Epiphone John Lennon Revolution Casino

The Epiphone John Lennon Revolution Casino is an exact replica of the Casino Lennon famously sanded and modified and used for the latter part of his Beatles career. It was also, famously, the guitar Lennon played at the Beatles final concert on the roof of the Apple Corp. building in London.

Guitar practice exercises: alternate picking chromatic scale

I’ve been catching up on RSS feeds and guitar blogs today and found this great post from Lori Linstruth. It puts a more melodic spin on chromatic warm-up exercises, and there’s a downloadable PDF too.
Guitar practice exercises: alternate picking chromatic scale
(Via Play Like a Girl.)
I see you’re new here, thanks for visiting! Why not [...]

B.B. King Museum

I’ve mentioned once or twice before that I’m a big BB King fan, so I read this with great interest and thought it would be worth sharing with you.
B.B. King Museum:
“Nashville-based writer and media producer Craig Havighurst (of String Theory Media) has recently written an article for the Washington Post about the opening of the [...]

Maybe You Should Know Jeff Healey

Danny has a great post on Jeff Healey, one of my favourite players. He says:
‘Jeff Healey was truly one of the gifted guitarists of our time. His talent was not about playing well in spite of an impairment, but rather playing so well that it was possible to miss that he was impaired in any [...]

New Epiphone guitar coming soon

Epiphone’s brand new blog has an exciting post about a new Epiphone guitar which is coming soon. “We’ve been hard at work around here on an awesome new model that we are REALLY excited about!” There are some pics on the blog. Hard to say what it is from those. But it’s electric, it’s got black pick-up covers and what looks like a silver pickguard. From the look of the fretboard inlays, it could be a signature model or some sort of special edition.

In other news, only four days to go until the Slash Les Paul Gold Top hits the shops. Woohoo! Get your credit card ready.

Epiphone ES-175

The Epiphone ES-175 is a semi-hollow body electric guitar based on Gibson’s hugely popular ES-175. The Gibson ES-175 was originally launched in 1949 and became one of the most famous jazz guitars in history. It was the first Gibson to feature a Florentine cutaway, and was so named because it originally cost $175. Sixty years later is still in production. It has been played by notable players such as Elvis’ guitarist Scotty Moore, and Steve Howe of Yes.

Happy Birthday, BB King

Danny has an excellent post to mark BB King’s 83rd birthday. AS I said in this post about the Epiphone BB King Lucille, BB is one of my favourite all-time guitar players. I saw him live a couple of times, once in 1989 and once in 1993 and both nights were amazing. Sadly, he’s retired from touring outside the US, but there are plenty of live recordings available from over the years. In particular, Live at the Regal, and Live at San Quentin are very worthwhile checking out.

Epiphone BB King Lucille

For as long as I’ve been able to play the guitar, BB King has been my favourite guitar player. There’s something about his style which manages to capture the joy and misery of the blues in one note. And the way he wrings the neck of his beloved Lucille to extract every last ounce of vibrato and sustain from it is sensational.
I’ve been lucky enough to see him live twice. On the first occasion, at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1989, the theatre was absolutely jumping. Everyone was dancing by the end and there was a couple in front of us who looked they were having a particularly good time.

The five best guitar teachers on YouTube

YouTube is a fantastic resource for guitar lessons. Not only are there dozens of highly-skilled guitar players demonstrating chords, lick, styles and songs. But some of the world’s best, and most well-known guitar players, some of them sadly no longer with us, are right there giving lessons.

So I thought that it would be great to put together a kind of video notebook of some of the best lessons I could find on there and keep it so that when I get some time (ha!) I can watch the videos and learn a few new tricks.

Two great Slash Les Paul videos

It’s been a while since I posted any videos, so I thought I’d make up for it by posting two great videos today.

They both feature Slash. In the first — which is an Epiphone promo, so is a little ‘in your face’ — he talks about the Epiphone version of the Slash signature Les Paul and how he suggested it to Gibson as a way of making it available to those of us who can’t afford to drop $4,000 on one guitar.