Wednesday, 30 September 2020
Wednesday, 23 September 2020
NLP communication skills and creative tactics.
NLP communication
skills and creative tactics.
As a teacher and communicator we need to maximise the
efficiency of our communication. In today’s society with the challenges that
this presents it is even more important to hone your skills.
For anybody who works where communication is at the very
heart of what they do, whether you are a teacher, health professional, salesperson;
the tactics of NLP will be of use to you.
As you know many of these courses that you can find online
would involve groups of people, however that is not practical at this present
moment, therefore I am offering one-to-one training either face-to-face or
online through Zoom or Skype.
I have used these techniques for over 25 years of music and
teaching and I have found them to be valuable and beneficial whether you are in
creative mode or communication mode.
Contact me on (07976) 405561 for further details.
Tuesday, 22 September 2020
Guitars are almost indestructible, and there is a little goldmine out there
Guitars are almost indestructible, and there is a little goldmine out there
Have you got an old electric guitar that has been hanging
around, or maybe an old acoustic with a couple of strings missing? They may be repairable,
in fact electric guitars and pretty much indestructible, so why not get it
fixed?
One of the problem areas on the guitar is the fretboard or
the neck. Sometimes the neck can warp, but on a well-made guitar you can adjust
this by tensioning or relaxing the truss rod that runs through the middle of
the neck. Now this is a job for somebody who knows what they are doing, so I
would suggest that you find a guitar repairer who could do this for you, they
will also be able to restring the guitar and maybe change the tuning pegs if
required.
I was always amazed as a teenager that when
you spoke to people about playing the guitar they always had one knocking
around the house somewhere. It always surprised me how many people didn’t play
but they seemed to have a guitar and as I was getting into teaching at the time
I would often get them to pass my name around.
A good friend of mine who is an architect keeps
a guitar and amp in his office. He says it is a good talking point when people
come in to discuss a new project, getting the conversation off to a relaxed
start.
In the years that I’ve been teaching I’ve known a number of
occasions where old guitar has been found in the loft and it’s turned out to be
quite a find. The most extreme and for
example of this was somebody found an original Gretsch White Falcon that came
in the original Gretsch case and this was worth a few thousand pounds 20+ years
ago. Although this is unusual there often finds of classic less well-known
guitars such as Hofner, and EKO and even the odd Fender Stratocaster.
A few years ago I put the word out for some old guitars to
be donated for charity, I had given to me around about 20 guitars that I was
able to repair and get into a number of schools that were short on musical
instruments. Even in that number there are a couple of Fender Squire’s that
were literally given to me for nothing. So this might be a little bit of a
goldmine if you are willing and able to do a little bit of repair work and TLC
on the instrument.
I am personally keen on the whole idea of recycling and
therefore the idea of an old guitar just being thrown away to me is quite
abhorrent. Guitars have their own character, even the cheap ones, and with some
attention can be made into something quite special. I have an old Ibanez Road Star
that I had rebuilt. The guitar actually cost me nothing because it had been
left in a school by an ex pupil for a few years and as he had gone back to some
exotic country he was very unlikely to come back to retrieve the instrument.
The basic build quality of the guitar was very good so I just stripped down and
repainted it but then spent some money on pickups and a nice scratch plate. This
is one of the guitars that I used to gig, playing in a different tuning and
using it for bottleneck blues playing.
I mentioned earlier that electric guitars are pretty much
indestructible, so what about the acoustic guitars. The obvious weakness on the
acoustic guitar is the acoustic body which is basically a hollow box, and if
this gets damaged it might be difficult to repair. It’s not impossible but it
is something that you would have to do because the cost of taking it to a
professional unless the instrument is a high quality would really not be worth
it. However that does not stop the instrument being useful for parts and the
same goes for the electric guitar of course. You might fancy building something
yourself but using the hardware from an old instrument.
Now if you have an artistic bent then and unplayable
instrument might be made into a work of art or even dare I say this into some
sort of container; which takes me to a story of an old classical guitar teacher
of mine who was horrified that one of his pupils had old guitars with plants growing
out of them hanging on their wall.
So with all these guitars knocking around, by
the law of averages some of them could be valuable and a good guitar keeps its
value not necessarily from the point of view of sale as that is market
dependant, but certainly from the point of view of its usefulness.
So if you are keen on salvaging and repairing a guitar but
do not know how to play I have a free course that can help
So until next time
Vic
Visit www.bluescampuk.co.uk
for links to the free course
for news on the Creative podcast if you want to learn to create and be successful visit my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/vichyland