Understand, this is a form, not free-fencing. (It’s a little bit harder for me to hit Puck when it’s not a form.) Click here for a description of the form, explaining what is going on here.

And here’s another video, showing Provost Kevin Murakoshi going through the same form with Maestro Curtis:

Enjoy!

Now, here’s part two, which includes a little bit of string-skipping:

A couple of notes to keep in mind:

• Start the first pattern with an upstroke. As you play each four note sequence, keep the pick between the two strings you’re hitting.
• Start the second pattern with a downstroke.
• It’s way way way more important to be smooth, clean, and perfectly timed than it is to go fast. You will get fast eventually, but only go as fast as you can still do it perfectly.
• The synchronization between your right hand and your left hand is crucial – if they aren’t together as you’re doing this, you’re reinforcing the wrong things. Go slow and get it right.
• If you have a metronome or a drum machine, use that as you do this exercise. You want to do this as rock steady as possible.
• Run through this a couple of times a day. Be patient – you’ll get super-fast sooner with patience than with impatience.
• Finally, please remember that this is an exercise that uses geometric patterns on the fretboard – it is not particularly musical. Do practice this. Don’t put it in your song or your guitar solo – that would sound dumb.

If you have any thoughts about this, please leave a comment – I’d love to know whether this was helpful (or a waste of time). I’m hoping to post more guitar exercises over time.

By the way, the tabs are drawn on the back of giraffe-pattern napkins. I’ll leave you with a shot of the front of the napkin:

2) If your opponent parries you weakly, stay strong and hit them. If they parry you strongly, yield to their parry and either do a conclusion or hit them with a stramazzone.

3) There are at least three strengths one blade can have against another: using a part of your blade closer to your hilt against a part of their blade closer to the tip (Destreza authors called this “greater degrees of strength”); from above (in Aristotelian terms: natural motion against violent motion), that is to say, pushing down while they are pushing up; and using the true edge instead of the flats or the false edge.

Link Two: Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best

The first link is one post from one of my favorite webcomics: Indexed. Jessica Hagy posts all these hilarious and/or thought-provoking graphs and charts on index cards. Check it out.

The second link is an article from The Atlantic that will not only teach you some things about maple syrup, but about food labeling in general. Worth a read.

Link Two: Llama font – say it in llama

I think I want a SureFire EWP-02 – the $90 price tag will slow me down a little, but I’ve broken two pens in my pocket in the last two weeks. (Didn’t get ink anywhere, just cracked the cases.) I like the idea of an überpen, ready to go anywhere or do anything, tough, rugged, ready for the world. Won’t break in my pants pocket when I plop on the couch.

Link two is one of those awesome things that the Internet was made for – it’s just goofy fun. Go try it out.

A perfect jewel
endlessly beautiful
reflecting God’s light
in countless ways
my own dear Silmaril
delighting eyes heart mind soul

Even the flaws
(impossible to see
without a loupe)
do not detract
they merely add
detail and texture

Polished surface
prismatic depths
beauty
upon beauty
upon beauty

That’s all probably fine if your goal is to be a guitarist.

But if your goal is to be a musician, there’s a lot you can learn from other instruments. (I should point out here that I consider voice to be an instrument.)  One of the reasons I specified “rock guitarists” instead of just “guitarists” here is that I’ve noticed that jazz and classical guitarists tend to be much more open to influences from other instruments. I think that’s pretty awesome, and us rockers can learn from that.

So here’s a couple of cross-training exercises for rock guitarists:

• Learn to play the bass part from some of your favorite songs, turning it into a guitar part.
• Do the same thing for the vocal melody. Don’t worry about this turning the song into elevator music – the goal here is just to learn how to make those vocal parts into guitar parts as a learning exercise.
• Figure out how to do a percussion pattern based on a drum groove you like – slapping the strings, the body, etc. Make it funky, son.
• Just listen to a great album that has no guitar parts. (You have to listen – it can’t just be background music.) I recommend Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, a fantastic jazz album. Since this advice is for rockers, guitar-less might be a little bit harder to find. (Of course, I also think it’s essential for rockers to listen to non-rock, but I can understand wanting to deal with one problem at a time. Baby steps!) Apocalyptica does metal with cellos and no guitars. If you enjoy electronic music, Crystal Method’s album Vegas has lots of food for thought for guitarists. Dig around, you’ll find something (and maybe discover some great music that you will be surprised and delighted to hear).

Link Two: Dunning–Kruger effect

Link one is a brilliant webcomic at Jellyvampire. Really highly recommend you read all the way through this – it’s a vertical scroller, but it’s not that long, and well worth it. It’s about pursuing your passion, even when it seems unrealistic.

Link two is the Wikipedia article about the Dunning–Kruger effect – which is a documented issue where incompetent people tend to think they’re better than they really are, and competent people tend to think that they’re worse than they really are.

Link Two: The Rules of Sagefight

The first link is pretty well described in the title – but you have to look at the pictures to see how dang cool it looks. Very interesting photography project.

The second link is for a game that looks like fun – I haven’t played this, but it actually looks like it would be a fun challenge for a martial artist, thinking about tactics and balance, leaving strength and speed out of it.  I don’t know, maybe not, but I’d like to try this with a few of my training partners at some point.

A murder of crows
omen of battle
noisy and social
low-class cousins of
lonely and noble ravens
thinking of death and hunger
(but mostly death)
your death, mine
the dog across the street
crows dream of death
even in springtime