Bill Leverty was born in Richmond, VA, where he was exposed to many different styles of music ranging from rock, funk, soul, blues, flamenco, and country. Bill was drawn to the sound of the guitar early in life, but didn’t actually start playing until the age of 14 when he took a group class once a week, for 8 weeks. “Learning chords first, rather than notes, really captured my interest because I was able to start playing songs immediately, the first being ‘Sweet Home Alabama’”.
Check out the title track of Bill Leverty’s latest instrumental album, Southern Exposure:
After learning the basic major, minor, and minor 7th chords, Leverty began to delve into the world of melodic lead guitar playing, first inspired by guitarists like Ted Nugent, Eddie Van Halen, and of course, Southern bands like The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and ZZ Top. “I always had a real love for Southern music. The style just won my heart over. Something about the way those Southern melodies make me feel will always be a vibe that I will gravitate towards.”
After changing schools in 9th grade, Bill began his quest to put together a band that would encompass his passion for Southern feel rock with an edge. He formed Continental Drift, and began playing in night clubs at the tender age of 16. After his high school graduation, Bill attended Virginia Tech, where he played with several fledgling bands. Ultimately, Bill decided that college should be put on hiatus in order to pursue his musical aspirations. “It was a tough decision that really concerned my parents who wanted me to have a college education. I assured them that if it didn’t work out, I would go back to school”.
After leaving college, Bill began working steadily towards the goal of securing a major label contract. He formed a band in Richmond called White Heat which began playing clubs almost immediately, performing a repertoire of 70% cover tunes and 30% original material. “We got a lot of gigs and played 5 nights a week. Our original songs became almost as popular as the cover tunes we were playing. I remember many a night finishing loading our U-Haul rental truck in Norfolk, VA, driving home the nearly 2 hour drive,
getting home at 5am, and having to be back at work in the grocery store at 7am. It was pretty brutal”
White Heat went through many personnel changes and eventually got a record deal with Epic Records and had to change their name to FireHouse due to trademark issues. FireHouse went on to sell over 6 million albums and win the American Music Award in 1991 for best new hard rock, heavy metal artist. “Those were the days!”
Leverty continues to play guitar for FireHouse, recording and touring around the world, and has recently put out 2 solo albums: WANDERLUST and SOUTHERN EXPOSURE. WANDERLUST is a vocal album with classic rock influences. Leverty brought in Gregg Allman’s bassist Bruce Waibel, and FireHouse drummer, Michael Foster as the rhythm section. For SOUTHERN EXPOSURE, Leverty’s first instrumental album, Foster again provided the drumming while Leverty played bass, keys, and guitars. “I’m having the time of my life!”, says Leverty. “I’m able to play about 60 FireHouse gigs a year, and also, put out side projects that show different sides of me as an artist. I just love making music.”
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”-Mark Twain
Want to be a Rock Star? Or just be able to sustain your desired lifestyle with doing what you love? Sure you do!
It can be a bit overwhelming thinking about all the things that must fall into place to achieve the huge dream of playing music and being successful. Follow Twain’s advice and break things down into the smallest pieces you can. As you go along accomplishing these smaller goals, you will find yourself feeling more accomplished and building up a nice momentum.
Try to learn something new each week. Make contact and give some value to one or two new musicians or players in the music industry.
Every little thing adds up. Remember, it takes one brick at a time to build a house!
Guitar Action Plan of the Week: Start Learning Your Favorite Guitar Solo
Do it! If you need help breaking the guitar solo down, check out our friend Jeffrey Adams’ Professional Guitar Transcription site. They will transcribe any song you want, each being tailored to your needs. If you ever heard a song you really wanted to play, but when you got to the guitar store, you couldn’t find the tab book for it, this is THE site for top quality guitar transcriptions!
Just got finished reading a blog post from Michael Michalko, one of the most highly acclaimed creativity experts in the world. As an officer in the U.S. Army, Michael organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics in Frankfurt, Germany, to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods. His team applied the methods to various NATO military, political, and social problems and produced a variety of breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old problems.
