Anyone who thinks filming an indie documentary means sitting around coffeehouses in Greenpoint with your MacBook and a copy of Final Cut Pro has clearly never attempted to track down virtuoso guitarists in their natural habitats. While my sleep deficit suffered this month, my appreciation for American music, and my growing collection of frequent flyer miles, are the better for it. It's fitting that filming the three country players in this month's Code update also required me to see a lot more of it....

David Lee Roth famously quipped that the reason he wanted to be the lead singer is because guitar players spend most of their lives alone in their rooms. As usual, he was right. The often sisyphean effort required to master the abstrusities of virtuoso guitar is at dead odds with the desire to have a life. But now that spring is here, and the ladies of the F train are wearing dresses with boots again, I figured I'd inject a little social networking into the mix. So I finally broke down and joined The Place For Friends™. That's right y'all, the MySpace page is up.

It's a good thing I don't work in Apple's marketing department, because I really can't keep a secret. I silently posted two updates to the Cracking the Code players page over the past month or so, and now that global media distribution has become as easy as falling down stairs, it didn't take long for word to get out. And with stiff competition for pop cultural bandwidth from Anna, Sanjaya, and Don, I consider this a victory for guitarists everywhere.

If you have a chord progression,

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As part of my recent quest for a quality amplifier, I've become even more acutely aware of the huge amount of energy expended by players everywhere in the process of demoing, analyzing, rating, discussing, and ultimately investing in expensive equipment that suits their tonal preferences. But as vast a resource as the internet can be, let's face it -- without sound samples, and some normalized way of comparing them all, reading about gear is ultimately more addictive than useful.

With that in mind, I've put together a compendium of field recordings from my amp shopping expedition at Ultrasound Rehearsal, organized by amplifier and gain level. All...

A guitar player with no amp? What's next, a graphic designer with no Macintosh? A writer with no latte? Alas, it's true. With the highly focused and forensic nature of the work on the Cracking the Code film project, there's been no need for me to own anything that produces actual amplified sound. For the last several years, my musical activities have targeted the mechanical over the creative, and the visual over the aural. Sure, I've produced lessons, but those have generally been...