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I woke up on sunday morning to the excited cries of my six-year old son: “There’s a lake in our backyard!”. I wasn’t too worried about it. Sometimes when it rains a lot we get a couple of puddles of water in the back and the kids call it a “lake”. A nasty storm had passed through the night before and it had been raining heavily all night so I assumed the puddles had appeared again.

But when he came running into my room screaming, “The lake comes all the way up to our house” I started to worry. I asked him if he had looked in the basement. He looked down the stairs then came back to report that the basement looked like a place where the creature from the black lagoon would live. That didn’t sound good…

I went down to check it out for myself. The first thing I noticed was one of my guitars gently floating by near the bottom of the steps. Things were getting steadily worse.

I had nearly a foot of water in my basement. That is especially bad news since I keep ALL of my guitars in the basement. I built a little closet to hold them about six inches off of the ground. But that wasn’t enough to keep them safe.

I brought all of my guitars upstairs and dried them off. The Taylor 414 and the Les Paul Standard that you see me playing in the videos on myOnlineGuitar were among them. I held the hollow instruments over the sink and let the water pour out of the sound hole. Then I set them out to dry and headed back down.

My next concern was my recording studio. Between research, contruction and equipping the room, it took me about two years to complete. Having a high-quality home studio had been a dream of mine for years. Finally, in 2007 I had completed it.

But in 2009, it was destroyed.

At least partially. I lost some important equipment. The nearly-soundproof walls which I was so proud of had been damaged. All the wood laminate flooring and subfloor had been destroyed. My Marshall half-stack, my Fender Blues Deville amp and my Pro Tools PC were all partially submerged. They still need to dry out some more before I’m going to turn them on to see if they still work.

There is a whole list of other things that were destroyed but it hurts the most to see my instruments and music equipment in such bad shape.

To top it off, my insurance company is paying me nothing for my claim. Because this was a flood and not a sump-pump backup they will not pay me anything. Ouch.

All in all it hasn’t been such a bad couple of days. My two little boys are safe and they had a great time playing in our new lake. I decided that instead of dwelling on everything that I had lost it was better to be happy that I had two little boys out there having the time of their lives. After all, it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to go swimming in your back yard.

I hope…

I want to make this site useful for the entire community. I’d really like to hear what it is that you’d like to learn about the guitar so that I can create lessons that are useful for you.

Are you interested in learning…

What style of music do you like best? Who are your favorite artists?

Feel free to leave comments to this post to tell me what you’d like.

I also created a survey which takes 2 or three minutes to complete. Click Here to take survey

I’m looking forward to hearing from you,

Brian

Jamorama Review - Learn how to play the guitar

In this article I take a look at the Jamorama Guitar Learning Kit. I purchased it for myself to see what it was all about and to see if it was a product worth promoting to my students.

I expected to find a watered down, cheaply produced and overpriced course like some others that I have evaluated. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is the real deal. There is enough material here to keep beginning guitarists busy for quite a while.

The package comes with a money-back guarantee and a lot of nice bonus materials including:

I found a nice web site today that will help you if you’re trying to learn the names of the notes on the guitar. It’s called Guitar Trainer. It will help you learn notes on the first twelve frets of all six strings.

If you’re trying to memorize the fretboard it might be helpful to spend a few minutes on this site everyday.

Brian

I created a couple of guitar lesson pages on Squidoo. You’ll find links there to some of my free guitar learning resources and some of the courses that I’ve created.

Here are the links:

Beginning Guitar Lessons

Free Guitar Lesson Podcast

I found this video of Airtap by Erik Mongrain on youTube a while back. What a great guitar player. I was really moved and inspired by it so I decided to buy the CD. I believe this “CD” is only available in MP3 format. It’s great listening. This guy is loaded with talent and is a great innovator. I think we’ll hear a lot more about him in the future.

You can get his mp3 album here.

Learning to play bar chords on guitar is not an easy task. Your fingers are forced to contort into positions that they would never normally be in. You need to hold them in that position for the duration of the chord. And it takes a lot of hand strength to do it.

Here’s a video I made that will hopefully help you play bar chords a little more cleanly.

Brian