The guitar is an amazing instrument and learning to play it is a very rewarding experience. If you want to learn to play the guitar, these guitar tips will help you get started.
Guitar Tips For Beginners To Learn To Play Guitar
Learning to play guitar is fun, but unfortunately, a lot of beginners give up before they learn to play anything. Just like with any other instrument, there is a learning curve. Playing the guitar requires dedication and a lot of practice.

Here are some guitar tips to help you get started.

How To Hold Your … Continue Reading

Fishing in the Depths of Benjamin Britten

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, a great English composer and conductor who created several outstanding operas: Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), and The Turn of the Screw (1954) among them. [The Queen had made him a peer in 1976, and Britten died of congestive heart failure later that year.]

… Continue Reading

Ludwig Minkus (1826 - 1917)

Some beautiful music is composed for ballet. Oddly, as Eliza Gaynor Minden writes in her book The Ballet Companion, “ballet music” was once a pejorative term. The implication, in the minds of some, was that the composer wasn’t good enough to write music that could stand on its own as a work of art, so he had to settle for something that the real artists could choreograph for and dance to!

Yet surely composers such as Léo Délibes, … Continue Reading

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Alain Gheerbrant, a Frenchman who explored the Amazon and wrote about his experiences there in The Impossible Adventure (1955), told an incidental story that bears on Mozart’s appeal.

Gheerbrant says that when he and his companions entered a certain village inhabited by Maquiritare Indians in northern Brazil, they had a lot of difficulty encouraging the locals to trust and interact with them. So the Frenchmen stayed in the village clearing, and began to play various records on their gramophone. Most of their … Continue Reading

Ken Russell in 2008

English movie director Ken Russell died on November 27th. We at justsheetmusic.com mourn his passing, and we gaze in retrospective admiration at his work.

Russell made a specialty out of directing movies about great composers. Elgar (1962) was his first in this line; a docudrama long before that term was invented, dramatizing the life of England’s own Edward Elgar. The BBC’s website says that this was “one of the most popular films of its kind ever … Continue Reading

20th /21st Century Music and EMI

Vivendi SA’s subsidiary, Universal Music, plans to buy the EMI Group. This represents the continuing consolidation of the music recording and publishing industries, and the Independent Music Companies Association, a Euro-centered trade group, says it will fight the merger. Furthermore, various regulators and state attorneys general may in principle yet threaten it. But the likelihood remains that EMI – one of the most renowned music studios of the 20th century – think of Queen, … Continue Reading

Emperor Napoleon

Napoleon made himself “Emperor” in 1804, losing the admiration of a generation of Europe’s intellectuals and artists.

In the last entry, I discussed romanticism from a bird’s-eye view, using some sweeping definitions. But I did my best at the same time to suggest the nature of the achievement of the early years of a flesh-and-blood composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, in the late eighteenth century and at the very beginning of the nineteenth.

Heroism and Its Disappointments

In this entry, I will … Continue Reading

Marilyn Monroe June 1, 1926 – August 5, 1962

August 4, 2012 is the 50th year anniversary of the death of screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Or at least, the best estimates are that she died before midnight that day. She was found dead in her home before dawn on August 5, 1962 with empty pill bottles about. Despite conspiracy theories, the consensus view is that the police who first investigated the scene were right: this was a suicide.

Since this is JustSheetMusic, we naturally … Continue Reading

Guitar maintenance is part and parcel of playing guitar. Some chores, like cleaning and changing the strings even impact sound quality.

In an ideal world, you’ll wipe down your guitar before you put it back in its case. But that doesn’t always happen, and even when it does, every guitar deserves a good cleaning every once in a while.

Cleaning your guitar is a simple process, but you do need to be wary of the materials and techniques you use. We’ll show you how to clean acoustic and electric guitars and make them look and … Continue Reading

After the chaos and glamor of the eighties, nobody could predict where the music industry was headed. But, as it turned out, the nineties was a treasure trove of hit song after hit song, each of which we still crank up on the radio whenever they come on.

If you aren’t feeling nostalgic yet, you will soon. From the birth of grunge and gangster rap to the explosion of dance-pop and teen pop, the nineties was a major period of growth in the music industry. To help jog your memory, our music experts put … Continue Reading