Author Archives: Moses

Merry Christmas

Written by Moses on December 20, 2010 — 5 Comments

Merry Christmas

Christmas is under a week away and it is an exciting time to be a guitarist.
For many, the holiday season offers a well deserved break from the flow of normal life and presents a fantastic opportunity to catch up on some quality ‘self time’.

Maintaining a consistent, structured practice regime is critical to the steady development of your talent on any musical instrument, however it is also incredible how much good some concentrated playing hours can do for your guitar skills.

So even if you have only managed to pick up your guitar a few times this year and perhaps you are feeling a bit disconnected from your musical self, don’t let it get you down, remember, putting in some time is better than putting in no time and the sooner you can overcome the initial blockers that any beginner guitarist will face, the sooner you can start experiencing the joy of hearing your own playing begin to sound like real music.

Enjoying the challenge of tackling chord shapes, transitions, rhythm and timing is about embracing the fact that it can be tricky to get your hands doing what your head is trying to tell them to do. Just slow down, relax, breath deeply and take your time, trust that if you just keep playing away, it will eventually start to sound good.

For those of you that are not yet using Jamorama to help you on your journey to becoming a real guitarist we are running a special discount this Christmas you can check out here.

From all the team here at Jamorama we hope you have a fantastic Christmas.

Posted in learning

Perfect Waves – Amazing Guitar Song

Written by Moses on November 14, 2010 — 19 Comments

Well things are humming here at Jamorama HQ as we get closer to the end of the year and New Zealand is warming up as we approach summer.  Festivities really start to kick off around this time of year and all of a sudden it seams every weekend is full up with gigs, parties or BBQs.

While it still may be a bit cold to hit the surf, the idea of the beach is steadily growing more and more appealing for those of us coming out of  a pretty cold winter and the Stephen Shackinger track entitled Perfect Waves paints a picture for me of that exact feeling.

This is a fantastic piece of music. The Fender Stratocaster he plays provides a beautiful tone that is very reminiscent of that Dire Straits kind of guitar sound especially from about 4:17. He is using delay over the verse sections which create that echo you can hear. Also his backing track is laden with all sorts of nice embellishment’s and some duelling lines that seam to track the lead line or play up the octave.

His use of interesting licks woven in and around the main motif are very well crafted and while this man is clearly very proficient on the guitar he is also very disciplined with when, where and how he uses some of his more flashy techniques.

Check it out and let us know what you think:

Posted in Artists, Electric Guitars, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , ,

How we play the G Major Chord

Written by Moses on November 4, 2010 — 2 Comments

Well it’s a rainy day here in Christchurch, New Zealand and lunchtime seamed the opportune moment to pick up the guitars and have a bit of a jam.

Something we’ve been exploring lately is the “One Chord” jam. Quite simply we just pick a chord and hold it for the entire jam. This promotes all sorts of different rhythmic ideas and variations on the chord and is surprisingly fun.

Take a look at the different shapes below:

guitar chords2 How we play the G Major Chord

Dave is playing a traditional shape with the added pinky finer. Dan plays the root with his ring finger freeing up the first and second fingers across frets one and two. Moses uses his second finger to play the root and mute the A string while his first finger floats above the second fret and the pinky also floats and can actually stretch to the fifth fret.

By floating the first finger you can try hammer ons and pull offs especially in the second fret.
There are countless amounts of variations that can be formed have a go exploring different options yourself.

Posted in acoustic guitars | Tagged , ,

Happy Halloween

Written by Moses on October 28, 2010 — 1 Comment

The wide spread observance of Halloween’s more social, festive and commercial aspects appears to be growing every year. American pop culture’s influence on an ever increasing worldwide audience is probably the biggest reason for the rise in popularity of the celebration amongst a new generation.

In New Zealand it is fairly rare to see any real Jack-o-lanterns around but trick or treating certainly seams to be getting bigger each October 31 and there has been a bit of buzz around the Jamorama office about how we could encourage kids to chew candy AND learn guitar.

Perhaps next year we will have to get some guitar shaped chocolate made up with special lesson codes on the wrappers, this year however we have sent some Halloween themed emails to our favorite subscribers with some tasty discounts on our guitar lessons. You can check out the discount your self here.

halloweenblog Happy Halloween

Posted in Announcements

Help us make Jamorama better.

Written by Moses on February 15, 2010 — 5 Comments

team will call you1 Help us make Jamorama better.

The Jamorama team is totally dedicated to your guitar playing education. In fact it’s our purpose for being so we tend to take it rather seriously. We know we are not perfect so won’t get it right all the time. But we also know that with your help, we can become the best guitar lessons online.

To do this we need to listen; listen and find out if you are getting what you need from us; listen and learn what we need to change.

We’d like to ask your permission for one of our team members to give you a call. The call can be as long or as short as you like – we only have a few questions (8 to be precise) and there’s no silly 1-10 scales of measurement, just real people who genuinely want to give you the best guitar lessons in the world.

If you would be so kind to give us permission to give you a call please follow the link below and enter your phone number and a suggested time for us to call you.

letuscallyou Help us make Jamorama better.

Posted in Jamorama team, learning
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