Notes From The Woodshed – February
Last month I promised to post my guitar practice studies on the first Monday of every month. Well, this clearly is not the first Monday of February! A mix of travel and convalescence has meant that I’m late to the party with this month’s notes from the woodshed. Remember, this isn’t really a “lesson” series. [...]
Notes From The Woodshed
Today is the second Monday of the year. But, it’s the first Monday “in the office” for most people. To mark that, here’s a little series I’ll be writing throughout the year – Notes From The Woodshed. On the first Monday of every month I’ll posting some notes, from my “office” so to speak. These [...]
Guitar Etudes – Warmup Exercises For Guitar By Pat Methany
For the past few weeks I’ve building my guitar practice sessions around Guitar Etudes – Warmup Exercises for Guitar by Pat Methany. This book is an exploration of Methany’s pre-show warm routine and features eleven studies, based on transcriptions of his actual pre-show playing. At first glance the book looks like a set of classical-music [...]
Scott Henderson
Scott Henderson was in Hong Kong last week for two shows at the Skylark Lounge. In fact, we were lucky to see Scott at all, as he was in Northern Japan during the recent earthquake. He was due to give a workshop the day before the gig, but had to cancel that after issues with [...]
The 150 Thing
Malcolm Gladwell has become synonymous with the idea that mastery comes through sustained repetition (to the tune of 10,000 hours). This notion builds on
Australian Jazz Stories
Spike Mason is a well established saxophonist and composer and long-time friend. He’s just started a new blog called Australian Jazz Stories. Every post is a vignette, showing us what the world looks like, from a jazz musician’s point of view. I particularly love the first entry, entitled elevator gig, “I was in an elevator [...]
Recommended Listening
As I mentioned recently, recommending music is something I typically over-think, for a variety of reasons. For this list I’ve crossed borders, of genre and geography, to come up some recent albums that have established themselves on my playlists. I don’t claim these are “the best” albums of the past few years – just a [...]
Berklee Guitar Certificate
Recently the postman brought me a lovely package, my BerkleeMusic Master certificate in Guitar. This is my third certificate from BerkleeMusic and on a personal level, the most rewarding. As a younger man, I harboured dreams of moving to Berklee College of Music in Boston and studying Jazz. There was a fine Jazz programme available [...]
Do It Everyday, Over And Over, Again And Again And Think About It
You know those articles – the ones that give you lots of neat little suggestions to improve some are of your life – 25 ways to be a better parent, 5 ways to become a famous guitarist, or 10 ways to improve your love-life? Tips? Yeah, I hate those. Tips; not the money you leave [...]
Enrico Rava Quintet and Henderson/Berlin/Chambers Live In Hong Kong
Of all the shows on offer in this year’s Hong Kong International Jazz festival, the one that immediately caught my eye was the double bill of Enrico Rava’s new Quintet and the Henderson, Berlin and Chambers supergroup at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Enrico Rava is a superstar of European Jazz, perhaps Italy’s best known [...]
William Ellis At The Hong Kong Jazz Festival
Tonight I made a quick trip to the very chic Dada Lounge in TST to hear William Ellis speak on Jazz photography, as part of the Hong Kong Jazz Festival. Ellis is an extraordinarly gifted photographer of musicians and their instruments, as well as a nice guy, willing to be really honest about his craft. [...]
Twitter As A Quote Engine
Twitter is used in a lot of ways. One purpose I like is sharing quotes. I’ve always been, even from childhood, a fan of a good quote. I used to love thumbing through our family book of quotes and have dropped good quotes into essays, sermons, articles, blogposts and everyday conversation. Lately, I’ve even started [...]
On Leaning To Say No
There are five or six aspects of life where I find myself constantly lacking in grace, confidence and poise. Saying no is one of them. I never seem to manage it in the cool and constructive way I’ve seen some friends and mentors do it. Usually I fumble about with lame excuses and often feel [...]
Writing Course Introductions
I’ve just started my last two courses en route to a BerkleeMusic Master Certificate in Guitar. These are Jazz 201 (the second Jazz course in the programme) and Funk/R&B soloing. You can check out some videos of the two instructors here, Serious funky cool from Thaddeus Hogarth Serious jazz from Bruce Saunders These courses always [...]
This Week
With the BerkleeMusic Chords 201 course finished (excellent stuff!), I have a week to focus solely on my own work and projects. I’m currently trialling Adobe Lightroom, which seems to have quite a few features that are not available in Apple’s Aperture. There’s a blogpost around the corner comparing the two programmes. It won’t be [...]
Being Honest About Disorganisation, Confusion And Success
I’m currently on my fourth read through David Allen’s book, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life. On each occasion, I have found the following quote profoundly challenging and unnerving. “Keeping uncaptured, unclarified, and unprocessed things in our minds creates unnecessary stress. But if we leave them there, we can allow ourselves [...]
Dragging A Song From Dud To Demo
Going through some old files recently, I stumbled upon a Sibelius score that was enigmatically titled, “G alt concept.” I’m not sure what I was expecting, but the file turned out to be a near complete song idea for a tune in 7/4 (not surprisingly, in G). The info suggested that I had worked on [...]
And Now Something For The Guitarists
It’s been a while since I posted something about guitar-playing… It’s been a pleasure to embark on the BerkleeMusic course, Chords 201. Along with the assignments, I’ve been adding some solo chord arrangments of standards to my practice routine. It’s been a while since I’ve done this much work, in this style, for a sustained [...]
Improving The Quality Of Your Recordings
12 Tips For Improving The Quality Of Your Recordings (via dBzeebee) – Practical and inspiring advice. Like so many things in life, learn to use your tools then commit yourself to using them well and without fear. Sound easy I know, but it takes years to really get to grips with either side of that [...]
This Week Is Flying By
Oh dear, it’s Wednesday already. I feel really busy, but I’m not sure I’m accomplished much so far this week. Sometimes you have just to stop, take a look around and get some perspective. I’ve been working on the next stage of the old song idea I blogged about here and http://fernandogros.com/?p=1442. The song is [...]
Album Blogging
I’ve been thinking about this for a while – how to use the blog to help me finish my solo album. Today I’m starting something different. Truth is I’ve been in a funk over the album for two reasons. First, I lost sight of why I was doing this collection of tunes in the first [...]
Sibelius 6
Thanks to the review on Create Digitial Music, I’m been walking on clouds all morning. The reason is the release of an upgrade to Sibelius, the music notation programme. Put simply, I’m very excited by the new features and improvements. Over the past few years, Sibelius has become a central part of my daily working [...]
Best Of The Blogosphere
Twitter To Go: How one local coffee shop used Twitter to double their clientele. – Great account of how Houston coffeeshop, CoffeeGroundz, used their twitter account (@coffeegroundz) to increase sales, provide better (and deeper) customer service and build meaningful connections with their community. Steps Towards a More Sustainable Life of Less – ZenLife is a [...]
Hong Kong Arts Festival – Roundup
First of all, the organisers of this year’s festival deserve credit for a great series of fixtures, with some smart and courageous decisions on artists and staging. Second, they seem to have done a good job with ticketing, with far fewer of the good seats at events going empty (and seat allocations being more even). [...]
Fernando Gros is a musician, photographer & writer based in Singapore. Born in Santiago de Chile, Fernando grew up in Sydney and has also lived in London, Delhi and Hong Kong.