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Santarantula

SantarantulaSantarantula, Santarantula, it’s spidey tinsel-time! Here’s a, well, a sort of Christmas song you probably haven’t heard of: Santarantula!

Santarantula, Santarantula
When you crawl back to the north hole
With an empty sack slung across you back
Won’t you stop and have.. Another snack
Another year come and gone we fear
And this one was a doozy
But your gentle bite brings us joy this night
though your venom makes us woozy…
Woo-ooooo-oooo-zy!

Lyrics, chords, notation and tabs for bass here.

Nobody loses at guitar if they put in the time. Something good always shows up. It’s all consistent with life’s big lessons. Patience. Determination. Love. Goals. Finishing a job. Etc.” – Ted Greene

2026-03-11T16:54:40-04:00
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Counting for guitar players

Download the strums! PDF

Counting- musically speaking- is harder for some folks than others, for sure. You hear the term “natural rhythm” and what that really refers to is a person’s innate ability to count, if you get right down to it. Some people have more natural rhythmic ability that others but anybody can improve their ability to count a rhythm!

Tap Your Foot

It amazes me how often students have to be reminded to tap their foot while playing. When you play guitar, you play with your whole body, right? Your hands, your head, your heart and your feet are- or should be- engaged. Tapping your foot while playing is a simple way to start thinking (and playing) more rhythmically.

Consider tapping and hand or foot to music any time you can! In the car (please be safe), while you’re watching Netflix (a great exercise, tapping to the rhythm of commercial music) and really, any time you hear any music. Try to find the beat!

Find Rhythms in the world

There are there natural rhythms you can count to as well. This may seem a bit weird but for example, let’s say you are in the airport, strolling towards your gate. Your walking pace has a natural rhythm to it and you can start counting 1/2/3/4 in your head as you […]

2026-03-18T20:40:29-04:00
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play better- by thinking about movies?

Want to play better guitar?

It might seem odd, but you can play better guitar by thinking about movies. Let’s step away from music for a minute and consider the “Kuleshov Effect”:

Film theorist and director Lev Kuleshov—who helped create the first ever film school—often had his students re-edit D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to learn how meaning was created. Kuleshov and his people even went so far as to re-edit pre-revolution Russian films in order to rid them of the “bourgeoisie” messages of the past. As a result, Kuleshov developed one of the most important concepts in montage theory; this came to be known as the “Kuleshov effect.” Kuleshov cut together several identical shots of an actor named Ivan Mozzhukhin with different shots including those of a bowl of soup, a dead child, and a beautiful woman. Although the shot of Ivan is the same, over and over, his expression seems to change because of the image following it.

This proved to Kuleshov that in cinema, it is the way images relate to each other that creates meaning—not the images themselves. This concept is one of the most important pillars of filmmaking. It is very natural for audiences to relate two sequential images to each other to create anything from an ideological meaning to even […]

2026-03-09T15:49:37-04:00
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World on a String!

Download sheet music for “World on a String”

World On A String

Another great American songbook tune: “I’ve Got The World on a String”. World on a String is a 1932 popular jazz song composed by Harold Arlen, with lyrics written by Ted Koehler. It was written for the twenty-first edition of the Cotton Club series which opened on October 23, 1932, the first of the Cotton Club Parades.

The song was recorded and popularized by Cab Calloway who had a #18 hit in 1932.

Bing Crosby recorded the song on January 26, 1933, with the Dorsey Brothers and their Orchestra.

The song was one of the first recorded by Frank Sinatra when he transferred to Capitol Records in 1953. His recording on April 30, 1953, with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle reached #14 on Billboard’s most played list.

“Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.” – Sergei Rachmaninoff

2026-03-12T12:22:32-04:00
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that old black magic

“That Old Black Magic” is a 1942 popular song written by Harold Arlen (music), with the lyrics by Johnny Mercer. They wrote it for the 1942 film Star Spangled Rhythm, when it was sung by Johnny Johnston and danced by Vera Zorina. The song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1943 but lost out to “You’ll Never Know”.

The song was published in 1942 and has become an often-recorded standard, with versions that include the original single release by Glenn Miller, by the singers Margaret Whiting, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Mercer himself, and others. Mercer wrote the lyrics with Judy Garland in mind. Garland recorded the song for Decca Records in 1942. Mercer recalled wanting to write a song about magic, and while composing, asking Arlen to write more music so the song could go on longer, but that they still wrote the whole song in about three hours. Billy Daniels recorded the song in 1949 and it became his trademark recording.

Download the lead sheet PDF

“The most powerful music is music with purpose.” – Tom Morello

2026-03-11T16:57:14-04:00
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travel guitars

Travel guitars are pretty interesting, and if you travel and can’t bring your guitar with, there are a few “travel guitar’ solutions. Typically these shorter-scale guitars have a neck without a headstock, the tuners being built into the butt of the guitar. The guitars are meant to be played through headphones and although they may be suitable for performance, I suspect they are used mostly for just what the name implies, a substitute instrument you can use to practice while away from home. Some of them do sound pretty good though, judging by recorded travel guitar video on their various websites.

The tradeoff for travel guitars portability is tonality.  The tone of the guitar comes entirely from the pickups so in the case of nylon-stringed guitars specifically (what I would be interested in) that pickup is a ‘piezo’ style. Piezo-electric pickups convert the physical movement of the guitar top into an electrical signal, and they can sound thin and ’tinny’.  Some classical/electric guitars have both an internal microphone and a pixel-electric pickup; using onboard controls, the player is able to blend the sound between the two sources (plus EQ)  for a more ’natural’ amplified sound. “EQ”, btw just short for ‘equalization’. You would use EQ controls to balance the sound of your guitar in the way that sounds best to you.
 I’ve always […]
2026-02-15T13:12:21-05:00
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Nutshell

nutshell

nutshell

“Nutshell” is a song by American rock band Alice in Chains that originally appeared on the band’s 1994 EP Jar of Flies. The band played it on MTV Unplugged in 1996, and this rendition of the song was included on both the box set Music Bank (1999) and the compilation album The Essential Alice in Chains (2006). Since 2011, guitarist/vocalist Jerry Cantrell dedicates “Nutshell” to Alice in Chains’ late original members Layne Staley and Mike Starr during the band’s concerts.

Lyrics

The lyrics were written by vocalist Layne Staley, and the music was written by bassist Mike Inez, guitarist/vocalist Jerry Cantrell, and drummer Sean Kinney.

Bassist Mike Inez said of “Nutshell”, when asked what song makes him think of Layne Staley the most:

I think the No. 1 for me is “Nutshell.” Layne was very honest with his songwriting. And in “Nutshell,” he really put everything in a nutshell for everybody. That song still gets me choked up whenever I play it. I get a little teary-eyed, and sometimes when we’re doing the arena runs especially, they’ll have some video footage of Layne. And I look and see me and Jerry [Cantrell, vocals and guitar] and Sean [Kinney, drums] looking the wrong way. We’re not looking at the audience, we’re looking back at Layne, and it’s pretty cool that there’s still that song for us. Yeah, it’s just a sad thing.

2026-03-17T10:37:55-04:00
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