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Video Link

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Video Link is a friendly competitor of G-Force Media Productions.

The owner of Video Link happens to be the owner of the building that G-Force is renting off of. The owner, Hugo, is quite the business man who does not have the same attitude as most people in the video making industry. He has the personality of your favorite uncle. He is very easy to get along with and, has the eye for the detail that you are looking for in a project manager, that will follow through with your specific and unique needs.

He also sells video equipment as well.

So check out his fantastic site and don’t be afraid to call. Oh BTW, he’s the guy who owns the great reasonably priced,beer dispenser that I talk about in my G-Force Media write up on this blog.




My choice is the Kyser Capo, Quick Change

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I had this capo thrown in when I got my Larrivee L-03 at the 12th fret in Toronto. I had always used the ones with the adjustable straps before with great results. I had seen quick change ones before but I thought that they where not the best way to go. Mind you, they were the ones from 1980’s.

As we approached the cash register to buy my new found love, don’t worry honey I’m not gonna leave ya, the sales guy named Tim, who happens to be a great guitar player in his own right, said “Would you like something thrown in for free?” I looked above him on the wall (where they keep the FOR SERIOUS FINGERS ONLY part of the store)and said “Hey honey, how about that guitar above him for you?” The guitar that caught her eye was a mint 1957 Fender Stat, for around $10,000.00 can. She said “that would be nice”, and that just gave Tim a good laugh. He then asked if I wanted the UNBELIEVABLE GUITAR tech. (who happens to work on BRUCE COCKBURN’S guitars), to give it a once over before I bought it? I said, “sure, why not, if he’s good enough for B.C., then he’s good enough for me!”

After bringing my new baby upstairs, Tim came down and we went out for a smoke outside. To this day when I go into the 12th Fret, Tim remembers my wife’s name and asks how she is feeling. She has been off work for some time now do to stomach problems. This is the type of small town service that you get in this place.

While having a smoke, I asked him about the new capo’s that are out now and what are they like? Tim then replied “Say no more, I will give the same one that I use and you will not be disappointed”. Sure enough, when he brought back my baby from seeing god, he put it on the guitar and I started playing on it,it worked like a dream.

It’s so easy to place and remove on the guitar without looking like an idiot. I don’t have to really tune the strings that much after putting it on either. I still have a couple of the old ones that I have used in the past in my case to be used by players who have forgot theirs when we jam and when they use my Kyser capo they normally go out and get one. They are a little bit pricier then others but in this case, you get what you pay for.

Any other thoughts about what is the best capo out there?

Keep on jammin’

Elixir guitar strings

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I’ve used these strings exclusively on my Larrivee L-03. I play with the “Light .012 – .053”, with great results. They honestly last longer then most and the have a great range of sound. They also allow me to slip and bend the strings with great ease. I might add that they keep tune for ages as well.

The I love the sound I get on the bass end especially when I am in “open D” (DADGBE) when slapping the bottom D with my thumb on songs like “Peggy’s Kitchen Wall, BRUCE COCKBURN” and “Neon, John Mayer”. The mid’s are fantastic on “Penny for your Thoughts, Peter Frampton”.

I change my strings every 4-5 months and they still keep up their sound intensity, but after that my pickiness and stubborn ways would come back into the fold. When I was a struggling musician, I would boil, yes boil, my strings and then place a cloth around the end of the string and wind the string in a circular motion to eliminate the dead skin that had developed around the outside exposed part of the strings.

I haven’t used my electric guitars in a while so I unfortunately haven’t gotten around to try the Elixir‘s on them.

Has anyone tried these strings on their electrics?

Keep on Jammin’

Me and my Larrivee L-03

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I am in love with my new acoustic guitar! This baby plays like a dream and sounds great. The neck is a bit wider then most put I chose it that way.

Larrivee L-03

Truth be told, I got this puppy for a final gig with some greats guys that I played in a band with. A couple of yrs. ago another dear friend of mine called, ago out of the blue, and asked me if I wanted to get the old band back together for one last gig. This was the band that i played in, in high school. These guys were the best bunch of musicians that I had EVER PLAYED WITH period!

I was at my parents house in Brantford while renovating my aunts house when I got the call. I was in total shock when Tony, the best keyboard player I’ve heard, called and asked me about it. While talking to him I drifted in my mind about the greatest high that I ever got from playing live with. Ohhhh …. what times they were.

He and his wife Laurie had an idea to get all of the bands that Tony played with together for one night at a bar in Milton Ontario called “The Hard Ball”

It was a 80’s style theme night. He called everyone up and they all pretty much confirmed they’d be there. They had the main stage rented and had made tons of food for everyone and a cash bar. The original drummer, Steve Negus, of Saga even showed up. Too bad the rest didn’t.

