Greg Rapaport.com

Anyway, as I'm searching the deep recesses of my currently dessicated brain matter I've come upon a couple of faulty synapses that I hope you may find enlightening. As I fall deeper into the trap of trying to become a better guitar player I've come across the following. Practicing is hard, tedious and a bit unrewarding. Don't get me wrong, I love playing, but I have some fairly lofty expectations of myself. (don't we all) I pretty much want to be the best at the stuff that I want to do. For instance who wouldn't want to have the legato prowess of the great Allan Holdsworth or Greg Howe? Or how about the pinpoint accuracy of Steve Morse's alternate picking technique? Or the effortless sweeping of Frank Gambale or Michael Romeo? The sheer speed of Rusty Cooley anyone? How about the sincere melodicism of Brett Garsed or Scott Henderson? This is where my moronalogue ensues. I think this is where YouTube can become a bit of a detriment. As an anorexic gazes into the mirror only to see a candidate for Jenny Craig us guitar players gaze into our computer screens and are dumbfounded by players like Guthrie Govan who is absolutely frightening on all fronts. We see all our faults through another player's greatness. I know I do. I find that this can really alter the perception of ourselves as a players. We begin to lose our identitiy as we jump on the eternal treadmill of playing catchup to all these great players who we idolize. These idealist fantasies can lead to some really serious incidents of depression. A shame really. I find that it really comes down to maintaining a healthy sense of who we are and how we want to express ourselves through our playing. Now I'm not saying that we should ignore everybody else and become isolationist because we really do learn a lot from eachother. I just think that learning/memorizing a bunch of other people's music is somewhat counter intuitive to developing your own style. Lets face the facts, as instrumentalists who create and play challenging music we probably won't be on Clear Channel or MTV anytime soon. You might as well stick to your guns and express yourself your own way and not through someone elses's licks and ideas...but I digress. Personally my goal for myself has been that I want to be able to play whatever I want. I don't want any technique based crap holding me back from expressing my ideas. If I hear something in my head, I want to be able to replicate it on the guitar, period, end of story. And over the years through practice and sheer masochism I think I'm getting closer to that goal, but man is it slow going.

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I'd like to talk about a new piece of gear I picked up a while back. If you play guitar and your a bit of a gear nut like me I'm sure you have heard about Fractal Audio's AXE-FX. Very interesting piece. Essentially its a preamp with built effects. The thing that's extraordiary about it is the integrity of the amp simulations. They are absolutley light years ahead of any other modeling gear out there. This is truly an amazing preamp! I use it only for direct recording, not for live purposes so I can't attest to its performance in a gig situation but I am comfortable touting it for studio applications. The layout is very intuitive. You basically have 12 columns of 4 routing blocks that you assign a particular amp, cabinet, or effect to and you chain them together in any order you wish. That's how it works in its simplest form. You can set up two amps with two different cabinets each with their own effects and either sum them to mono at the output or go stereo. It has the obligatory analog and digital I/O and effect send and returns if you want patch in your favorite box. In addition midi and 1/4" I/O for assorted controllers and foot switches. For me the real treat are the amp simulations. These are super high quality, high fidelity sims that really sound authentic to me. The tube behavior and essence I feel is represented very well. The list of amps is extensive and has all the biggies with a ton of boutiques as well. Each amp's interface is well thought out from a guitar player's perspective and you can go deep and I mean real deep into tweak city with these things. You can even adjust the bias of the tubes in the power amp section. The cabinet and mic simulations are awesome as well. My favorite mic is the Royer R-121 ribbon mic which offers so much detail its mind boggling. I feel bad for the competion, they have quite a bit of catchup to do to even be on the same planet as Fractal. Also the support is fantastic. Cliff is always on the forum and is constantly updating the firmware, offering new simulations and effects for free. Yep for free. No model packs here. Once you're part of the AXE-FX family its like Christmas with these new updates!

AXE-FX Wiki

AXE-FX Site

AXE-FX Forum

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In other news the new cd is humming along well. Working on the seventh tune, currently laying down bass tracks. No solos cut yet as I'm always trying to improve so I can do a good job. Some of the changes are going to prove challenging to play over and I'm pretty excited about that. Like I said before the tunes are heavy, very progressive and melodic. I want the songs to carry their weight even before any solos go down. I feel that quality songwriting is paramount in instrumental music. So I'm doing my level best to make sure that the writing is adventurous and fun, I'll leave it up to you to form your own opinion when its done. I'm thinking of maybe uploading some demo quality rhythm tracks as a bit of a preview of what's to come. I don't know if that would be a good thing or not though so the jury is still out on that.

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Things at UMusic are going well as we start to head into the summer season. I have to say that a few of my students have really stepped up and are turning into monsters. I'm really proud of you guys, you know who you are. We just had a recital and it turned out to be a great show! If you're interested in checking out some of the videos from the show, click here.

That's all I got for now.

Homunculus