Not surprisingly for the Holiday Season, it’s been a pretty slow week for guitar news. So, I thought I’d make a list of must-see guitar-related fictional movies. I’ve listed them in order of my preference, with #1 being my favorite. If you’ve got more, post ‘em in the comments section and I’ll update the post [...]

Back in October, I posted about the Sammy Hagar supergroup (tentatively named Chickenfoot), made up of Sammy, Joe Satriani, Michael Anthony, and Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer).
MusicRadar.com has a lengthy audio interview with Sammy about the new group and his relationship with the Van Halens (Hint: it wasn’t good). I missed it the [...]

Excellent guitarist Chris Poland is scheduled to appear at the NAMM (North American Musical Merchants) Show early next year (Jan. 15-18, 2009) at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA. If you live in the area and have a connection to get you in, go check him out.
According to BlabberMouth.net, Chris will appear at a [...]

Normally, I could give a rat’s ass about the Grammy Awards. But, this year, the Recording Academy has awarded Clarence Leonidas Fender (founder of Fender Guitars) a posthumous Technical GRAMMY Award for 2009. A no-brainer, but it sure seems like he deserved this long before now, no?

Anyone lucky enough to live near Los Angeles would do well to go check out the Jazz Bakery’s New Year’s Eve Party, featuring Kenny Burrell (guitar, duh), James Moody (sax), and Benny Green (piano). The tickets are tax-deductible because the Jazz Bakery is a non-profit organization devoted to promoting the jazz tradition. Here’s a nice [...]

Holy cannoli. William Laskin does some incredible inlay work (not to mention making beautiful acoustic guitars). Here’s a summary of his inlay process:
Here’s a capsule overview… It is the result of using 9 different species of shell, 15 different types of stone, 4 different kinds of ivory and bone, 3 different metals, hand cutting them to [...]

All About Jazz has a great review of a a relatively new Johnny Winter DVD (Nov. 2008) featuring a collection of concert footage from Connecticut, Germany, Denmark, and London intercut with rare interview clips.
The last paragraph of the review about sums it up:
It has been said that it’s the music that matters. It truly does. The [...]

For those Tommy Emmanuel fans out there, Reverb Nation has given the world a nice Christmas present: a 14-video Tommy Emmanuel package, including the world premiere of “Locomotivation” first played on WGN 720 (The Voice of Chicago). If you’ve never heard Tommy, this would be a great place to start:

And thanks for reading Fretz!

Sheesh, it just occurred to me looking over my posts lately that the front page of Fretz is like a virtual mausoleum. So, here’s an Allan Holdsworth chaser to bring us back to the land of the living. This is Proto Cosmos, one of my favorite Holdsworth tunes.

You have to love the mullet the keyboard [...]

For those of you who have never heard of Lenny Breau, do yourself a favor and poke around on the links below. Lenny is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated guitar players of the 20th century. For those who are hip to what he was about, he’s a god. I think of him [...]

Gigwise is giving away the Epiphone acoustic guitar Jim Carrey played in the movie Yes Man, an Epiphone Hummingbird. Visit the site to enter.

Here’s a nice bit of 12-string finger-picking from Preston Reed. This is the tune Overture from his CD, Metal:

Coming from a rock/jazz-fusion background, I found playing traditional jazz solos something of a challenge.  I purchased lots of instructional videos and many books, but usually they told me something I already knew: which patterns I should play over which chords. This isn’t helpful at all. I knew how to do that. That doesn’t make [...]

If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and check out Bill Milkowski’s biography of the greatest bass player who ever lived, Jaco Pastorius. I have a previous printing of this book and have read it many, many times. The 3rd chapter is posted over at All About Jazz along with the following video of [...]