Anyways, we talked on the phone and decided that we would play a song an appropriate song called “On the Road” by Max Webster. So needing a acoustic guitar while knowing that some heavy weight guitar players would show up, I decided to buy one at the legendary “The 12th Fret“.

I had been to it at their last location around 20 yrs. previous and now that their newer location was down the st., I told my wife what i was going to do. To my relief she was VERY SUPPORTIVE of the idea. We had wanted to get an acoustic that I was worthy of with the working budget of around $5,000.00 can. So I went in and played guitars for around 8 days straight, 5-6 hrs. a day.

The staff was unreal to me. I told them right from the start what I was looking for and said “don’t be afraid to ask anything about anything that you want to know”. They told me to come in early and stay till whenever, they even gave me a great sound both to play in. If you ever are looking for an axe, this is honestly the only place to go. They sell very high end gear so there is no pressure by any stretch of the imagination.

I played many, many, many guitars that week. The staff didn’t even bother me once, they looked at me once in a while through the glass and nodded their head, that’s it, NO SALES PITCHES. The one that I chose was not that expensive and in my opinion, the best sounding one plugged in or not! i won’t bore you with any of the particulars unless you ask so here is the link and check it out for yourself.

Anyone else have one of these babies?

Keep on Jammin’

Upkeep of your finger nails

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I am the type of guitar player who uses a combination of playing with a pick, pick with finger nails and nails exclusively.

My style of playing is that of a aggressive one. This is not to be confused with a THRASHING technique. I also playing with a lot of a dynamics’s. I mean having the ability to play any song very quietly/soft (PPP, triple piano) or very LOUD (FFF, triple forte). I find that being able to do this allows me to change the mood of the piece at any given time.

I love the straight forward playing with a pick style but having the tools to be able to incorporate all the fingers is useful as well. But my new re-found love is to get back to my roots and just use my nails. I played classical guitar for a while and did not play ANY ROCK at all.

I wasn’t a BRUCE COCKBURN fan until 1986, this when I was living in a dorm/frat house in Toronto (Bloor and Spadina). Here I would be able to play acoustic guitar for hours straight, but I sure as hell wasn’t! I started to finally listen to HOW he was playing. I had thought that he was using a pick because the only player in the world at that time, so I thought, that used his fingers was Mark Knopfler, boy was I wrong!

So listening to his music I found this thing called ” Open Tuning “. The first open tuning song I did was “Tokyo” by BRUCE COCKBURN. I played this tune for days on end! It was new, refreshing and something that I had never done before. So, one day I got out the phone book and looked up his name, found his number and called him. Sure enough, it was his number and his wife at the time answered and she told him “that he would not be home for some time.” Well at least I tried! True story.

Anyways, when I first started to take my nails seriously (this was in grade 9 remember),I had used MANY products to strengthen my nails. I had gotten use to shaping them to fit my attack. The long nails held out not bad but I was always pissed when they broke!!! This was just something that I had to get use to. After I had had enough of this style after 2 yrs., I went off to different ones. I loved to try different styles that I could bring to my playing.

So fast forward to July 8th 2005, my birthday. My wife was working as a ER nurse in a Toronto Hospital and I had just dropped her off at work, it takes literally 1 minute, we live just down the street, and I had a finally got up the nerve to try this fake nail thing, YES FAKE NAILS! When I was done I just had to go back to work and show her. She just laughed and laughed, not to mention her buddies as well, I work with them all so that was fine.

I just love them! I can play at any time without having to worry about them braking and not having them when I want to play. The only thing that I don’t like is the fact that when they grow out they look weird. They look like I have jaundice of the finger nails, they have a yellow hue to them. Women are lucky because they can just throw some nail polish on them. If I do first would be divorced or placed on the H6 Ward of our hospital.

The cost is around $10.00 and that’s not bad. Does anyone have any other ideas that they use for their nails other then the fakies that I use and please tell me how durable they are and be honest!

Keep on jammin’

Oh my God, what the hell, it’s got 2 necks

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Now that I was in grade 6 and my brother was in grade 8, other musical influences came into view for me. My brother Tim was the popular guy in school that everyone wanted to hang out with. He was an unreal defencemen in hockey, good looking and a very likable link of guy.

I too played defense and was quite talented. He had won more valuable defense men awards then I did but I had to try harder because I was much smaller then him. He was a rushing type of defense men and I was the crazy stay at home and take no prisoners type. As usual, I tried to be like my older brother, like most people in the pecking order of life. I always strived to catch up to him as much as I could. I even played on his team one time and that was really some so I thought.

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Anyways, he started out listening to music that did not get much airplay. Bands like early Zeppelin and bands of that era. I thought that if it was good enough for my older brother then I got to listen to this stuff!

At first, I was a bit of a pain asking him to replay some songs so I could think of them in my head and for the most part he did because some of the girls in his class thought that I was cute and that I was a good guitar player and in those days guitar players were someone who they liked to hang out with. So I ever so slightly gravitated towards hanging out with my brother and his circle of friends.

