Darrin Koltow’s Guitar Lessons On The Net
Yesterday I downloaded Darrin Koltow’s “Guitar Lessons on the Net”. You may be familiar with Darrin as a frequent contributor here and as the head honcho at Maximum Musician. This ebook of 150 pages is chock full of information on where to find just about anything related to guitar playing on the internet.
An hour after buying and downloading I had gone through the ebook cover to cover, amazed at the breadth of information it contained. Now I say I went through it in an hour, but to actually CHECK out all of the references and sites listed in the ebook would take you a good week of surfing.
Darrin’s intent was to provide a well-written, easy to read guide on how to minimize your time on the internet so you can maximize your time playing your guitar. He succeeds.
Right off the bat I found a utility to slow down any MP3 while preserving the original pitch. It’s an amazing piece of software, complete with basic instructions to LOAD it in the document. I’ve used this software for several hours already, slowing down songs to jam along, played “Eruption” at 60% speed so I could figure out all the notes, and transcribed a couple of other pieces. I figure I got my $14.95 worth already.
Besides that little gem, there is a brief review of 9 or 10 of the top general guitar supersites. No surprise here, Guitar Noise ranks at the top, but there are a number of other sites listed that I had never visited. Darrin points out each sites strengths and weaknesses, things to beware and alternatives to consider. It’s not a complete reference to every site out there (would that even be possible?), but a well-balanced selection of sites covering just about every topic of interest to the guitar player.
The theory section has some cool sites I didn’t know about. Learning the fretboard online is especially valuable. When standard notation has relevance to the fretboard, theory makes a whole lot more sense. Darrin lists other sites here where you can get chord generators and even individual answers to theory questions.
“Guitar Lessons on the Net” has sections on Home Recording, converting wav to MP3, and wav editing. I already knew the information in this section, but for someone looking to start it would be an invaluable resource.
Everything is neatly indexed and arranged and if you can’t find it in his ebook, Darrin has also included a section on making your internet searches more effective. This little tidbit turned up a surprising number of more relevant hits for me.
The only negatives I could find was the pdf format does not allow for direct clicking on hyperlinks. That would make life a lot easier, but doesn’t really detract FROM the overall value of the ebook. One other minor item, there is a transcription in the middle of the book that takes up 20 pages – just an oddity of trying to get readable tabs INTO pdf, but you do have to scroll a while to get past it.
Next on my list to visit:
- Ear training software
- Improvisation and soloing Resources
If you’d like more information, follow this link to take a look at the TABLE of contents.
http://www.maximummusician.com/guitarlessonsonthenet.html
You can own this wonderful little ebook for the cost of a set of new Elixir’s. I highly recommend it.