A Plan to Actually Fix The Music Industry – No, Really… I’m well aware what a grandiose claim that is but I want to get people’s attention to actually read this, if only to try to shoot holes in it, but I’ll start by giving some legitimacy to my having an understanding of the way […]

If you’re like a lot of people going into this holiday season, you might be looking for some new music to listen to are tired of the same old tunes, but also are worried that maybe the music you choose might not be “Doug Perkins / JGS Approved” with a “High Enough Holiday Hipness Quotient”. […]

The Origins of the Jazz Guitar Society site: I happened to run across these two MP3s from when my partner John Pin was one of my (Doug Perkins) private students when I taught at Musician’s Institute in Hollywood in the mid 1980s where I am illustrating some ways to go outside in a blues. If […]

I’m currently doing an eBook for a publisher intended for people that know how to play guitar but now want to learn how to play jazz on it. One of my little advice “sidebars” in the book is about jam sessions, so I decided I would write something for JGS on the same subject. Whether […]

My Tribute To Jeff Beck (Jan 11, 2023) (This is the tribute I (Doug Perkins) did on Facebook the day after Jeff Beck died (Jan. 10, 2023), I have included all the links I put in the comments so others could see the very wide range of music this man was able to cover in […]

Previously, I did a blog here that had to do with fixing guitar technique problems by slowing down practice to the point that you could see movement ergonomic (or: the science of efficiency of motion) problems for insight as to how to change them. The major point was the idea that only when playing slowly […]

This last couple of weeks I have been doing a theatre gig with a singer / actor / guitarist / pianist doing a show of some music from retro music legends of the past, and as I was driving to the gig I was sort of reflecting on the musical road I have traveled, and […]

I know I keep addressing the inner intellectual and emotional aspects of being a musician in blogs, but that’s just because I find it to be so common an issue in both in my own teaching and talking to other musicians both on the gig, and just as friends. I see people in jazz social […]

Every musician needs a certain amount of facility on their instrument to play the music that they are called to perform. As far as determining how much that is, I think Howard Roberts put it very succinctly in one of his books when he said that you need “over technique” to perform whatever it was […]

I remember a number of years ago being in a since defunct guitar store in the valley of LA called “Guitar, Guitar” trying out a guitar synthesizer playing over a standard or a blues, and when I stopped playing for a second a guy that was standing there watching me asked what he thought was […]

I got a scam email looking for a solo guitarist for a wedding, and since this is the second time I have gotten one of these, I thought I would lay out how it works since it doesn’t seem to be going away: You are contacted for some kind of gig that is relatively soon […]

I have recently gotten a private guitar student that is an adult graduate of a big music school, and he came to me because he was frustrated that he still couldn’t do the things that he set out to do in learning music. After talking to him a bit I recognized what the problem was: […]

“Fixing a Hole – or – How To Prep Songs For Performance” Years ago I was at a “musicians and spouses” party” and the spouses were all joking about listening to the musician’s practice, and one of them said something like “and then you hear them practicing the same song they always practice, and sure […]

30 Real Books Tunes That Will Teach You to Play Any New Tune The above statement is probably true on maybe 97% of the songs you’ll ever encounter, as it’s always possible that there is something new that will come around the pike that will go outside of the harmonic situations that these songs present. […]

I am pretty sure that I have done just as many solo guitar gigs – and I mean with no vocal where I played the melody, harmony, groove and any soloing myself – as I have done gigs with various sized bands. Non-guitarists tend to see solo guitar as no harder than what a pianist […]

One of the things that I have learned from teaching both my private students and my MAIN “lifetime student” – meaning, ME – is how much as human beings we don’t really understand how to learn things. And in terms of music, that means that many don’t really understand the best ways to practice our […]

Almost every musician is plagued by worries about how much technique they do or don’t have, and how important technique is or isn’t to the music they are trying to create. Here’s a short blog that helps to answer those questions: I just had a discussion with my partner in JGS about the new players […]

BREAKING FREE FROM LEAD SHEETS WHILE IMPROVISING The training ground for jazz guitar is the Great American Songbook—the songs that were mostly written in the 30s and 40s. This body of work contains the richest assortment of melodies and harmonies ever produced by man. All of us learn to improvise by playing over the chord […]

An Eternal Jazz Legend Will Be Featured in the Upcoming Documentary: Billie Billie Holiday is a famous jazz singer whose music thrills modern audiences to this day. There is so much excitement surrounding the highly anticipated film Billie, which was partially inspired by countless interviews that had never been seen by the general public. The […]

The following is a list of things that I have found to be extremely valuable in maintaining a music career of any type that provides a supporting income. This does not mean that other people do these things – but it does make doing these things all the more valuable in giving you an edge […]

I’m in a few jazz guitar groups on social media, and the subject of sight reading comes up a lot, with people requesting advice on how to develop it. Here’s some stuff I said in a group recently that might be of value to people on this subject: In my experience I would say that […]

Rising Stars: Jazz Guitarists To Keep Your Eye On In 2019 The challenging art of jazz guitar is such a high level of musicianship. In this list, we’re doing our bit for the music community and discussing some of the best jazz guitarists out there, and those who are currently active and releasing music, so […]

