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brian's guitar thing
I started playing guitar in October of 2000 after many years of saying to myself that I had to learn a major musical instrument. I was originally going to go with a keyboard, but I haven't enough space around the house to set one up and can't afford a decent one anyway. So I bought a guitar.
I play a Peavey Raptor I International Series through either a Crate GX15 practice amp or a Smokey cigarette pack amp (though mine is one of the polycarb models with no cigarette logo in sight). I'm not fond of the axe (I want a Fender Texas Fat Strat; if you find this page useful feel free to send me one :-) ) but it's playable. I'd love to have more gear but I can't afford even a wah pedal (and I so want to learn to play funk...). I play mostly classic rock and blues, though I also like to play disco or R&B when I can find the chords for them. I don't perform, though I plan to hit a few open mike nights in the Boston area in the very near future to see whether I can hack it.
This site is my personal collection of interesting guitar links, with a focus on guitar tablature sites. It's not meant to be an authoritative index; it's just a list of sites I've found helpful in my guitar education.
Technical Sites
- Harmony Central -- A great site for not just guitar players, but also bass, keyboard, MIDI... It's especially useful for its product review boards, and it also has extensive links collections for the musician.
- GuitarGeek.com -- Probably the ultimate guitar tech site, this website tells you everything you need to know about many of your favorite guitarists' setups. And yes, if you are so inclined, you can put together Jimi's setup.
Tab Sites
This is probably a controversial issue right now because of copyright issues and such, but I personally find the idea to be quite defensible. After all, sheet music does cost money, and you can't always find the music you want. One thing I do ask though: if you do use my site as a gateway to find music for a paid gig, do yourself and the artist a favor and make sure you buy a legit copy of the sheet music if you can find one. (Failing that, I'm sure you could just mail a check directly to the artist in question as a note of appreciation; I don't know that I'd do it myself, but it's not a bad idea...)
- The Online Guitar Archive -- OLGA is the first place to look for any guitar music. Their focus seems to be mostly on rock music; the selection of funk/R&B is fairly poor, unfortunately, but you can still find some stuff.
- Renegade OLGA started off as a mirror of OLGA, but now mostly plays host to the Ultimate Tab Search. Not quite as clean as the original, but it's sometimes a bit more wide-ranging at the cost of ease-of-use.
- guitaretab.com -- If OLGA doesn't have it, you might find it here. I'm not too familiar with it, though; it does have links to a large list of tab sites.
- Groove Station is a French-language site that has a number of R&B tabs that OLGA doesn't; it also has MIDI files of most of the songs on the site.
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