Linkage: 6/5/09

Derek Sivers asks us an important question are you future or present focused? Sivers is the founder of CD Baby and several other websites such as Music Thoughts. The article above is about the Marshmallow experiment and give some suggestions for balancing out your personality.

Matt Warnock published a great interview with jazz guitarist Sid Jacobs today. It’s really a good read, with some helpful thoughts guitarists of any style.

The best advice I can give, and this truth goes for any musician, is that you need to have material to play. It doesn’t matter what style of music you want to play, you have to have songs in order to do gigs and to communicate with other musicians. Nobody is going to care if you know all your modes and scales if you can’t play any tunes, but if you can play a few tunes, at least you can jam with other people and become a functioning musician.

In case you missed it earlier this week, I put out a short ebook with the method I use to teach my students Every Note on the Fretboard. The method outlines a way to get going and have a pretty good knowledge of the whole fretboard in just a few weeks.

The Rock House Blog has a particular series of blog posts I really like: Five Music Terms for the Day. I wish I had thought of that.