On entering a room containing a piano, what pianist doesn’t turn white at the command, ‘You can play – let’s hear you!’ You thought you were visiting friends, not giving a performance, so of course yo

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

What was your first guitar? I wanted a guitar when I was 10, but it took until I was 12 before my parents gave in. We went to a shop in King’s Cross in North London, and they had guitars hanging up, i

LAST MONTH, I discussed some of the advantages of playing in a power trio, such as the open harmonic canvas that it affords me as a guitar player. “Threw Me to the Wolves” is a song of mine that prese

C. Thi Nguyen The Score How to stop playing someone else’s game 368pp. Allen Lane. £25. Games and metrics are cousins of a sort. They both give us targets to pursue, often in the form of numerical sco

ONE OF THE coolest and most badass-sounding things a guitarist can do is double a long, complex bass line an octave higher. This was my approach for the song “Dean Town,” which I recorded with Vulfpec