Let me introduce you to Expert Village.
A few mates and I have been swapping links from this exciting site recently, amazed at the high quality of tuition on their videos. Experts in a wide variety of subjects share their knowledge on the Expert Village site… for free!
My two favourite tutors are Athena Reich and the amazing Austin McBride.
Athena is particularly knowledgeable about the guitar. She encapsulates the entire subject of playing guitar into just one minute and eight seconds of video. I’ve been working at this stuff for over twenty years, so it was refreshing to hear her reveal that you “just pick at things”. It takes an expert to discover stuff like that. She also knows how to string a guitar showing that the open string notes are EADGBE, counting from high to low… not low to high, as I’d mistakenly believed! Duh, what a silly billy I am!
Austin is the piano expert, and I’ve learned loads from watching his videos. For example, his lesson on recognizing 5/4 time is a classic. He clearly demonstrates how it’s simply a matter of playing in 4/4 time, but counting “2-3-4-5″ instead of the boring old “1-2-3-4″. On another video, Austin introduces us to the little-known (actually, make that totally unknown) drop scales which can be found in several examples of… er, music, apparently. The reason I have no idea what he’s trying to say is because I’m not an EXPERT.
I urge you to visit this site and learn as much as you can. I think it’s great that they have a site where they can keep all the experts in one place. At least that way they can’t spend too much time on the rest of the internet…
Y’know, if I didn’t know you better, I’d have thought you were being sarcastic in your appraisal of these two musical giants…….
I can’t believe I’ve been admiring your work for many years, only to find out you didn’t know the guitar strings go from high to low. What a numpty! You’ve seriously never heard of drop scales either?? Pah!
I discovered a really cool video that teaches you how to log in, and back out of your myspace page… Pure genius.
Love your blogs :)
Log in *and* out? This is advanced stuff… I love the internet!
Awww… coming back to this much later to report that Austin McBride was an elaborate hoax. I’m slightly disappointed about that… it takes away a little of the WTF? factor. Still, it was a brilliant piece of japery, and a great satire of the “real” videos on Expert Village (now part of eHow), some of which are truly incompetent.