I’ve taught many students who initially started taking lessons as a birthday gift. Each of them would tell me that they would never have treated themselves to guitar lessons on their own – but were now thrilled with learning to play the guitar. The gift sparked their interest, and nearly every student continued to take lessons with me after their initial gift had expired.

Give a unique experience that they’ll love!

You choose the number of lessons – and I am offering a 10% discount to those who purchase a gift certificate for friends, family, that special someone…

…or even your band’s guitar-player!

Gift certificates can be redeemed for either in-person or Skype/Facetime guitar lessons.

Contact me below with questions and to purchase your gift certificate today.

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

The lineup is great this year, and culminates in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, Friday at the Bob Hope Theatre. I’ll be attending a number of the events this week – there’s nothing better than good jazz.

Check the University of Pacific website for the full schedule.

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

The new Whirlow’s stage is excellent, the sound balanced and clear, and the vibe is inclusive and very jammy. Whirlow’s is always a great local hang-out for musicians, but the Wednesday vibe is even more fun and carefree than normal. Check out the toy drum kit!

This is also where you can come out and see me and any of my more daring students perform our “coffee shop” acoustic sets on a regular basis. Yes – that’s right – Dan does sing from time to time…

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

Time: Sundays, 4:00pm – 6:00pm.

Who: Daniel Page (guitar) with Kali Dub System and Michelsen.

Where: Chitivas Salsa Bar, 445 West Weber Ave.

Cost: FREE!

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

In my own case – my studio has to have many functions. It is first and foremost a teaching studio, but also must serve as my own practice studio (that’s right – you still have to practice – a lot – even after you become a guitar teacher), a recording studio, and a creative business studio.

While in the past I’ve been using one centralized computer as the hub that a lot of my studio activities revolved around, I recently noticed that it was acting as a bit of a bottleneck in the teaching and creative processes. As powerful as personal computers are – they still just have one input device (mouse and keyboard in my case) and one screen – and multi-tasking is made very difficult because of that. If, in a typical lesson, I am using the machine to look up a student’s song on the internet, search for and display sheet music, record us playing along to a backing track, and plug in a student’s phone to hear the recording that they made, it becomes overwhelming – not necessarily to the computer’s processing power, but to the user of the machine.

So a big project that I’m undertaking this year is to re-think the flow of activity in the studio into more specific activities done on specific pieces of equipment. I’d already made that decision with keeping a couple of nicer studio amplifiers around – rather than only running the guitars into garageband like a lot of guitarists and teachers do these days. The next step has been the decision to add a mixer to the studio. Whereas I had always used an audio program (currently Cockos “Reaper”) for my sound mixing, and connected any microphones or other sound devices to a separate audio interface (currently Mackie “Onyx Satellite”) it proved to be very tough to keep tabs on my software mixer when I was actively using the computer for all the other things we use the computer for.

So we’ve pulled the trigger on a small-format mixing board, the Mackie Onyx 820i, which looks like it has enough inputs, outputs, and routing options to fulfill the ways that I need to move audio signals around in the studio. Connecting students iPods and phones to play music should be no trouble – and in fact – we could even route audio to those devices to record. We’ll also be able to hook up hardware drum machines and effect processors to the mixer and hear them coming directly out of the studio monitor speakers, rather than making the round trip into and out of the computer. Finally – all 8 tracks of audio that the mixer handles can be sent into the computer via firewire to record on 8 separate tracks. The trick is, I’ll be able to set up my recording software ahead of time and basically just use it as a big tape machine, hit record once and then not worry about the individual tracks inside the computer until it’s time to mix (which is a whole other topic).

The mixer arrives next week and, assuming that it’s working when it gets here, I’ll be posting a part 2 with pictures showing how I’ve got it wired into the studio and some examples of the new functionality that it brings to the studio.

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

Before this gig, when we were all meeting each-other, we talked about how you always seem to be thrust into gigs on no notice, having never played with the other musicians before, and with a couple dozen new songs to learn in no time at all.

More often than not it turns out to be a great show and a happy crowd, like today. Featured are myself (left), Ross James (middle – guitar), and Jon Graboff (right – pedal steel guitar).

