Faza

2,041 reputation

512

bio	website	thecynicalmusician.com
	location	London, United Kingdom
	age	35
visits	member for	2 years, 1 month
	seen	Jun 24 '11 at 3:02
stats	profile views	11

I have been playing guitar for 19 years now. I'm an old-school rocker/metalhead, but I try to keep my mind open and am more than happy to incorporate other musical influences, be they blues, country, progressive, folk or even electronic.

My current project is Viridian - a melodic hard-rock band where I am the guitarist, main songwriter and manager, for my sins. The band is in something of a state of suspension at the moment - following our move to London from Warsaw, Poland - as we are presently looking for musicians to complete the lineup.

On the side, I write music business commentary @ TheCyncialMusician.com - something which has surprisingly gained me more notoriety than my music. My point of view stems from my personal experience in music and the biz, plus my education as an economist. More often than not, I find myself pointing out holes in conventional MusBiz blogosphere wisdom, but I hope it helps provide other musicians a different perspective in these troubled times.

In the past, I have taught guitar and might do so again.

My gear, just for the heck of it:

Guitars - Gibson SG standard, Ibanez RG2550E Prestige

Amplification - 2 Marshall JCM900 half-stacks (a 4100 Dual Reverb and a 2100 SL-X)

Effects - Boss GT-10

	2,041 reputation	bio	website	thecynicalmusician.com	visits	member for	2 years, 1 month
512 badges		location	London, United Kingdom		seen	Jun 24 '11 at 3:02

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Jun 2	answered	How to maximize band rehearsal time?
Jun 1	comment	How to maximize band rehearsal time? @Matthew Read - I disagree that he question is subjective. Rehearsing for maximum effect is very much a skill that can be evaluated objectively.
Jun 1	answered	Boiling/washing used guitar/bass strings - is it worthwhile?
May 27	awarded	Nice Answer
May 27	awarded	Commentator
May 27	awarded	Nice Answer
May 27	awarded	Teacher
May 26	comment	Tuning a Strat a whole step down .011-.052 is a good place to start. You can also try .012-.052 with an unwound G (LaBella Electrics Blues Heavy, for instance). I use these for tuning down 1 1/2 steps, which I find is somewhat slacker than standard E - but then again, I use .011-.052 for standard E.
May 25	comment	Recording an amp using headphone out? Yep. That one looks pretty good. It's got enough inputs, phantom power if you ever want to use a condenser mike, direct monitoring, headphones; nice all around. The bundled ProTools software is a bonus - you have a chance to learn the basics of the worldwide studio standard.
May 25	answered	Best method to clean guitar?
May 25	answered	Recording an amp using headphone out?
May 24	comment	Position of white dots in guitar fretboard Nice breakdown. With regards to the 9th fret, my suggestion would be that it marks the position of the relative minor to an open-string major scale. Having said that, however, I think the reason is more prosaic: the flanking two-fret intervals make the octave immediately stand out, even if the markers are bars or some such (i.e. no special double dot symbol or similar). The remaining seven frets are divided in the most efficient way for easy recognition: four marks, three spaces.
May 24	answered	Get back into an instrument after long break?
May 22	answered	In chord progressions, how can I refer to a chord that's out of the scale?
May 19	comment	Do you count mental practice when counting total practice time for the day? Based on my experience as a guitar teacher, I'd say that mental practice is fundamental to developing certain skills. Things like fretboard knowledge, transposing harmonic resolutions, learning scale/chord tones and their positions in standard patterns all require working with your brain rather than your fingers. Visualisation and paper serve us equally well here as the fingerboard - perhaps moreso, since we focus only on the task at hand. That said, mental practice is unlikely to count towards your practice limit, since it doesn't create any physiological stress.
May 19	comment	How can I toughen up my fingertips? Callus thickness is probably a factor. Can't say I've ever noticed a "wet hands" problem. Then again, I do a lot of bending on 011-052 strings tuned to E.
May 18	comment	Do music theory books differ per instrument? I agree, though one reason to find a guitar-specific theory book would be to have certain things illustrated in a guitar-specific context. For instance, some four-part harmonic resolutions might be tricky to adapt from piano to guitar, which is a lot more limited in terms of notes you can play at the same time. Nevertheless, you can get by on piano-oriented literature (which tends to be most common for music theory), as long as you acknowledge that you might not be able to play some things.
May 17	answered	Is the B. C. Rich Beast NJ Series with the Floyd Rose Speedloader tremolo rare?
May 16	answered	Basics of stage presence for guitarists
May 16	comment	How can I make my palm mutes sound more metal? I'd say that right-hand positioning is 99% of the sound - get it right and you'll be able to play good-sounding mutes on any setup. Two things I'd like to add are: you'll find that downstrokes give a much "chunkier" mute than alternate picking, so you might consider playing the heavier parts with all downstrokes and that adding just a bit of thumb flesh to the pick attack (as in pinch harmonics, but not quite so marked) can do a lot for the aggressiveness of the sound.