The new version of Practicing the Tremolo is now available. I’ve added musical examples and reformatted it slightly. Other than that, not much else is changed.

One of the things I’ve decided to implement for my books is DRM or Digital Rights Management. Basically, it means you will need your email address to open the book. It is a hassle, I know, but present conditions leave me with little choice.

With this new version, I’ve also increased the price to $18, which I believe is still a reasonable price.

To read more about Practicing the Tremolo, please go to this link.

The new book, How to Become a Virtuoso in 60 days is now available.

The book is a step by step practical course to applying the principles in the AOV.

What is the difference between this new book and the AOV for Guitar?

The AOV for guitar is a compendium of guitar tricks, techniques, ideas, and philosophies while this book is strictly a step by step guide to implementing the concepts in the AOV.

To read more about the book, please go to this link.

For a limited time, I’m making the book available at $18. This price is good until July 21, after which it will go to its normal price of $38.

At $38, I believe it’s still a bargain. It would be hard to get one lesson for $50 these days and this book has ten lessons contained within its pages. The price also includes access to all accompanying future videos. These videos will be available October, 2013.

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to start password protecting my books, especially the practical books. When you purchase the book, the email address you use will be your password.

You would still be able to print these books into hard copy, which I suspect most people are doing anyway, especially with the practical books.

Five hours a day – I wrote in my preface to my new book.

That’s what you need to do to achieve virtuosity.

I know some people will be asking, isn’t this asking too much? Who has the time to do all that practice?

Precisely.

And that’s why not everyone will become a virtuoso.

But yet, there will be others who will think, ‘but that’s hardly enough.’

The point is, it takes effort to accomplish anything.

And the more complex and greater the task, the more effort is required. We’re talking about conquering an Everest here, not some hill in the park.

You can get by with two hours, but it wouldn’t be enough.

Three hours is the minimum, but you’re just getting warmed up with three hours.

It’s only after three hours that magic happens.

That’s when your fingers begin to loosen up, they seem to become charged with a special kind of energy. Things that you had difficulty with before suddenly become easy.

This is when breakthroughs happen.

Imagine if you only have the patience and dedication to do three hours a day.

Just as you’re getting warmed up, you stop playing.

Think of all the breakthroughs that were waiting to happen, but didn’t because you stopped too early.

A short clarification.

By five hours, I don’t mean five hours consistently every day.

Some days you might do two, and others, eight.

It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re playing all the time. Five hours a day is really another way of saying you should be practicing all the time during this 60 day period.

Every chance you get, you’re holding and playing that guitar.

That’s part of that virtuoso reality you will be introduced to, part of that state of mind I wrote about earlier.

So this course is not some happy talk designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And it’s not a magic pill either, that will turn you miraculously into a virtuoso in 60 days, without you having to do the requisite practice.

But perhaps you’re saying.

Isn’t that stating the obvious?

If you’re practicing five hours a day, wouldn’t that automatically make you a good player, with or without any special book or program promising such a thing?

Not necessarily

It depends on what you practice.

If you spend five hours a day practicing follow-throughs, that’s unlikely to develop economy in your movements, which is vital to virtuosity.

If you spend five hours a day trying to hold your hand straight at the wrist, that’s unlikely to give you the relaxation you need to produce speed and power.

And if you spend five hours a day trying to play exclusively from your knuckles, that’s unlikely to improve your precision, another vital component of virtuosity.

To produce results, you must practice the right things.

(‘Right’ meaning things that will bring you your desired results.)

And that’s what this book will do.

It will help you develop the fundamental conditions that are vital to virtuosity (described in the AOV) and to tapping into your natural speed and power.

Two more days to go before the 2 for 1 special offer expires.

You get both ‘How to be Extraordinary’ and ‘How to be Extraordinary – for classical guitarists’ for $8 — in effect, $4 for each book.

And if you don’t like them, let me know within 60 days and I’ll refund your money in full.

Just a side note.

Perhaps you’re wondering, what on earth does being extraordinary have to do with virtuosity?

Well actually, everything.

The very definition of virtuosity is to be extraordinary.

Think of these two books as being the philosophical counterparts to the AOV and AOV for Guitar. They deal with the mental components of virtuosity while the AOV series deal with the physical.

