Justin Comstock recently gave an interview on the GMI podcast about his community funded product FretDeck. The FretDeck website states, “Master The Guitar – The FretDeck helps guitarists learn and master the guitar in every single key”. In this review, we look at FretDeck and see what it has to offer guitarists.
Many people around the world are waking up to the fact that music is not just about enjoyment or accompanying a social/entertainment situation. Music is now used as therapy to help people of all ages who suffer from a wide range of illnesses and ailments.
Ged Brockie of GMI had the pleasure of interviewing one of the executive directors of Nordoff Robbins Scotland Janet Halton in the Edinburgh premises which is one of four Scottish centres. Nordoff Robbins as Janet explains in the interview, have centres around the world and carry out a wide range of therapies with music at the heart of everything they do.
Let’s face it, learning the guitar can be hard and that is where FretDeck comes in. It is a very simple concept, but like most of the best ideas; they are simple. In this podcast we talk to Justin Comstock about how came up with the idea of FretDeck. Further to this, we discuss his career as a player and how he managed to get through the maze of Kickstarter to see his dream idea become a reality.
Chris Cunningham (second from the right above) is the manager of Guitar Guitar Edinburgh. Opened thirteen years ago, Chris discusses the role of manager, the skills you need to work in stores like Guitar Guitar and his life around guitars (thousands of them!).
Hummie wraps up this four part interview discussing his move to Seattle, the first beginnings of the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program. He also talks about how he met Barbara Streisand under a huge last minute orchestration gig! His relationship and work with Jerry Goldsmith and finally his current film projects.
Moving to L.A. is quite easy, finding work is quite hard. Hummie discusses how he managed to break into the L.A. scene. The early successes, working as an orchestrator and producer on major movies. Finally he discusses breaking into composing for film, the work, people and personalities within Hollywood.
After discovering he had a talent for music, Hummie tells how he eventually found his way to Berklee College of music. Berklee was an exciting time and prepared Hummie for his eventual movement into finding work as a musician.
Bill Frisell is one of those guitarists that you either love or hate judging by comments on social media by some detractors. We are firmly in the camp of loving the guitarist’s work. Furthermore, we were delighted to hear that a young guitarists from Seattle, Washington State, USA Jan Jakut has created a line on transcriptions of Bill’s solo work on Youtube for review.
From his work with Mel Brooks, Marc Shaiman, James Newton Howard double Emmy winning composer Hummie Mann has achieved a huge amount within his musical life and career. In this serialised podcast interview, Hummie discusses everything from early beginnings through to working with some of the biggest names in American film music.
Chris Prendergast is the inventor of a new portable guitar amplifier that attaches onto the vast majority of electric guitars. Working with your smartphone it’s a guitarists dream. Funded via an Indiegogo campaign, it’s funding from guitarists around the world has been simply overwhelming. In this podcast GMI talks to Chris about the idea of JamStack, it’s development and his hopes for the future.
