ACM

Almost 4 decades after his death, Jimi Hendrix still has more guitar magazine coverage than almost any other player. Much of this attention has been gained from Jimi being a showman and lead guitarist but his rhythm playing is equally as interesting and innovative. In this lesson ACM’s Jon Bishop explores Jimi’s use of the fretting hand thumb to play bass notes, allowing the little finger to create add 9, add6 and sus 4 chord voicings.

20 lucky ACM students got the chance of a lifetime to rock out with the legendary Thin Lizzy at their recent gig at the Southampton Guildhall.

Guitarist Scott Gorham sent a personal invitation to the 20 fortunate musicians to attend the gig as the band’s special guests. Before the concert, students met up with the rock legends for photo opportunities and autographs, got on stage to check out the set up and watched the band as they went through their sound check.

Renowned blues guitarist Stephen Dale Petit took to the halls of ACM to share his experience and love of all things blues with guitar students. The Californian born musician and musicologist said; "It's important that students are exposed to raw, deep blues first hand and that they know it's available to them. I love Guilford. It's very fitting that I'm starting my clinic tour in the place that produced so many guitar players, such as Eric Clapton. It's known as the Surrey Delta, like the Mississippi Delta where blues was widely accepted to have originated."

I start bright and early today with a 9am lecture in the main Music Week lecture theatre. This morning’s lecture is for the Music Industry Overview module and focused on the music industry and digital platforms. This is a subject I find really interesting, as I’m a keen user of the internet to showcase my music. We spent the lecture identifying how the music industry has adopted the internet and mobile phones to showcase artists and distribute music.

Happy New Year to you all, and a belated welcome to the new and improved Alloutguitar.com! Regular visitors to Alloutguitar.com will notice a whole load of changes - and all of them hopefully for the better... as ever, let us know what you think.

So what's new? Well, we've streamlined the whole magazine to make sure that it's more intuitive, user friendly and over the next few months we will be steadily introducing new levels of interactivity throughout the site.