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

If you’ve read some of my other posts on this website, you’ll know that I absolutely cannot stand the blatant overuse of compression in modern recorded music. I don’t, however, want you to come away from this site thinking that “compression” is some kind of evil term, to be avoided at all costs. In fact, it is one of the most basic and useful audio tools in a musician’s arsenal.

A great way to use compression is to help create the illusion of a louder amplifier sound. Most of us practicing guitarists have to do most of our practice in low-volume situations. It is a well known problem that guitar amplifiers do not sound their best unless they are turned up a substantial amount. By that point, though, neighbors will certainly be complaining!

One reason that our amplifiers sound better at a higher volume is that at high volumes, the amplifier begins to “compress” the guitar sound – that is – it makes the quieter parts louder and the louder parts quieter. One way to test this out: turn up your amp all the way and then blow air onto your guitar strings, hear that cool sound?  “Compression” is what allows us to hear such a quite sound at such a high volume (without having our ears blasted out when we actually strum a chord).

I find that using a “compressor” pedal in front of an amplifier, turned very quiet, is a great way to get a good guitar sound at low volumes. Simply turn the pedal on, adjust the compression amount to what sounds good, and you should notice a much more satisfying, but still quiet, guitar tone.

What are some good compressor pedals?

My personal favorite is the “Keeley Compressor,” a very transparent sounding pedal. It is, at this point, a modern industry standard for guitarists. Another good pedal is the “BBE Opto Stomp” which is designed for a subtle and natural sound, though it cannot achieve the moderate to heavy levels of compression that you may want. Or you can go for a more pronounced, vintage sound and get a modern recreation of the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer such as Analog Man’s Juicer pedal.

A couple of notably popular, though untested by me personally, pedals that you also might look at are the Pigtronix Philisopher’s Tone and the Barber Tone Press. The philosopher’s tone took the guitar magazine review circuit by storm, earning a number of editor’s choice rankings because of the number of controllable compression parameters on the device (most compressor pedals have 1 or 2 knobs, it has 5). The tone press became popular because of its affordable (at least in boutique guitar pedal terms) price and its ability to provide a very clean compressed tone using its “blend” knob.

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

Digital music. Internet radio. Honestly, what is it good for? With more access by more people to more music more quickly than ever before, what has actually happened to our listening experience?

The last form of music playback that I really connected with was the CD. It was portable, durable, and futuristically shiny. There was the brief, beautiful mechanical sound as it was drawn into the slot on your car stereo. As handy as it was, you had to care for it – be mindful of scratches and not lose the jewel case. Though the music was digital, our interaction with the CD was a tangible, sensory experience.

Then we began to rip CD’s to the computer, load songs up on our iPods, buy music online with iTunes, and get rid of our old CD collections. We could take our entire music collection with us in a pocket sized device, and comprehensively categorize thousands of albums on the computer, psychedelic visualizer pyrotechnics firing away on our ever-widening computer monitors.

Music became fragmented

My own enthusiasm lasted until about that point. While I enjoyed the power of being able to back up CD’s into the neatly organized columns of regimented artists and albums, my own little army of music, music on the computer started to involve more and more steps. iTunes kept getting bigger, and bigger – adding more features and things to buy. New stores started popping up with different file types, there were restrictions on which audio files could be on which devices, with which programs. And as all these things were springing up, it became that the process, and talking about the process, of buying and listening to music became more important than actually listening. A recorded song, merely one piece of the puzzle whose potential is to hurl waves of pressure through the air and towards your ear, lays dormant behind a license agreement and DRM protection. Register and click agree for music.

Songza: (very) simple music

How Songza works

The critical feature of Songza is that you don’t really have to do anything. Your input into the program can be very limited. It tells you what day it is and what time it is, which is a pretty funny reminder that the program is all about dumbing down the music listening process. Push a button telling the program what you are doing and it prompts you for an appropriate genre, then this screen:

One more click and the music starts, and it is very, very good. Who knows what kind of process the team at Songza had to compile their playlists, I can only guess that competent music lovers got together with a competent design team and managed not to mess anything up in the process. In playlists fitting a variety of moods and genres, from “waking up” to “studying”, r&b to solo acoustic instrumentals, I was listening to great songs by great musicians (and many that were unknown to me). Another nice surprise is that there are no audio ads whatsoever in the app (and ad placement is limited to a small banner that appears on the “now playing” screen).

