Jason Becker, Swiss Picks, tapping, Chasing Sound Radio and more
Hey everyone, and welcome back to Six String Sunday! I hope you’re enjoying a holiday weekend if you live in the States. There are lots of sales going on for gear and lessons and more. I have nothing to sell you in this post, just great guitar links from around the internet. Let’s get into it.
5 quick tricks when you’re stuck — I love Tim Pierce’s YouTube channel. This video was super inspiring. Tim goes over 5 tricks to use when you’re stuck on guitar. The first one is that gear doesn’t matter, and how true is that? He gets beautiful tones out of a wide variety of guitars, and you can too.
My favorite tip of the 5 is “borrow from the best”. We talk about this all the time on Chasing Sound. You don’t just have to “steal” from one guitar player. Steal from many guitar players, even if it’s one riff, one chord, one technique, and then make this vocabulary your own. Go check out Tim and tell him I said hello!
Take your tapping to another planet — I’ve been on a huge Daniele Gottardo kick again, and I can’t stop listening to his song Cardiology. The tapping Daniele uses is insane. I first found out about Gottardo from Jude Gold’s podcast No Guitar is Safe.
It turns out that Jude recorded part of the episode and put it up on his YouTube channel. Check out this video if you want to take your tapping chops to a whole new level.
Pentatonic box warm up — This week on the site I broke out my iPad and Focusrite interface to write up a simple pentatonic warm up lick that you can use to get your fingers going. There are 4 audio examples in varying speeds, tab, and an explanation about how to pull the riff off.
If you’re familiar with the pentatonic box shapes already, this should be second nature. If you’re not, check out this string skipping article I wrote which has a full diagram of all 5 shapes.
Break out the mousetrap — This week I also was able to review 7 picks from Swiss Picks. These picks were a lot of fun to try out. Each has their own unique name, like Sharp Cheddar, Atomic Glow (it glows in the dark!), Nuclear Cheddar, and more.
They have really great grip holes, which are raised and make the picks extremely easy to handle while playing for long hours. If your hands sweat at all, you should give these picks a try. They also sounded good when hitting the strings, and the sharp ones were super easy to play with.
There are all different gauges and materials (although most of them are Delrin). Two of my favorites are the Bleu Cheese, which is a Jason Becker tribute pick, and the Atomic Cheddar picks which are Rusty Cooley’s signature picks (made out of polycarbonate). Rusty’s picks are lighter, and are perfect for shredders.
If you’re looking for something new to try with your guitars, and you’re bored of your everyday picks, check these out. Go say hi to Pete over at Swiss Picks (made right here in the USA!)
Guitar Album of the Week — Speaking of amazing guitar players, this week the Guitar Album of the Week is The Raspberry Jams by Jason Becker. If you’re not sure who Jason Becker is, you should fix that right now by listening to this album!
Jason Becker back in the 80’s was an incredible guitarist and songwriter, releasing his own albums, teaming up with Marty Friedman, and playing in the David Lee Roth band. Then, he was diagnosed with ALS and told he probably wasn’t going to live much longer. Turns out, all these years later, Jason is still with us.
While he can’t physically play guitar any longer, he is still a massive inspiration. He has a unique system where he painstakingly makes music with his eyes. He actually crowdfunded a album a year ago that should be coming out this Summer.
The Raspberry Jams is a bunch of demos and guitar ideas from Jason that shows how his mind works when he was creating his songs. There are shreddy songs, clean songs, covers, and more on this album. The tone is identifiable as 80’s, but it’s just so good. Check this album out, and then move on to albums like Perpetual Burn and Perspective.
If you want to get a background on this incredible musician, check out Jason’s documentary, Not Dead Yet.
Chasing Sound Radio — Last week in Six String Sunday I teased that I was working on something fun for the website. I’m still working all the kinks out as what I’m trying to do just got updated this week.
I’ve podcasted for years about a number of topics, so I wanted to bring a podcast to Chasing Sound. While it was still in beta I downloaded the Anchor app. It’s a great app that allows anyone to essentially have a “radio station”. They got featured at a big Apple event a couple of weeks ago, and are updating the app all the time.
I’m going to use Anchor to make a radio station for Chasing Sound, and if it works out well enough, turn it into a podcast. The great thing about Anchor is that you can record from your phone, have call-ins, audio in between segments, and play full songs. It’s like Twitter for audio. The great thing is that it can be updated as often as you like.
If you’re into this, let me know what you’d like to hear. I’m going to start experimenting more with it over the next few days. When I do, I’ll post the link on Twitter, Facebook and the site.
That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
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If you have any questions or comments, you can reply to this post, let me know on Twitter, or by posting in our Facebook group. I also have a fun Instagram channel where I post fun guitar pictures throughout the week.
Brian Sutich is a guitar player, audio engineer, podcaster, teacher, and hockey fan! He loves learning, helping people, and drinking way too much coffee.