Some people, I’ve noticed, only see the difficult in things.

You can give them the simplest things and they will find some way to make it complicated.

For these people, life is hard, it’s a constant struggle.

Virtuosos think and work differently.

Instead of making things complicated, they simplify them.

Instead of seeing the difficult in things, they see the easy.

This point was brought home to me never more forcefully than in a recent viewing of Paco de Lucia playing the Aranjuez concerto.

As I wrote in my previous post, there’re some advantages to living in the 21^st century, one of which is youtube and the other is the VLC media player.

Now watching Paco play the first movement in slow motion, I was amazed to see how he simplified the score.

One scale, in particular, caught my eye. This is the scale which first occurs at 02.23 and is repeated five more times and in four different keys in the piece.

What do most people do with those scales?

They play them with a different fingering every time.

But not the Maestro. He plays the scales the same way every time. Whether it’s in D or F or C, he uses the same fingering in all of them, thereby effectively reducing four scales to one.

Truly amazing.

And it just goes to show that virtuosity is mostly a state of mind.

If you have the virtuoso state of mind, virtuosity will occur naturally, a logical outcome of that mindset.

I’ll be posting a series of articles soon.

This will be the beginning of a new book titled, “How to become a virtuoso in 60 days.”

Yes, it sounds a little bold and provocative, I know.

Can one really achieve virtuosity in 60 days?

Well, you’ll have to read the posts to find out. But you can probably guess the answer from the first part of this post.

Virtuosity is mostly a state of mind.

And it shouldn’t take more than 60 days to change your state of mind.

Springbreak is always a good time to catch up on stuff, and this week, I managed to catch up on some youtube viewing. Tired of the stop-start connections, and with the help of google, I soon found a way to download some of the videos to view on my netbook. Which led me to an epiphany about youtube as the greatest learning tool ever invented and to this short article…

Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation.

Let’s say you have a choice of two teachers and they’re giving you conflicting advice.

One is saying you have to play from the knuckle and move your finger into your palm as you pluck and the other one is saying you have to play with your fingertips and lift your finger up as you play.

Let’s say one of them is your teacher and the other one is John Williams.

Who would you choose to believe?

Yes, it’s a hard decision, and you’ll probably say you don’t deal in hypotheticals.

But let’s say it’s not so hypothetical after all, thanks to youtube.

You can actually have John Williams teach you, right there in the comfort of your home or studio – not with words but with actions.

Here’s what you need to do to study with John Williams.

First download this app, VLC media player (it’s free).

http://www.videolan.org/index.html

Next, go to this link:

http://en.savefrom.net/

And paste this youtube link into the box where it says download.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDlQE9djIxE]

Here’s the video:

Then download the video. I recommend MP4 360p for best quality.

When you’ve downloaded the video onto your computer, open it with VLC media player.

Next, go to the menu and select playback-speed-slower. This is a crucial part of the process. You’ll have to watch the video in slow motion.

And go to 2:55 or 3:18 in the video. These are two spots where the upward movements are clearest but you can probably find other places.

And there you have it – the great John Williams teaching you how it’s done.

So who would you choose to believe?

I don’t know about you, but all I can say is I wish we had youtube and VLC player back in those stone age days when we only had LPs and cassettes.

In an earlier article, I mentioned that these days, it’s fashionable to blame all the failings in our school systems on teachers.

And in this regard, I’ve been disappointed with the actions of our foremost education administrator, our esteemed President (who I voted for twice) and who I think is greatly misguided in his education policy by jumping on the bandwagon of teacher bashing.

Of all people, he should be the first one to understand that good students are not the result of good teaching but of good parenting.

Does he attribute his own success to the mentoring he received from his grandparents and the personal interest his mother took in his education getting him up personally at 5 am to do his homework, or to some ‘super teacher’ in his life?

(http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/05/01/dreams-of-his-mother.html)

In the article above, he himself said that “she seemed intent on raising a combination of “Einstein, Gandhi, and Harry Belafonte.”

In his infinite wisdom, how could he fail to recognize that this was the secret to his success and not some imaginary ‘teacher-of-the-year’ in his life?

But these days, it seems to be the trend to blame all the problems in our schools on teachers.

