Niall's Weblog

On my home desktop, I dual boot Windows and OpenBSD. Under OpenBSD, I have a few good choices for music players. Since I’ve taken quite some effort to organise my music collection – which resides on a 2T RAID 5 array on my OpenBSD server, served up via NFS / Samba – Xmms, [...]

Fundamental to Jazz guitar playing are chords. You need to know lots and lots of chords to be able to play chord-based solos, or to accompany, well. This can be quite daunting, given the number of chords and variations. An easy way to break down learning these chords is to simplify into [...]

Jazz is a very challenging form of music to play – many musicians have described it as a life-long quest in which you never stop learning. I found it not only challenging to play from a technical point of view, necessitating excellent sweep picking techniques, but also from a music theory perspective. It [...]

A few months ago I bought a ’90s Gibson SG, a really lovely instrument, however I only had a cheap amplifier on loan from my neighbour. I particularly missed my Fender Blues Deluxe tube amp which is back in Ireland. In any case, I was in the market for getting more guitar gear. Then [...]