Tag Archives: Musician

9 tips for keeping a healthy attitude as an artist

Posted by Zombie Minstrel on

This is an ongoing process that I’d like to share. This information is loosely based on an article written by Eric Johnson and a wonderful WordPress authored by Nicole Rogers titled “keeping fit and healthy for playing guitar.”

1) Attitude is everything! If you desire happy guitar
something attract it with what’s positive within yourself. This in turn will bring great things of inspiration surrounding your life with a bounty of creativity. Avoid the mundane and the negative that serves nothing but a tainted ego spewing out cryptic negativity that will begot more negativity. Break the cycle, breath in the air and love the process. Feeling like the inside of a garbage can within yourself? Write about it! (see entry 3) the catharsis can be positively museful in charging not only your art but good for the inner spirituality that lies inside true artists.

2) Be Resilient
Don’t let situations, in your practice regimen specifically if you’re a musician keep you away from being the best you can be. Being tough, thick-skinned and acute in trying situations will only serve you in a positive light. You and no one else are the master of your reality, use that truth to empower yourself in the woodshed.

3) Journal
I have journaled since my freshman year of high School. I business, personal and Music Journal as often as twice a day and as little as twice a week. This keeps ideas in the forefront of  your conscious mind focusing on your goals instead of what you watched on the tele last evening. Journaling also serves as an excellent resource to recall ideas and clarify information that may be months and even years since you last vested time toward it. If you’re an OS X user as I am Day One is a magnificent piece of software that aslo is available with an iOS app that shares entries.

4) Optimism
Take the time to be optimistic. You control the thoughts in your mind, take the garbage out when it piles up. If you struggle in this area it can take time at first, but it becomes less work as you clean the messes up one by one. It is possible to maintain positive thought through your whole creative process, it just takes work.

5) Enjoy the process
Enjoy the process of creating rather it be work or play. If you don’t enjoy the process you need to “change it up.” Do whatever it takes to enjoy your time creating art. Art stimulates the nervous system which in turn can have the effect of energy but also focus. Be the part of the process you enjoy!

6) Exercise!
Being of the “Thick” persuasion myself I’ve found exercise even if only on a treadmill will make a difference between my elbow and fingertips in a big way. As I’ve previously written I turned a corner a while back after reading an article written by Eric Johnson about his exercise regimen based solely around his performance capabilities after the age of 40. I’ve been on an exercise schedule for over a year which has improved my stamina as a player 100% not to mention the almost 60 lbs I’ve taken off and I feel great! I’m completely warmed up in less than 40 minutes and at a happy medium in 25 which is really important to me. I don’t have much patience for warming up or changing strings, I like to make both as quick as possible.

7) Sleep
I know this may sound silly but sleep well and with a window open if possible. Getting enough sleep daily helps you stay healthy and puts 02 into our bodies in abundance. For myself it has helped me keep a tighter schedule throughout the day and evening requiring less effort to carry out goals and have fun!

8) Act, don’t react. The distinct difference between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom is the brilliant ability to act and not react… well most of us anyway. If you react you’re disempowering yourself giving away your mojo to a situation not warranting your time nor bandwidth. Acting on the other hand is thought out and balanced, wastes less time and keeps your goals, drive and desire in perspective. If you react to a bad performance instead of act the outcome will be profoundly different.

9) Laugh!
If you can’t laugh at yourself you’re missing out on some funny shite! I do this thing that always makes me laugh, I’ll repeat a mistake in the same spot in the very next phrase when improvising. It makes me laugh! I don’t know why for sure but I suspect it’s my id body slamming my supper-ego. Laughing also releases the proper mood enhancing peptides that elevate your physical body which is a plus for any ambidextrous physical activity. You can actually force yourself to laugh even if you’re not jovial and still reap the benefits of the chemicals being released into you body with Laughing Yoga exercises. This Yogi is to funny not to laugh at or with!

keyword: guitar spammed! – an open letter to Matt and the wordpress team (Updated 7-14-12)

Posted by Zombie Minstrel on

(EDIT 2) I just went through Key word: Guitar and reported over 200 posts that have been put on 33 accounts in the last 18 hours. I guess wordpress is expecting its community to take our time and report these spammers and do nothing about it. I have news for you Matt Mullenweg, if you want wordpress.com to become as irrelevant as live journal loosing its 20 million people strong user base just keep doing nothing and see what happens. These spammers are making a fortune off of google keywords using anonymous proxies while your expectations are for the user base to report them. This didn’t work for live journal and it wont work for wordpress.com but will make you obsolete if you don’t take action. I beseech you to do some simple scripting blocking these fucktards like Google does on Blogger. If not your user base will leave and go elsewhere including myself. Please someone buy the them a clue. In the last 15 minutes Keyword guitar has been spammed with 471 individual spam posts.