And even worse, to apply workplace standards and business practices to the task of educating our children.

In other words, to equate the education of our children with manufacturing products and running a business.

It is true, in most industries, if the products are not up to par, you can often lay the blame squarely on the workers.

For example, if you’re building cars and you’re getting recall after recall of those cars for defective workmanship, it’s not unreasonable to blame the workers in the factory for those defects.

But can we apply those same standards to teachers?

Can we apply factory floor manufacturing standards and expectations to schools and the task of educating our young?

On the factory floor, if you assemble a car, the results are predictable. When you put in a screw, the screw stays there. When you install a part, the part stays there. In other words, you’re working in an environment of predictable outcomes. What you put in is what you get out.

Teaching, however, exists in quite a different environment.

You’re dealing with unpredictables, because you’re not dealing with inanimate objects that are completely under your control, you’re dealing with thinking human beings.

(If you don’t know what a thinking human being is, try asking a teenager to take out the trash and you’ll soon find out.)

And here’s the crux of the problem.

The student is not some inanimate object that is completely subject to your will and control. It’s not a product rolling off a factory floor that you have 100 % control over. It’s a live thinking human being with a mind of their own.

Imagine if you will, a car manufacturing plant.

Cars are rolling down the conveyor belts, and you’re a worker on the floor installing, let’s say, the headlights.

Only this is no ordinary factory – in this factory, every automobile part is a live thing with a mind of their own.

So you try to put in the first headlight, but instead of going into its designated space, it decides to roll onto the floor.

You chase after it, and after some effort, you manage to get it into the space but now the screws refuse to go in. So there you are trying to persuade them to be good and allow you to tighten them, when the manager comes along and asks why you’re not doing your job.

It sounds like a crazy world but that’s the world of education.

You’re trying to do the best you can, but you’re constantly being sabotaged by students and administrators.

Truly a thankless task.

First, you have to try to persuade your typical facebooked-texted-friend-me-twittered-video-gamed-to-the-eyeballs distracted student – trying to persuade them that perhaps they should do their homework besides these other great ‘priorities’ in their lives.

Or on the other side of the coin, trying to persuade children who have no strong and involved adults in their lives, children who have been indoctrinated by popular culture that being cool is better than getting good grades.

And doing all this while having to justify your job by writing countless ‘learning outcomes’ reports, and undergoing endless evaluations to determine your dedication to your profession.

And on top of that, an unsympathetic President and other opportunistic politicians and administrators who would use teachers as scapegoats for all the failings in our society.

Welcome to the circus, otherwise known as the wonderful world of education in America.

I wrote “How to be extraordinary” two years ago.

The book is based on the three principles that have defined my life and career – do something no one has done, do it in a way that no one has done before, and sing your heart out.

After I wrote the book, I decided I would rewrite the book and place it in a more general setting, the original being overly guitaristic in tone.

The result is the new “How to be Extraordinary.”

(The first book is now retitled “How to be Extraordinary – for Classical Guitarists.”)

Like my other books, the new book is brief – 38 pages short – and to the point. No made-up anecdotes, just the bare essential points.

But why extraordinary?

As I wrote in the blurb for the earlier book, it’s hard to be noticed these days.

With over seven billion people on the planet, you’ll have to be extremely exceptional and special to stand out and be noticed.

This book offers simple strategies (or life principles) to separate yourself from the crowd, come up with your own vision of where you want to go and do it in an extraordinary way.

To read more about the new “How to be Extraordinary,” please follow this link:

https://philiphii.com/htbe

As usual, the 60 day money back guarantee applies to this book.

If you find that you have learned nothing from the book, let me know and I’ll be happy to refund  the $8.

For a limited time, I’m offering a special bonus.

If you purchase the new “How to be Extraordinary” before March 31, 2013, I’ll bundle “How to be Extraordinary – for Classical Guitarists” with this book – two books for the price of one. You will receive your download link for HTBEgtr after the purchase.

And if you have already bought “How to be Extraordinary – for Classical Guitarists,” you can download the new book free using your old password here:

https://philiphii.com/cgi-bin/dl_file.cgi?file=htbe.pdf

To purchase the new “How to be Extraordinary,” please follow this link:

https://philiphii.com/purchase/