Junior Modification and Comparison

John Horne — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:08:47 +0000

I’ve been using Fender Blues Junior amps (I have two of them) since about 2007. I’ve never had any problems with them but decided that after seven years of use on the original tubes it might be a good idea to have them looked at. I’d also heard a lot of great things about the Eminence 12″ Cannabis Rex as a replacement speaker for the Blues Junior, so decided to pick one up and have it installed in one amp while the amp was in the shop.

I asked Athens area guitar and amp tech Jon Fluharty* to do the work for me. He tested the tubes and found out that all of the preamp tubes were pretty well shot and the power tubes were severely mismatched. I’m not at all knowledgeable when it comes to tubes so I went with Jon’s recommendations that he said would give me a bit more more headroom and better clarity. The tubes installed are as follows: V1 JJ 5751, V2 Sovtek 12AX7WC, V3 Sovtek 12AX7WC Balanced, and V4/V5 Sovtek EL84M. Jon also biased the amp and then took care of breaking in the new speaker by hooking it up to an old Jeff Beck recording and just letting it play for a good 40 hours. Who else would you rather break in your speakers?

There are a ton of mods out there for the Blues Juniors, and although I didn’t ask for this, Jon went ahead and made a couple of tone stack modifications. In the stock amp, it is impossible to completely attenuate the mid frequencies. Jon corrected this so that the mids can be turned down completely if desired. He also beefed up the response on the bass knob. Where once the bass was anemic and made little difference below a setting of about 8, it now has a huge bass response and with lot more even control.

Since I now have both a stock amp and the newly modified one sitting next to each other, I attempted to create a video to demo the differences. Please note that the camera’s internal microphone did not do a very good job of picking up just how much difference there is in the the low-end response and the noticeable volume boost the modded amp has. I don’t know if the changes would be everyone’s cup of tea and some might even suggest that I should have bought a different amp in the first place, but I’m extremely pleased with the result of the updates and mods and look forward to upgrading the other amp sometime soon.

*Jon Fluharty does not currently have a website but if you are interested in contacting him please leave a note in the comments or email me via the Contact John page and I’ll put you in touch!

Snow On The Ohio River

John Horne — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:25:00 +0000

View from the lobby of the historic Lafayette Hotel in Marietta Ohio.

Music Around the Web 02-22-13

John Horne — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 14:42:15 +0000

Kickstarter: The Psylodelic Gallery at Fur Peace Ranch
Help fund this new venture at Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch.

Earth Blues by Jimi Hendrix
A sneak peek at the previously unreleased Hendrix album that drops in March.

Jazz Boot Experiment
Bootlegs of jazz concerts. Glad to see this site getting updated regularly again.

Brian Setzer Guitar Lesson
I just LOVE the Dave Edmunds lick in example 6!

Eric Johnson “Cliffs of Dover” Live 2006
Rare footage of EJ playing a Gibson SG on his trademark tune.

Jim Nova’s Trombone Ensemble Arrangements
I know this is a guitar site but these are way too good to overlook.

iTunes 11’s Mysterious Cloud Icon Explained
I’ve been wondering about that.

Phil Hansen: The Art of the Imperfect
Embrace your limitations and fuel creativity. Watch below:

Review: Adam Rafferty Instructional Video On Demand

John Horne — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 05:09:10 +0000

Guitarist Adam Rafferty is now introducing digital downloads of his popular instructional videos that walk players through his funky fingerstyle arrangements of Stevie Wonder and The Jackson Five. This is a great solution for folks who primarily use devices that don’t contain DVD players or who just want to be able to access the video lessons on their mobile devices.

I’ve tried the digital downloads out and they work great. Here’s a quick overview of the process:

The videos are sold via a company called Leaping Brain who also distribute content for Homespun Music Instruction and dozens of other well-known clients. You can visit this page to see all of Adam’s available titles: https://leapingbrain.com/modshop/?shop=194&

Upon purchasing a video, PC and Mac users are be prompted to download a special “Adam Rafferty Player” which basically acts as a container to organize the raw video and PDF files. Users can then download and launch all of their purchased content via the player. The videos will launch in their own player which has the ability to play the lessons at half- and quarter-speed and to select a portion of the video loop over and over. Great features for those elusive sections you need to see and hear several times to get a grip on them!

Tablet and smart phone users are prompted to click through to Leaping Brain’s “MOD Cloud Player” which loads as a regular browser page showing all of the purchased content available for streaming. I first tried the cloud player with Adam’s “How to Solo Over II-V-I Changes for Jazz Guitar” and found that the videos did not stream. However all of the other titles work just fine on both my iPhone 4 and on my PC. The vids all feature excellent sound and video quality and buffered almost instantly. I suspect that the II-V-I video had just not yet been converted for live streaming as of this writing.

Leaping Brain also offers an iPhone/iPad app called MOD Mobile that sells for $1.99. This app allows users to transfer the video files from a PC or Mac to a mobile device via iTunes. It takes a couple of extra steps to accomplish this, but if you don’t want to eat up your data plan or bandwidth streaming the videos this solution makes a lot of sense as all of the files will reside on your device. Although there are some negative reviews of MOD Mobile on iTunes, The app worked flawlessly for me.

One more special feature of the digital download are the newly formatted booklets of the arrangements. The music in the included files is significantly larger than what is in the booklets that are provided with the DVDs. This makes for much easier reading and study. However, in order to protect the content the music only opens in it’s own PDF reader-type program and can’t be copied or shared. The booklet may be printed to your default printer but you can only print the entire book so be sure to have plenty of paper (about 60 pages) and ink ready to go!

These digital versions of Adam’s instructional videos are an excellent value and will likely be the preferred method of delivery for on-the-go players.