Mr PRS

I recently helped a friend out in his choice of guitar purchase. He was looking for something Like a Gibson Les Paul without the price tag and had narrowed it down to an Epiphone Les Paul or a PRS. I had a shot of both of them and much preferred the wide neck and general feel and sound of the PRS not to mention the fact that it was cheaper.

The upshot of his PRS purchase was free tickets to meet MR Paul Reed Smith himself when he visited Glasgow's Oran Mor last night along with some fantastic session guys and a full collection of his finest instruments. There was a question and answer session, aswell as interesting demonstration of the acoustic properties of the wood that is used in PRS guitars and some top class session musicians turning up the voltage to show what the guitars could sound like when played very well!.

Despite Mr PRS enthusiasm for handing over my credit card details in exchange for one of his fine guitars, I decided to stick with my Gibson Les Paul, but maybe I'll add a PRS to the collection in the future, it did sound fantastic and is a truly versatile and easily playable electric guitar.

Soundcloud

The internet is awash with excellent free tools and software for sharing things over the net and with a bit of searching you can quickly find something that does what you are looking for.  I recently tried out soundcloud in order to show a demo I recorded. Soundcloud can be used to share, send and receive audio files with the minimal of hassle. I uploaded and easily shared it on facebook, twitter etc aswell as embedding it onto the front page of my web site and emailing the link to folks on the mailing list.

Via a bit of surfing I discovered Greg Brown's yet to be released album 'Freak Flag' which is currently streaming for free on the No Depression web site.

A similar service but focusing more on a page to place your music on is bandcamp - which my own mp3s are on. Bandcamp doesn't have the community / social networking aspect of soundcloud but does have great features for getting music to fans - e.g. download codes.

The less said about myspace the better, it's dying a quick death. For a great article on the demise of myspace visit Andrew Dubber's Blog