My Studio

I have a fully equipped studio at home that has been designed for teaching. Armed with everything you need as with Apple's Logic Pro at the hub where we can record your efforts and turn out professional output . Apple’s comprehensive suite of professional tools that provides musicians with everything needed to create music in the studio, on the stage, and for the screen.

Logic Pro 9, a powerful music production application, features an intuitive new interface that makes it easy to write, record, edit, and mix music—all with the legendary sound quality and rock-solid timing that have distinguished Logic products for years.

MainStage, a brand-new application for live performance, dramatically simplifies your live rig by making it easy to play software instruments and effects on stage—using standard keyboards, pedals, and other controllers along with an easy-to-read display.

Soundtrack Pro 2 is a full-featured audio post-production application for film and video. It features deep integration with Final Cut Pro as well as powerful sound design tools, multichannel waveform editing, and intelligent sound restoration capabilities.

Studio Instruments and Studio Effects include 40 incredible-sounding instruments and 80 professional effect plug-ins, many with True Surround capabilities.

Studio Sound Library includes the content from five complete Jam Pack collections and the entire sound library from Final Cut Studio 2, as well as new Logic Studio channel strip settings and plug-in settings.

Production utilities include WaveBurner for CD mastering; Compressor 3 for surround encoding; the Impulse Response Utility, used to capture the acoustics of real performance spaces; and the Apple Loops Utility.

The studio is loaded with equipment and teaching aids to help

Everyone needs to practice with a beat ........

..... .and if you cannot find a drummer then you cannot get better than the Boss DR-880. This is the new heavyweight champ of rhythm programming. The DR-880 is a new-school powerhouse that’s loaded with world-class sounds from Roland’s famous SRX library, plus a stunning collection of original waveforms. The DR-880’s drum, percussion, and bass sounds can be played and programmed as is, or customized with powerful tools such as independent compressors and EQs for the kick and snare, and a compressor and selection of COSM® amp models for the bass. You will never be short of a new beat to play along.

Learning Songs ?? How can I learn to play that?

Apart from making your own music and songs, this is the next best thing and it's great to be able to play songs people know, however learning them , even with the sheet music is tougher than it looks which is why I invested in the Tascam trainer to assist my students learn songs. When dinosaurs roamed the earth (like the 1970s), musicians would take a vinyl LP record and manually spin the record on a turntable, slowing it down to be able to better hear and understand the performances, like guitar solos and complex chord changes. With my Tascam CD-GT1mkII, you get a training method that's even better.

Not only can I slow down the speed of the CD by up to 50%, but you can do it without changing the pitch of the original material! After you learn the lick at a slow speed, you can increase the tempo in steps until you can match the original performance note for note. No guitar player should be without access to one of these goodies. Take any standard compact disc by your favorite band and put it in the CD then use the Slow Down and Learn with Slow Speed Audition feature.

Learning and using Tab

One of the key skills we learn is how to use tab. The use of tablature is a tradition dating back to 16th-century. Tablature illustrates note placement on the fingerboard as well as fingering — a necessity, as most stringed instruments offer several ways to play the same note. Accurate transcription of guitar and related stringed instruments is a highly specialised task that often defies capture with standard music notation.. Guitar Pro 5 is the best guitar-tablature editing software around. The realistic sounds aren't perfect, but they're a huge improvement over the MIDI sounds of the past, and the program's printed output looks great. If you're a guitar player then this is the program to get.

Guitar Pro is a multitrack tablature editor for guitar and bass. Besides writing scores, Guitar Pro is a useful resource for guitarists from beginner to experienced levels toprogress , compose , or simply accompany themselves. Guitar Pro allows you to access huge online archives growing every day with various style contents. More than 40,000 tablatures are already available in Guitar Pro format.

Sounding like your heroes

We learn and practice clean (no effects) to ensure that we are getting it right, distortion and effects can mask your errors, and then we start the process of understanding and using effects. Using Logic Pro, Line 6 (http://www.line6.com) and Boss tools and a whole range of effects and modeling that accurately captures the tone and feel of speaker cabinets, microphones, and studio room characteristics we can create a whole range of tones. You can have all the amp, cab, and effect sounds that you need to sound like your heroes. Some of the amps and cabinets we can model include:

Amp Model
64 Fender® Deluxe Reverb®
’59 Fender® Bassman®
’68 Marshall® Plexi 100 watt
Marshall® JTM-45 meets Budda Twinmaster
’60 Tweed Fender® Champ®
Budda Twinmaster head
’65 Blackface Fender® Twin Reverb®
’60 Vox® AC 15
85 Mesa/Boogie® Mark IIc+ Clean Channel
’85 Mesa/Boogie® Mark IIc+ Drive Channel
Dumble® Overdrive Special Clean Channel
’95 Mesa/Boogie® Dual Rectifier® Head
’89 Soldano SLO Super Lead Overdrive
Dumble® Overdrive Special Drive Channel
1987 Roland® JC-120 Jazz Chorus
Line 6® Insane

Cabinet Models based on*:
1960 Fender® Tweed Champ®
1952 Fender® Tweed Deluxe Reverb®
1960 Vox® AC-15
1964 Fender® Deluxe Reverb®
1965 Fender® Blackface Twin Reverb®
1967 Vox® AC-30
1995 Matchless Chieftain
1959 Fender® Bassman®
1996 Marshall® with Vintage 30s
1978 Marshall® with stock 70s
1968 Marshall® Basketweave with Greenbacks
Line 6® 4x12, 1x12, 2x12, 4x10

Effects include:
Compressor
Tremolo
Delay
Chorus
Flanger
Rotary Speaker
Wah
Swell
Reverb