(EDIT) I received this response from the WordPress team:
Thank you for this report; the blogs you reported actually contained information that helped us remove over 100 spam blogs on WordPress.com and will help us in keeping more off the service. Please continue to report this as you see it; we are constantly working to keep spam off the WordPress.com service and every report helps.

Dear Matt and WordPress team! keyword: guitar – There are 20 or more different accounts spamming this keyword all with hundreds of products that are music gear from various dealers. Almost posts or duplicates in one form or another. This keyword is now completely useless in a huge community musicians, producers, songwriters, audio engineers, singers, guitarists, bands, fans etc. There are 30 spam articles coming from 30 spam accounts to every one real human. There’s so many I could make a full time job in reporting them, no one has that kind time. What can I do to help that wont take 8 hours of my day?

Thank you for wordpress and all your hard work!

Re-posted on zombieminstrel.wordpress.com

An image of WordPress’s reader set at Keyword: Guitar

My Reader Feed Keyword: Guitar

My Reader Feed Keyword: Guitar

Guitar strings and things that ring and ting

Posted by Zombie Minstrel on

I was just corresponding with another guitarist here on word press on the subject of guitar strings and wanted to share what I’ve learned about those little pieces of wire in 30 years as well as its various plectrum’s. I’m going to focus mostly on electric guitar strings because that’s where most of the variances are.

Electric guitar strings differ in tone when the material changes. My very good friend Touch Singleton has taught me more about tone in the last 10 years then I learned in my entire lifetime. Buy one of his guitars, you will hear the difference believe me. Electric strings come in a few different flavors; nickle wound, pure nickel, steel and yes even bronze. IMHO bronze strings on an electric sound poorly as the bronze does not conduct electricity well to the pickup’s magnets. However, when Gerry Garcia used them on the Americana they sounded pretty darn good.

Steel strings polarize the magnets wonderfully and are resistant to corrosion but they’re very bright sounding, to bright sounding for my sonic pallet. Pure nickel string were the norm years ago but cost and economic trends made them rare until the last few years saw manufactures revive them. nickel wound for myself have the best of both worlds, the steel to make those Alnico magnets (my personal choice of pickup magnets but that’s another article for later) fire and the nickel wrap to give a smooth even tone.

In the last 10 or so years some manufactures have started branding a separate line of strings that have coatings on them for longevity of life. I have found these to suck the tone out of every electric brand I’ve tried which include; DR, D’Addario, Elixir and Ernie Ball. None has yet to received a passing grade for myself simply because the coloring of the tone the coating creates. However I want to equivocally say this does not apply to one brand of Bronze acoustic strings, the brand Cleartone. Cleartone phosphor bronze acoustic guitar strings actually do what the coating process intended from the start, add string longevity. They don’t color the sound at all to my ears but they are very pricy. For me, the price tag is worth being able to have my Taylor at arm’s length in my home studio without worrying about the strings oxidizing in a week and sounding flat.

I have my guitars tuned different or set up for different styles of music, the following are my current preferences for my guitars and why I chose them. I have a custom Singleton Crossroads the guitar I now play the most. Touch Singleton built it for my hands based on their measurements and my personal preferences. Because the Neck Pickup is a Seth Lover hand wound by none other than Seymour Duncan himself and the Bridge is a Quarter Pounder it’s not your typical Telecaster. I can play Metal on this Guitar! In fact I can play Rock, Hard Rock, Smooth Jazz and country on it at any time. I tune this Guitar to 440 and Drop D when the need arises. My Strings are Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky’s on this guitar, nickel wrapped for tone and a light top end so I can play it all night without my hands giving out at the end of the last set.

My Second most played electric guitar is an US Strat plus that I’ve heavily modified. I Purchased from the custom shop in Norco, CA as a B stock item during one of the parking lot sales in the 80’s. I was told it was one of many Jeff Beck prototypes that were designing for him at the time. It came with Lace Sensor Pickups and that Baseball Neck size Jeff Beck neck standard on the JB model Fender strat for all these years. I took the pickups out and replaced the Neck and Middle with Texas Specials and the Bridge with a Stratocaster spaced Seymour Duncan JB. My Stings of choice for this guitar are D’addario Pure Nickle 10’s. This guitar is generally tuned to Eb or Drop Db and produces a very distinct Jimmy Hendrix and Ty Tabor Tone. I rarely take this guitar out of the middle and neck blend because it sound so good there, really I’m smitten with the tone after all these years. The other Mod I made was to take 3/4″ of meat off the neck on a milling machine, it never stayed in tune until I did this mod which was intended to fix the neck for another project guitar at the time.

My Les Paul sports a set of GHS Zakk Wylde Nickle Plated Boomers gauged at 11 – 70. This Guitar Has the Standard SH4 and JB set up but is tuned to Drop B for slide and heavy riffage. Les Paul’s are pretty simple, they all sound great with heavy strings. My Taylor has had Cleartone light Bronze strings on it since they came out. I can’t say enough about how great I think these strings are.

I’ll leave plectrum’s for next time :)