The Official Blog of Pro Guitarist Allen ROBOT Van Wert

I just heard about Buckethea…I mean Paul Gilbert and John Petrucci playing 2008 G3 with Joe Satriani. It should be interesting. I never went to a G3 show but I have been at a Joe Satriani show once. I will never go to one again. He is a great musician and the guitar playing was decent, however guitar alone is boring to me. I can only listen to guitar solos for a little while and then I want to leave. My favorite part of that show was the Stu Hamm bass solo actually. I should mention that Stu gives online lessons along side of me at Music Virtuosity.

One cool thing about guitar shows is that the audience tends to clap in time. The shitty thing is that it is basically all guys who play guitar and stare at the dude on stage with their arms crossed thinking… yeah I play that song better at home on my POD…or whatever.

One review of my album said I should be a third of G3 someday. It would be fun for me but I always tend to think a straight out guitar show is boring for the audience. Steve Vai is a great front man and musician…perhaps he could pull off entertaining without vocals. He seems to. I liked his DVD from London.

Before anyone thinks I am bashing guitar based music…keep in mind, I put out an all instrumental guitar album and love listening to instrumental music. But as far as a live show goes, It seems boring to me.

I am becoming slightly disheartened in regard to the fact that people would rather click on a video of a girl showing cleavage who talks about nothing rather than FREE beginner to college level guitar/music theory lessons. I have been actually getting more hits on YouTube than on here. I am going to start putting daily text blogs like this one. I thought people would rather videos, however it seems to be in opposition to what I had imagined. Plus having text is supposed to bring in more people to the site. So here we go…

I have had comedy style videos on YouTube and they seem to get more hits than the free guitar lessons. Whenever videos have a girl showing cleavage in them they get more hits. At the risk of viewers being distracted from my lessons, I am thinking about having my very attractive girlfriend shake her large breasts behind me while recording the videos from now on. This should draw people in and perhaps they will learn something while looking at a sexy girl, rather than just getting excited…or whatever people find so amusing about girls. Or maybe she could give a quick recap of what the lesson was about and an introduction or something. Another really strange fact is that many people have paid a substantial amount of money to buy my lesson book and take private lessons from me over the years, however there are only a small amount of people viewing the free lessons and commenting.

I have about 20 new lesson videos sitting here on my hear drive but I am reluctant to post them online until I start getting some more visits to this site itself. I thought about making a rule where I will not post a new video until a prior video has received a certain amount of comments. Things like that to help promote the site. I do not have the funding to advertise this site at the moment. If anyone would like to help out by linking to it, that would be much appreciated and helpful.

This site was intended to be a person blogging type deal for me, however I am always excited to help people out with their music and guitar work. So I ended up posting bunches of video lessons for guitar and music theory. Perhaps people would rather an inside look at the life of a shred guitarist. That could be fun. I just fear that the more I let people in the more they might hate me since I tend to be a strong debater on most topics.

Let me know if anyone has an idea on what could help this site grow.