15 hrs · Kansas City · If you're a Jimi Hendrix fan like I am, this is really interesting - there's very little actual footage that really goes with the audio here, but the audio is amazingly great (some of this stuff actually sounds better than his his studio records) for someone recording this on who knows what from back then - portable recorders were almost non-existent in the late 60s. "I Don't Live Today" is one of my fav Hendrix tunes and it's great here, but the intro for Foxy Lady is worth the price of admission by itself - and the ending to that is REALLY cool - OK, I am a sort of feedback freak I guess ;-)


I have seen a lot of jazz guitar players turn their noses up at rock guitar players because the note selection is limited, but what they are missing is the pure power of the actual sound - and I have to say that I've gotten to take some sort of evil pleasure in watching a couple of these big box jazz guys have NO IDEA how to control the snarling beast that is a loud electric guitar with distortion, and have it all result in just a totally unmusical noise. Hendrix could make every noise that came out of his Stratocaster sing into something of beauty.


"Bleeding Heart" is a blues here where he shows off his "grab two strings with one finger and bend them and transfer from one to the other" thing that I have also really run with over the years. I'm sure it's an old Chitlin Circuit thing that lots of guys did back then, but he's the only guy I ever heard do it, and like I said, I have figured out ways to make this work over all kinds of scales etc.


"Fire" is really cool here, it's another one where the audio is way better than his studio recordings, the vocal is sort of not there a lot, but I think he just didn't bother to sing a lot of times. What I have always loved about his playing is his sense of the dramatic - he leads the music in a direction that it's always interesting, and he does the same thing in his solos, he makes sure that there is a beginning, a developed middle, and a climax at the end all the time.


I learned how to sometimes "float through the time" in a solo from Hendrix, sometimes he will do things that are not even close to metronomic but somehow work. I have recorded things that I had to tell my logical mind to not try to analyse as I was playing it, because I knew it would look like the science project of all time on paper - one of these days I will get some drummer to write them down for me.
"Little Wing" is amazingly in tune for a live Hendrix performance, and that goes for both the guitar AND the vocal performance. I have to give credit to whoever was mixing the live audio this night, the balance between all the instruments and the vocal and the drums etc is really studio quality.


And then there's "Voodoo Chile"....whooooooowwwhhh! Complete with his substitute #9 chords on the climb section. Once again, his tone is killer here, it's astounding that this a late 60s live recording - and he's just SO in tune, which so many times was just NOT the case in his live gigs. Mitch Mitchell is kicking ass and taking names on this thing, you can see why Hendrix hired him, he's right on Jimi at all times, pushing him to keep what ever he has happening going. They put a sparkler effect on Hendrix in the footage on this solo, and you can see why - wow. Even his "good night" section at the end with Mitchell is really cool, they actually had some rehearsed stuff to jam out on. Considering this is 1969 at the end of his life when his manager was working them to death and spiking their drinks with acid to punish them for violation of some rule he had, it's just as energetic as his stuff when he broke in 1966-7.
They bring out some jammers when they add "Room Full Of Mirrors" on to Voodoo Chile - Dave Mason on guitar and Chris Wood from Traffic on flute, who actually sounds really good. How they were able to amplify a flute with Hendrix's wall of Marshalls screaming behind him is a modern miracle of sound reinforcement.

The encore is "Purple Haze", the song that when I heard for the first time made me stop in my tracks and decide that I had to learn how to make a sound like that. Oh well, his low E string gets stuck in his guitar's nut at the end and goes totally sharp - but he's a master of fixing that stuff in the moment, and by "Wild Thing", it gets acceptable - sort of, you can see him trying to fix it all through the tune - well, if there's one sone that it doesn't matter much if you are in tune on, it's "Wild Thing" wink emoticon I've always thought it was really cool how he put "Strangers In The Night" into the solo, that's just total creative brilliance.....and so then the camera focuses on his crotch and whatever, he was nothing if not sexual and had the greatest clothes ever - and then there is the "National Anthem" quotes to close it all out, and the crowd going crazy trying to get the pieces of the smashed guitar.

Thanks to Tony Jones for turning me on to this, it's amazing stuff, and definitely NOT something that you want to skip through, listen to the whole thing. With all the totally terrible stuff that the Hendrix estate has release to scape money for the bottom of the Jimi barrel over the years, I will be really surprised if they don't release this audio as a new Hendrix CD, it would probably be the first really good one. 

There is an amazing amount of guitar information everywhere these days, so what I want to talk about is the best way to learn guitar from whatever source you choose, because there are universal principles for learning that are true for everyone.

