music-lessons posts

Filed under: Audio, Video, Web services, web 2.0

Video-Tabs: Learn to play guitar the YouTube way

by Brad Linder May 16th 2008

A few month ago we checked out iVideoSongs, a web site that lets you buy music lessons from experts like Rush's Alex Lifeson, or Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills & Nash. The video quality is excellent, the lessons are top notch, and you can find lessons for beginners, intermediate, and advanced musicians. But only some of the lessons are free. For many you'll have to pull out your wallet.

Or you could just resort to the thousands of music lessons uploaded to YouTube and other video sharing sites for free. But who wants to sift through videos from every dude who thinks he's the next Jimi Hendrix in order to find the most worthwhile lessons? That's where Video-Tabs comes in. The site is basically a blog that features user generated guitar lessons, which are sometimes punctuated with actual guitar tabs.

Some of the lessons are excellent and easy to follow. Others not so much. But for the most part, the tutorials that we checked out seemed to feature people who actually knew how to play the songs they were teaching. If you're a visual learner, the site is definitely worth checking out.

[via listio]

Tags: guitar, guitar-tabs, music-lessons, video-tabs

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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