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One day one of my brothers friends, whose uncle happened to live on the same cul-de-sac as we did, had heard that I played guitar. As luck would have it, my life long friend John E., lived right beside him. We were playing soccer in his parents back yard when I fired one into the back yard of this guy.

When I went over to get the ball I met this guy, real skinny and with long black hair. He said “you must be Tim’s little brother?” I never met this guy so I said ya? He said that people on the street say your player too? I thought for a second and then said “oh ya, guitar”. He just laughed and said do you want to see something that I just bought, and I said sure! So off he went, inside his home, he lived with his parents and they of course knew my parents VERY WELL through the church.

It was a very warm summer day with a bit of a breeze, honestly I really do remember it, no shit! He came outside with this big black skinny box. I thought that it was one of those keyboard/organ things that was in the band that I saw, but it wasn’t!

He walked over to the standard back yard table in the 70’s, and placed this big black thing with one handle on it, on the table. He said “stand back because this thing will blind ya!” What hell is he babbling about! He was washing his motor cycle at the time and I saw a couple of dead soldiers beside the bike so I thought he was drunk or something. So I moved back and he began to open up this thing.

As he opened it up, the glare that this thing gave off was unreal! I was slightly blinded. When my eyes started to re-focus, I saw what I believed to be as a guitar but this was VERY, VERY DIFFERENT! Oh my GOD, what the hell, it’s got 2 necks on it!!!

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It was a candy apple red double neck guitar. The name on the top where the tuning heads were said “Gibson” At that moment, I realized that it was the same guitar that the guitar player Jimmy Page had! Holy shit, this must be Jimmy Page that I’m talking to!!!

I started to get that same feeling that I had, had when I saw that Christian Rock Band, flash pots went off to start the show. Now I know what their called, at the time, I had no idea what was going on but it looked sooo cool. I slowly approached this mythical device with eyes and mouth WIDE OPEN! He then said “What do ya think of it kid?” He then brought it out of it’s strange home and begun strumming it! He was strumming the 12 string part of the guitar and it was a strange but wondrous thing that I heard for the very first time. He began to play “Stairway to Heaven” and in my mind that clinched it, he was Jimmy Page, but his face was off a bit.

Has anyone had an experience like this before?

Just Jamming on my own!

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Well, now I was at a point where I was playing in school and at mass. I kept listening to songs on the radio over and over again. I was never a writer of songs, so I just listened to the guitar parts in every song. I remember trying to figure out the song in my head by paying attention to the low end of the song. What I mean is the bass part.

I put everything out of my mind and listened intensely at this. I hummed it in my head and tried to slow it down as well. Once I started out with the bass components, the chords just started to pop in place. My knowledge of chords was limited so, that is when I asked Mrs. Lord if she had anything more up her sleeve, so she gave me this book, and I dived into it. She had started me out on “The bar Chords”!

This was really cool because no one else in our class was doing it but me. This opened up some area that was fun for me! I tried to simplify what I was shown (imagine playing a B chord without barring the second fret) and tried making a more bassie/bottom end sound to the chord. That is when I started barring the chords the way everyone else does. This helped me obtain that rock sound that was being played on the radio at the time. For the longest time I tried to figure out how they got that sound, it must have been that big black thing with lights and knobs on it that I saw at the school concert.

How did everyone start out figuring songs at a young age, like this?

My first real guitar lesson

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Boy, was that exciting and boring all at once.

I went to this older man for lessons, who had me start on slide guitar because he thought that my fingers were too small to chord. I thought that he was an idiot but he knew what he was doing, so I thought. This was one of those “Royal Conservatory” school of guitar that I was enrolled in. It was a class none the less.

I honestly thought that Mrs. Lord showed me more then this guy ever could! He keep teaching us the dreaded “THEORY” stuff that drove me nutz! I could play everything that he wanted us to play BUT I memorized it all in my head, then went at it. I used the lesson that the Christian Rock Band guitar player told ” start out SLOWLY and the speed will come later”.

This drove buddy over the edge every time. He said ” Chris, why aren’t you looking at your sheet music that I gave you when I played it?” It was at that point that I told him what advice that someone gave me and he said ” I could do that later”. I kept trying to do it his way but I just found it way to hard!

A couple of years ago when I was going to College, they had found out that I had a learning disability, I was dyslexic! I also had a grade 9 mathematics trying to do college physics! They just thought, what the hell is he doing?

Anyways, I wish I knew that then so I could have done something about it at an earlier age.
Music and math is one of the same, so we are told, but every good musician that I ever met was pathetic at math.

I honestly think that it is half math (or just being able to remember patterns better then most, that is where I think I fit in on this) and natural ability.

So after getting totally frustrated, I quit!

Hey, does something like this sound familiar?

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