Erin McKeown on recording Sing You Sinners

Erin McKeown's photo journal of making her new record, Sing You Sinners, is worth a look. An interesting glimpse into the day-to-day process in the studio.

She's an articulate artist whose thoughts on making it as a DIY musician are included in my book The Complete Singer-Songwriter.

JPR on CNN.com, "How to Be a Guitar God"

This recent post on CNN International offers a five-step plan to guitar deity and includes a soundbite on barre chords from my book the Beginning Guitarist's Handbook.

Animated Coltrane: "Giant Steps"

A conversation with fusion guitar great Larry Coryell the other day got me thinking about John Coltrane's "Giant Steps"...and a few clicks later I found myself watching this mesmerizing visual interpretation of the bebop classic. It's well worth a look--fascinating to think about solo improvisation in geometric terms.

JPR music update

I've been revamping and expanding my music pages at MySpace (which includes four tracks from the Traveling Songs CD and info on upcoming Syracuse-area gigs) and on my own site. Plus lots of new photos can be found here, and you can sign up to receive periodic updates on gigs and news.

Spins: Radio Paradise

A friend recently pointed me to this Internet station, which streams a very satisfying mix of rock, pop, and world music, old and new. So much of the Internet is about serving ever-narrower niche interests, and I appreciate this station's eclectic DJ-driven approach, a throwback to the dimly remembered days of free-form FM radio. The playlist includes some artists and songs I know, some I don't, but all are clearly filtered through a music lover's taste--not chosen to target a marketing category. For those with fast connections, the 192k MP3 stream sounds awfully good too...

Check it out: www.radioparadise.com. (It's free, and no registration is required.)

Ben Harper on his first guitar, 2001

"I was nine at the oldest when I got my first guitar. I wanted to play, and I kept reaching for my mom’s guitars, which were quite nice--Gibsons and Martins and such. I was like, 'I want a guitar like yours, Mom.' She was like, 'No. I will get you your first guitar.' So she gave me a bottom-feeder nylon-string--very basic, plywood, orange top, brown sides--and I played it and I played it.

"My brothers and I were heavily into BMX, and we were making double-sided ramps that we would jump off one side and land on the other. Out in front of the house, we were getting everything but the kitchen sink to jump over--there was everything from Big Wheels to phonographs that didn't work anymore. I came home from school one day, and there was my guitar in the pile of stuff they were jumping! I just nutted up, 'Nooo!' I grabbed it. It had been good and scuffed, but it was still working. I was like, 'Oh my God!' I was furious.

"I stuck with the nylon-string until I was really seriously into learning an instrument. I was up into my teens when I started saying this is something I might really want to do--a good seven or eight years later. I think that guitar is still kicking around my mom's garage. This family never throws out an instrument."

From an Acoustic Guitar interview.

Readings: How to copyright your songs

Here's my primer on copyright, published in the December '06 issue of Acoustic Guitar and available online.