Like I Love You is a good one, and with very easy guitar so you can just focus on singing a the same time. Plus it makes ladies panties drop.

Hm, not sure. The way I do it is to simply run my Mesa Quad through the TonePort UX2, straight into the MacBook. Works for me...

I can't do it myself, but one of my students learned it pretty quickly. Only strumming, tho.

How good are you with playing the songs on guitar, can you do all the position shifts without looking or thinking about them?

This is beaufitul:


Mahogany strat.

I'm not sure how the whole pre-amp thing works. Could I plug one into a regular cabinet?

Not on its own. The name implies that it's only a partial amp, you're gonna need a power amp for it to work with a cab. I did that for a while, used a Carvin power amp and my trusty '70s Marshall 2X12 cab, but how am I gonna get any good sound out of it if I can't crank the damn thing? Even cranked, the acoustics of my apartment aren't exactly studio quality, so you get this really weird, distant sound, regardless of where the microphone is placed.

That's just my experience, tho, and it led me to where I am today, with a pre amp that uses the TonePort as basically a power amp and cab simulator. It's strange, but it works. I get positive feedback on the sound, and I can get fat leads without having to get complaints from the neighbors every time I start noodling. The only downside for me is that I can't get long sustain or feedback, the kind you hear from Gary Moore, Malmsteen, Vai, Hendrix, etc. No "Parisienne Walkways" for me.

Anyone here ever try playing any Zappa songs, or know any good difficult ones I might not know of.

I also played this a while back, bad quality camera but you can still hear the guitar.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=988076779355

Some pretty annoying out of tune bends at the beggining but hey I was younger

That was it for me. When the guitar part became second nature and I didn't have to think about it, then I could just focus on the singing.

Has anyone here done anything with polychords before? Shit's cray.

I've been messing about on the Ruokangas website today with the Hellcat model. Does anybody want to give me €7000 so I can buy one?

Just bought one of these badboys:

Finally learned to relax the grip on my pick and my picking has become much more accurate for some reason. Is this something that is recommended? For years I just couldn't relax and always held the pick really tight.

Oh yes, definitely, a relaxed grip will keep your stamina up, but also look into limiting motions as much as possible. Chris Brooks talks about that in this video, I found it very helpful:

That was great, thanks. He picks a lot like Malmsteen.

Hurray, I know seven basic chords now... they don't sound quite as cool as I've heard them played before and I'm still switching my fingers one at a time, but it's still the best news I've had in a while.