For the next few weeks (probably two), starting Sunday, 1/8, I'm doing something that I've not done since StevieSnacks began over 4 years ago. I'm taking a break.
Practically this means:
Lately, I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of “please teach me ______” emails I get each week. This is not a bad problem to have, but it’s only fair that I communicate to all of you where I stand on the subject of lesson requests.
The simple answer is this. I don’t take requests, there's no way I can. But I welcome your suggestions.
Here is why.
Today marks the 4th year since I uploaded my first lesson to YouTube. During those 4 years, many things about my life have changed, while other things have not.
This post is a tribute to you, the viewers and customers who come here to learn. This site exists only because you keep coming back, talking about it to friends, and supporting me with your purchases.
The point I hope to make is that the success of StevieSnacks is a remarkable thing, because it happened without the help and support of any large companies, celebrities, or publications. It happened entirely because of your loyalty.
Read my last post before reading this one. It will make more sense if you do.
StevieSnacks will soon turn 4 years old (10/21). To celebrate, B.B.'s Influence, a new lesson series teaching the style of B.B. King, will launch on that day. Ten people will win free copies.
However, this post is also a celebration. Here, I will finally put a few things to rest. Things that never quite found legs on StevieSnacks. Just like trees, websites need to be pruned. Without pruning, they become vast blobs of half-baked content.
My reasons for this are simple. My first, and highest goal for StevieSnacks is to make the best blues guitar lessons you've ever seen. Anything that dilutes that focus needs to have a very good reason for being here.
So here, for the final time, is a list of things that have, or will soon disappear from the site.
There’s a great scene in the movie Office Space, where efficiency consultant Bob Slydell (John C. McGinley) leans across the desk, looks right at Peter (Ron Livingston) and says:
“What would you say…… you do here?”
That movie has nothing to do with StevieSnacks, but my own answer to that question is clearer to me now than ever before.
First, I have very little experience with compressor pedals. Second, the Ego compressor was not some new release for the Nashville Amp Expo.
Wampler Pedals actually had a pretty cool high-gain distortion pedal they were demoing for the first time at the show. The SLOStortion is a surprisingly thick sounding distortion pedal. Not entirely my cup of tea for blues, but I was surprisingly intrigued by it's beefy tone.
I spent a good amount of time in the Wampler room, trying out the pedals when no one else was around, and by chance, discovered they had a compressor pedal called the Ego.
Samamp VAC 40 Series IISome of you know, and others may not, but I've not used the Blues Junior regularly since 2009. The tone in my videos, since August 2009 comes from a VAC 23 amplifier, made by Sam Timberlake of Samamp.
That amp combines two things I love: Fender style tone and low power. Sam invented a way to use appliance lightbulbs to limit voltage and current to the power tubes, reducing their power, and thus, volume. This feature is called the Variable Amplitude Clipping, or VAC. The VAC control allows you to pick the power level appropriate for your venue. The VAC 23 that I play has 3, 5, 11, 18, and 23 watt settings.
This year at the Nashville Amp Expo, Sam introduced me to his latest creation, the VAC 40 Series II. Short summary: awesome, better.
Here's a few notes from my first day at the 2011 Nashville Amp Expo. First of all, I didn't take any pictures because…well, there's no excuse for that. But wherever possible I will include images from the web of the gear I'm referring too.
Unless you were living in a cave the past 3 months, you probably saw all the promotion about my trip to the Tall City Blues Festival, which happened at the end of July. This is a quick summary of my trip.
Josh at GuitarLifestyle.com posted these rare SRV soundcheck videos on his blog. I've posted one below, head over to his site to see the rest.
Watching these made me feel a few things. First, it's kind of spooky to see him in such an informal context. In most performance videos he's pretty animated, with all cylinders firing. In these videos, it looks like maybe he's wishing he could go back to sleep, but plays flawlessly anyway.
Dr. Ken Tangen is a psychologist who's been interviewing people with interesting jobs, and publishing them as a podcast on his site WhatsItLike.info. I got the chance to do an interview for his site, and it turned out really well.
You may have seen it advertised already, but I'm coming to Texas at the end of July to teach at the Tall City Blues Festival. This post will summarize everything going on at the trip all on one place, and explain more about why I'm going.
So.........I'm kind of a one man show here. And as is common with one man shows, sometimes things go wrong.
The Albert's Influence 2 DVD sets are finished. They'll be released on Monday. And they'll be sold for $10 less ($55) than what I intended to sell them for ($65).
A customer emailed me to ask my hand dimensions, something that would seem creepy if it were not for the fact that I teach guitar lessons :-)
That got me thinking, that's probably something other people have wondered about, particularly as it relates to using "The Grip", which you should totally own if you like this style of playing.
Back in february, over 3,500 people entered my KWS Strat Giveaway. After about 2 weeks, the contest got mentioned on several blogs that have nothing to do with guitar, and only broadcast information about free giveaways. Truthfully, the last 2,000 people that entered were probably not even regular visitors to this site.
Over the past year, I've gotten more requests to do joint ventures, link exchanges, etc.. than I got in the first two years of StevieSnacks combined.
To be honest, I was completely unprepared for this when the requests started rolling in, and the way that I handled some of them was probably not very professional.
Online businesses often do things to help each other out. Site "A" trades links with Site "B", or Joe Q. Websiteowner helps promote the products of some website, in exchange for a commission.
Many of those tactics, I find distasteful, and will not participate. That's not to say they don't work for other sites, but that's them, not me.
G.A.S. - Gear acquisition syndrome, a fake disorder affecting guitarists everywhere, often used as an excuse to buy gear that sounds just as bad when we play it as the gear we have now.
A hard-working man, with middle-class income, saves for an entire year to buy a $500 used guitar while a teenager with upper-class pedigree goes shopping for a USA Fender Stratocaster because his dad "wants him to have something decent".
Seems a bit unfair. But here we are.
Since the KWS Strat Giveaway was announced, two good questions have been asked, and I will address them here.
A few weeks ago, a very nice chap by the name of Chris Enns of ssktn.com interviewed me for his podcast called "Welcome To The Internet". I'm not sure he intended it to be an 75 minute interview but that's exactly what he got :-)
This is a recap of my third day at NAMM 2011. For details on the previous days, see the posts about Day 1 and Day 2.
Anthony