5 Effective Jazz Guitar Hacks for Intermediate and Advanced Players Jazz can be an overwhelming undertaking when you don’t focus on simple concepts during your practice. To counter this, I’ve thought about easy hacks and notions that can really open up your playing and give you many options to explore with minimal effort. The more […]

It’s a new year and lots of people make a lot of resolutions to do things differently now. You probably have a list of things that you wish were different in your musical life, but possibly only a vague idea of what should be done about them, and not much of a real plan to […]

Way back when I was a brand new instructor at Musician’s Institute, I used to run a morning “before school” improvisation theory class that a lot of guys used to come to. I picked out 20 standards from the Real Book that I felt had pretty much every kind of harmonic improvisational situation that you […]

I thought that some of you might be interested in how Jazz Guitar Society.com was started, and also the principles that it operates under. It all goes back to what was Guitar Institute of Technology in the early 1980s in Hollywood CA, soon to become Musician’s Institute. I (Doug Perkins) taught there for a number […]

I had an email recently from someone who had gotten one of our newer masterclass videos and said that they were overwhelmed and felt like they would never play the guitar again – this should never be, and I want to address the subject of how to learn what looks like hard material on an […]

(This was a reaction to my recent blog about what level of sight reading is and isn’t necessary these days from Ric Molina, who amongst other things plays guitar in the Broadway show WICKED. It was so good that I felt that it should stand on it’s own. I completely agree with what Ric is saying […]

I recently have had a lot of people ask me about sight reading music, and it seemed to be a good topic for me to write a blog for JGS on – especially since I have been spending some time cleaning up my own reading recently as well. While I am known to be more […]

Hi Everyone, Well, it‘s starting to get colder in my part of the globe (or at least as cold as it ever gets in Los Angeles), and the fall/winter is always the time when I start new things – possibly due to being born then, who knows? But, besides starting NEW things, we all have […]

It’s July 4th, Independence Day here in the United States, and a historic time where the largest group of people to ever assemble in the history of the world are  in Egypt to attempt to have a hand in their own freedoms. It made me think about one of the things that can give us […]

I was able to get new teacher Jamie Glaser to do a “guest blog” to go along with his new video, and hope to do more of that in the future with other teachers at JGS – this is a very fun and facinating collection of thoughts and stories I think you will enjoy – […]

Well, next month is the one year anniversary of JazzGuitarSociety.com, and I realized that I have spent so much time bringing in new teachers and doing interviews etc., that I haven’t done a blog in a really long time, so here goes…but before I start in, I want to make sure everyone knows that we […]

So I am writing this tonight fresh from the final day of the auction of the estate of the late (and VERY great) Les Paul at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills, CA. Am I rich and someone that collects valuable things? Well, I’m certainly not rich, but I DO collect things that have value to […]

This week’s blog is about some of the things that I have learned about myself with regards to practicing, I have a feeling that they are common enough to resonate with others but I am very curious on peoples’ thoughts on some of this as to how it applies to them.   One of the […]

It’s now one week after the once in a lifetime Musician’s Institute Reunion – I say that it will only happen once because of the scope of the event, it was for everyone who was ever a student or an instructor / staff since the school started in 1977 through when it was sold in […]

CODA: Accepting Your Limitations and Embracing your Strengths.   After all of this talk of how to improve our right hand techniques, I felt I needed to add a “coda” here to try to balance all of this out with something philosophical about the nature of music and being an artist in general. Try to […]

Anyway. as soon as I got my weight shifted a bit and got the little finger to the point that I didn’t have to exert any effort to keep it out and relaxed, I was pretty good to go. Somewhere a year or so after this change over, a friend sent me a great article […]

OK, so all of this served me pretty well for a while, but there were certain guitars that were really uncomfortable for me to play, especially guitars without pick guards, or arch-top acoustics where there was a long drop from the first string to the pick guard – I would hit that as I was […]

Part 2 of Doug’s exploration of “Universal Truths In Picking Technique”
That worked pretty well for a few years, although I never quite got to the Mahavishnu buzz saw that I would have wanted to have. Then I went to Musician’s Institute (then GIT) and I knew right away I was in the deep end of the pool and it was adult swim. One of the first people I got to know in my class was a guy named Gilles Renne from France, and he had the effortless buzz saw right hand of doom. After a couple of months of being around him, both myself and instructor Ron Eschete decided to switch our right hands

I got a call this morning from a Musician’s Institute alumni who I had been talking to on Face Book and had remembered from when I was teaching there years ago. He had seen me writing on FaceBook (yes, I’m there probably too often) about a right hand picking technique change over that I was in the final conversion to, and being frustrated with his own right hand technique problems, he wanted some advice. At the end of about 45 minutes, he felt that he was given a lot of insight into a problem that had plagued him for many years, and suggested that I blog about it, so I decided that maybe my own years of struggle in the same area could help some others so decided to do it.

One of the things I have been doing lately is helping to plan the reunion of the original Musician’s Institute students and teachers (‘77-‘94) in Hollywood in March of 2012. In doing so, we put up a FaceBook group and people from all around the world have been posting really interesting things. One was a […]

It was some time in the early 2000’s that I got an email from a keyboard player friend here in Los Angeles that some guitar player named John Pin in Australia was looking for his old guitar teacher from Musician’s Institute named Doug Perkins. He figured that was me and sent me John’s email, who […]