Last Sunday, we hosted our 2nd annual Open House at the Blue Raccoons’ Studio. It was a lovely afternoon filled with food, drink and community all set to wonderful live jazz performances by our students. Our master teacher, Carey Smith, kicked off the afternoon with several lively duo performances with Bhagwan Khalsa on bass. Our students took over and played ...READ MORE »
An efficiently moving right hand is the key to producing relaxed yet grooving lines and chords on guitar. While the left hand, of course, plays its own indispensible role in producing notes, the right hand demands far more careful attention and diligent training than its partner. Though, in certain cases, I’d dissuade a player from a complete reinvention of his ...READ MORE »
Strength constitutes the essential, and widely unrecognized, key to effective guitar technique. For the guitarist who has never addressed this principle in his playing, newly trained arms, wrists and hands will produce his musical ideas with a precision and effortlessness that astonish. Locking in on the groove becomes inevitable.
Just as strength is the key to technique, overtraining is the key ...READ MORE »
Making music, whether with one’s voice or with an instrument, demands total physical engagement. If the goal of musical expression is indeed making real the sounds that emanate mysteriously from within oneself (i.e. from “mind,” “heart”, or “spirit”), then the means of producing these sounds must become so facile as to be imperceptible to the player, a gesture as simple ...READ MORE »
This past Sunday, we had the pleasure of hosting Tuck Andress, guitar virtuoso and half of the American jazz duo, Tuck & Patti, for a master jazz clinic at the Blue Raccoon Tunes studio. It was an intimate event open to our current and past guitar students, their families and a few very fortunate friends! Tuck and Patti were ...READ MORE »
The computer has changed the ways that we endeavor to acquire both information and skills, and guitar playing is surely no exception. While the tools that the internet offers are quite diverse, the two main instructional services provided seem to fall into two general categories, namely, pre-recorded guitar lessons and live online guitar lessons.
Pre-recorded lessons tend to focus on ...READ MORE »
“We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it: for instance, men become builders by building houses, harpers by playing on the harp.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II.1
The ultimate end of studying jazz music on any instrument is the act of performance, whether solo or in a ...READ MORE »
Why study anything? Given the contemporary whirlpool of debate that engulfs the methods of institutional education, both public and private, in America, one would think that we as a nation would already have defined collectively, albeit broadly, the purpose that such methods aim to serve. While indications of consensus are detectable and many institutions offer statements of their mission in ...READ MORE »