What’s the verdict?

No one facet of Songza makes it a great music listening app. Where the program excels is its ability to incorporate itself into how we have grown to listen to music on digital devices. It is free. It opens quickly. It presents you with a very simple set of choices, easily navigable with sleepy and uncoordinated fingers. Through 3 quick prompts it narrows the musical choices down to a specific station that you, importantly, chose to listen to. It does not disturb you with ads. It plays very good music, almost all of the time. Lastly, it offers the capability to, but does not require you to, delve further into depths of playlist exploration and creation.

And while I set about this month signing up for and using a number of different online music services with the intent to write about each experience, listening to music these past few days with Songza I wonder why I would even bother. I’m listening to more music now than I have since the old days spent carefully planning out which CDs made it into the car’s special CD sleeve.

And the best thing? I don’t care how I am listening to it.

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA

A-B tests, what are they good for?

Producer Allen Farmelo has recently written an article in response to a lot of the criticism that has recently been leveled at Neil Young’s recent venture into high quality audio distribution. A significant reason why lossy audio formats like mp3 took hold so quickly and easily was the fact that many if not most listeners could not tell them apart from the CD format – the conclusion being that mp3s were just as good as CD’s. So Neil Young’s development of a “studio quality” high bit-rate music player and file-type would be completely unnecessary, right?

The coffee analogy

Mr. Farmelo takes issue with the idea of the A-B tests that are used to compare different file sizes, but not the issue you might think. He doesn’t doubt the veracity of the test. Most of us can’t tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and a 1411kbps lossless wav file when blindly switching between the two. As is often needed when using words to discuss audio, he explains his position by way of metaphor:

For example, when I started living with my partner I introduced her to what I call “good coffee.”  At first she kind of shrugged it off as my snobbery at work, and she couldn’t really taste the difference.  But then, after months of drinking the good stuff, she found herself to be a bit of a coffee snob, too.  She could taste the difference because she had, simply, spent time with the good stuff.  The coffee revealed itself to her, slowly and subtly.  Her palate developed.  And the thing about good coffee is that it holds more detail, nuance and, therefore, interest.

But it takes a while to become aware of that depth and complexity.  Had she done a flip-flip-flip A-B and made her choice to only drink the cheaper stuff because, “you know, they’re basically the same,” she’d have missed an opportunity to develop her palate.

I think the same thing can be said for the resolution of music, and it breaks my sonic heart to think of the A-B tests out there designed to convince someone that because they can’t tell the difference today they won’t tell the difference in a month or a year.  A-B tests may be designed to show that subtle differences don’t matter, but what they really do is shut down the possibility that those subtle differences could be the key to someone’s aesthetic awakening.

Yeah, I get that analogy. Not only am I a coffee drinker, like many others, I was a Netflix subscriber when they introduced the online-streaming component to their service. Over the period of many months I enjoyed watching movies in this format, as convenient as it was, to the point that mailing and receiving DVDs seemed an unnecessary chore. My enjoyment of the movies had suffered – something I only noticed when after many months I put in a DVD and was immediately immersed in the content. Living with the two formats for long enough, I realized that the sound quality constraints of the online format, while objectively minimal, were defeating the intended experience.

Living with the guitar

We run across the same idea when playing a musical instrument. I’ll often recommend that an aspiring student spend as much as they can budget on their first guitar (the opposite of the conventional wisdom). Why? Because a quality instrument will teach you how to play it. It rewards you with a resonant vibration and airy tone when it being played well. It will scold you with clinically distinct buzzes when your technique is poor. We are playing a long game with our music. While you may not know the difference between a cheap plywood guitar and the nicer solid-wood quality instrument in the guitar shop today – both the enjoyment you receiving from living and playing that guitar for years, and your own musical skill, will be all the greater for it.

Daniel Page Guitar - Guitar Teacher in Stockton, CA