I finally got around to making a tab for the Sinfonia No. 15 in B Minor. If you’re looking to work on your tapping chops, this might be a good place to start.

Download it here as a PowerTab file and here as a pdf.

And here’s the video of the song:

Ron Fuchs wrote a review of A Metal Tribute To String Quartet over at Prognaut. Big props to him for taking the time to listen to and write about it.

Apart from that, things have been a bit slow lately. I admit I’ve been focusing more on my own music lately, but I’ve been working on many new arrangements, and I should be posting a few sneak peeks here and there.

I also intend to make more videos, but my camcorder broke, so that’ll have to wait till I save up enouh to buy a new one.

That’s all for now, more coming soon…

Here’s another teaser video, this time from “The Maiden Variations”. This is the second variation of the main melody, where things start getting heavy. I hope to do another one for the variation right after it, which is probably my favorite part in the whole EP.

I thought it’d be cool to take my favorite sections from the songs on the EP and make videos out of them. These are short and don’t take much time to do, so expect a new one every week or so. The hardest part is re-learning and practicing all the parts! Anyway, here’s the first one, from Death And The Maiden - Part 1:

Made a new video for Death And The Maiden Part 1 with the help of my wife, Carolina.  Quite a bit of work actually…first I had to re-learn and memorize all the parts, and then we did 3 or 4 takes for each.  Thanks to Caro’s wicked cinematography skillz, we got some pretty cool shots, despite our not so cool camcorder.  Some people have mentioned that the shadows behind me look like I’m playing violin. Pretty awesome coincidence.

Caro also handled the editing, with me constantly bugging her about trivial details, hehe.  Anyway here it is, hope you enjoy it. Rate it, comment it, subscribe, etc…these things always help

Oh, I’m offering the track as a free download at my Bandcamp site.  You just have to sign up for the mailing list. 

I’ve been reading Schubert’s biography these last few weeks.  Originally, I just wanted to learn more about the ‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet and any information surrounding it. But in the end, I just ended up reading the whole thing.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I just really like to read musician biographies…I don’t know why I don’t read more of them (laziness…).

Anyway, there’s a lot of hoopla about Schubert’s final years and how his disease (most people agree he had syphillis…pretty much a terminal disease back then) affected his music.  The Quartet is a perfect example of this, not only because of the title and any sad and depressing qualities it may have, but also because it was written about a year or two after he found out he was sick.

But I’m generally skeptical about finding autobiographical qualities in a composer’s work, and this is no exception.  Schubert’s music almost always had an underlying nostalgia and sadness to it, and he was a master of switching in and out of it without one even noticing it.  This, in my opinion, is what makes his music so special and unique…well, one of the things.

That being said, Schubert did seem to be pretty down during this time.  Here’s a quote from a letter he wrote to one of his friends, written the same year as the ‘Maiden’ quartet:

“In a word, I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world.  Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the happiness of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whose enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to disappear, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?”

Woah. It’s hard to argue that those kinds of feelings didn’t affect his work in some way, at least indirectly.  I would imagine that finding out he was sick made him rethink his priorities, and that it’s no coincidence that his final years are filled with his most amazing and powerful works.

Oh yeah, the book I’m reading is called “The Life of Schubert” by Christopher Gibbs.  I would imagine there are more extensive biographies, but this one is well written and gets to the point…qualities I like in a book.

After a lot of careful consideration on what the best method for selling mp3’s on my site was, and actually setting one up and almost announcing it, I discovered Bandcamp, which basically does all the dirty work for me.

Even better, it offers the downloads in various formats, including FLAC and Apple Lossless. All payments are handled by Paypal and go directly to me.

But the real good news is that you can now stream the entire EP on my Bandcamp page! (or right here on the music page). So go and have a listen. I’ll be adding the rest of the tracks to Myspace and other places as well.

One of the side-effects I’ve noticed from playing classical music on the guitar, is that it has greatly improved my chops.  I don’t just mean in the sense that I’m playing difficult stuff, but also that I’m playing things that aren’t meant for the guitar and sometimes I need to find creative ways to play them.

Let’s face it, we guitarists tend to play “guitaristic” things that fall easily on the guitar.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  It’s perfectly natural to play what feels more comfortable on an instrument because it tends to sound better; taking the path of least resistance, so to speak.  However, it’s nice to break out of one’s comfort zone every once in a while to expand one’s technique.

For example, look at his run from Bach’s Sinfonia in B Minor:

Now those are the notes, but it would be pretty tough to play that up to speed.  It was pretty obvious from the beginning that I needed to find a different way to play this. How about sweep/alternate picking?

Ok, that’s better.  An added bonus is that musically it sounds a lot more interesting this way. But the constant back-and-forth still makes it difficult and somewhat uncomfortable.  Maybe if I practiced enough, but I opted for the tapping route: 

Now we’re talking.  This is much easier to play, and sounds even better in my opinion.  Still, it’s not a very common tapping pattern, so it took me while to get it down.  Keep in mind this is the easiest run of many to come in this piece.  It took me a lot of experimenting to find the best way to play each of them.  Maybe I’ll get into more specifics in future posts.

Check out this video to see me play the whole thing. 

The debut EP, "A Metal Tribute To String Quartets" is now available on all the major digital stores (Itunes, Amazon, Emusic, Napster, and Rhapsody). It’s a digital-only release and consists of 6 tracks.  Four are arrangements of movements from well-known string quartets, and the last two are arrangements of Bach keyboard pieces.  Here’s the cover art and tracklist:

1. Death and the Maiden Part 1 (Franz Schubert - String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor D. 810 - Allegro)

2. Presto (Ludwig Van Beethoven - String Quartet No. 14 in C# Minor Op. 131 - Presto)

3. The Maiden Variations (Franz Schubert - String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor D. 810 -Andante con moto)

4. Death and the Maiden Part 2 (Franz Schubert - String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor D. 810 - Allegro)

5. Sinfonia No. 15 in B Minor (J.S. Bach)

6. Invention No. 4 in D Minor (J.S. Bach)

Available at:

Here’s another video, this time of Bach’s Invention No.4 in D Minor - power trio-style.