The most important thing is to understand how the brain learns things, so you can use it to best accomplish your goals rather than work against them – yes, if you do things wrong, you will severely delay playing the way that you want to. The first thing to consider is that the brain doesn’t know the difference between what you MEANT to do and what you DID, and sees what you did as what you wanted. What that means very simply is this: NEVER PRACTICE MISTAKES. That sounds simple to say, but what does it look like?

First, look over what you are learning and visualise how to play it in your head. Then, play through as slowly as you need to play to not make mistakes. If you DO make mistakes, you will have to reprogram them by replaying the passage correctly as many as 24 times. It’s a huge waste of time to try to play too fast, so tell your inner voice that says that you should be able to play it faster to shut up and you WILL play it faster after you have it down.

It’s also really helpful to break whatever you are learning into small “chunks” of musical ideas. After you have a couple of chunks down, then begin to string them together, focusing on time, feel, and overall sound, and use a metronome or drum loop if possible.

If there are any sections that are especially difficult, look at changing the fingering, picking, etc. to find something that is easier for you. One thing I have always taught is that I have never seen anyone play anything hard to do on the guitar, they just do easy things very well. What that means is that they do things the way that the human body is made to do them, not just the only way that someone showed them or they read on some free guitar tab off the internet. What I am talking about is reducing unnecessary movements like really wide pick strokes (your pick stroke shouldn’t go much more than a pick’s width above or below the string) or lifting your fingers very high off the strings.

Another very important thing in the fretting hand is what I call a sort of “walking” motion between notes. What I mean by that is to keep one finger down on the string (sort of like one foot being on the ground) while the other finger is in motion to the next note, and not lifting the first note’s finger until the next note’s finger is down. Besides reducing the unnecessary motion in your hand (and the smaller the motion, the faster you can do it – right?), it will make your playing much more legato, meaning that every note will last longer.

It’s also really valuable to change up what you are practicing after no more than 5–10 minutes. Besides allowing you to practice more things longer by reducing boredom for your brain, you will find that you are better when you come back to something you were practicing before, because you subconscious brain is actually still working on it after you stop.

These things might seem overly simplistic but I invite you to think about them and try them with the next new thing you try to learn. These principles are not “jazz” or any other genre of music, they work no matter if you are trying to learn an Eddie Van Halen lick or an Irish fiddle reel – don’t laugh, they’re pretty hard to do fast. I think giving all of these concepts a try will really make an amazing impact in your playing – give them a try!

Ok, so all of my utility services are set up to be stopped after I leave and I will spend the day packing up everything to load in the car and drive away from Los Angeles to Kansas City at about 6:30am (about first light) Friday March 27, arriving on Monday March 30. I will leave exactly as I came, with all of my "essentials of life" stuff packed in my car - well, OK, all my OTHER HOUSE FULL O' STUFF is in a POD waiting to ship to KC after I find a house - and this time my dog Django will travel with me. "Essentials" on this trip are about 5-6 of my main guitars, a small Marshall combo 30 watt amp, a Bogner Goldfinger amp head, a KK Audio 1x12 speaker cabinet, a flatscreen TV, an iMac computer, a rolling lawyer style book bin, a brief case, a suitcase and a clothes bag with "work clothes" including a tuxedo - more sophisticated than last time, but pretty much the same "what you need to work" thing. That makes sense, as I am going to a new town to do exactly what I did as a 22 year old kid coming into LA years ago.

On my way to meeting my niece Laura for lunch yesterday I headed down Hollywood Blvd by the old (but now updated) Snow White Coffee Shop where I - and probably so many other MI students - had their first meal in LA waiting to get into the school. I must have screamed "I'm from out of town" all over me because some guy there said "So, when did you get to town", and after telling him everything I was going to do here, he said "Yeah, you'll get laid back like everyone else here" - actually, that never really happened, my external "Mr. Intense" persona did dial down a bit but under the hood the drive to do things never went away.

I remember that on my way to LA, just as I was driving across the desert as the sun was setting (where I found out "for purple mountains majesty" was not just the lyrics of a song), this song came on my crappy AM radio in my beat up Ford Maverick, "Deacon Blues", supposedly Steely Dan's treatise on LA life - "Learn to work the saxophone, I'll play just what I feel" - that was what I was coming to do on my instrument, and I did accomplish that purpose and met and played with some of the best of the best musicians in the world. Ernie Watts' sax solos still totally get me, and this is prefect cruising music with the little "popping" single note guitar parts at the end:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52EeVLOeM0w

One of my dad's old jokes seems to apply: As the monkey said when he got his tail caught in the lawnmower, “It won’t be long now” - so fair thee well all, 

This is (I think) a comma and not a period on LA for me, but I am sure that when I do come back, I will be changed and for the better.