I began playing guitar in 1977, and have stuck with it steadily ever since. For the last 20 years I’ve made my whole living from guitar, which means playing live, marketing my original music on itunes and as physical CDs, writing for the major guitar magazines, doing session work, publishing instructional videos, teaching private guitar lessons, doing clinics for organizations like The National Guitar Workshop, writing guitar books for Alfred Publications, and directing a rock-n-roll music camp called DayJams.
Staying busy is good and I’ve learned a lot while doing so. As far as I’m concerned, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right, so I stay focused upon the task at hand and try hard at whatever it is!I’ve also learned to trust myself and believe in my own unique style. I used to care too much about impressing high level players and snobby critics by trying to play more like them or utilize concepts of which they obviously approve in my own playing, but that never worked out very well. When I discovered Zen Guitar and learned how to just “be myself” on guitar, things began to fall into place for me musically and professionally! Check out these you tube videos to see what my Zen Guitar style is all about!
My live playing projects include a duo with singer songwriter, Terry Gourley, and solo clinics, which are often like little concerts in which I play my original music with backing tracks and as unaccompanied solos. I use Dunlop jazz III picks, Marshall and Mesa amps and am endorsed by Paul Reed Smith Guitars, Ernie Ball strings, and Pigtronix Pedals. My latest releases, of which I am very proud, are the Zen Shred Zone CD, which features cameos by fellow shredders Michael Angelo Batio and Mattias IA Eklundh, and The Total Rock Guitaristbook/CD, which is available at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Guitar Center, etc.
Upcoming releases include Moonlight, the new Terry Gourley CD with me on lead guitar and the first ever guitar instructional graphic novel, which is called Shred Boot Camp. It features a CD of some of the fastest and wildest guitars ever recorded! This will capture the fullest shred I’m capable of - plus the same from super-shredders: Dave Martone, Michael Angelo Batio, Chris Ranier, Kurt Bell, and Glenn Riley! Watch for it in late 2008!
A great thing about commenting on blogs is that you can put a link to whatever website you would like to represent on your commenting name.
It can boost your credibility, bring in more music sales, and increase your revenue. A well-placed, well-written comment gets fellow readers interested in you, and they’ll follow you to your website of choice if you have them really intrigued.
If you are a professional guitarist looking for more exposure, more CD sales, or better networking, leaving a value-filled comment after a blog post can help drive traffic to your personal music site. Your commenting shows the world that you have personality, wisdom, and that you might even be pretty good at music!
An easy strategy to help develop relationships with people in online media is to focus on a few article sites that really interest you, and comment regularly on them. Not only will readers begin to recognize you, but the authors and editors of these sites will begin to take notice as well, and who knows, you might even become the next Featured Artist of the Week!
Get out there and start commenting! Share some of your own insights. (A good place to start is at the end of this post!)
With it being Memorial Day weekend, we figured why not remember some of our fallen guitar heroes?
God Bless all the great music that came out of these guys! Here is a short list along with their WikiPedia bio pages for all you guitar players to visit and pay your respect:
Reza Manzoori was born in the year of the fire horse in Shiraz, Iran, a city famous for its wine, rose gardens, and poetry. He remembers an early affinity for music and rhythm, but didn’t begin playing until rather late in life at 17 when he found an old guitar belonging to his sister in the basement of the house they lived in. The guitar had only the three treble strings. Still, this was more than enough to work with. “The first chord I ever learned was a D chord and I think it was because the guitar only had those three strings”.
A Segovia cassette was another inspiration. “Finding a Segovia album in post-revolution Iran was not at all impossible, however to me it was more than a call to the understanding of the guitar. It was a call to the understanding of music itself. I realized that the guitar wasn’t the instrument, but that music was, and the guitar was simply a tool for the instrument of Music.”
Upon arriving to the United States Reza enrolled in Los Angeles Valley College. Throughout his attendance there he held first chair in both the LAVC Guitar Ensemble and the Monarch Guitar Quartet, an extension of the guitar department headed by Robert G. Mayeur. “Performing (solos) was a great lesson for me. Knowing that I had nothing but the music to play allowed me to forget that I was all alone up there.”
His musical experiences are wide and varied. “I wanted to be a great guitar player, but more than that I wanted to be a great musician. And so music in all its forms became appealing to me. I thank my sister for leaving me that old guitar with three strings, and the Creator for blessing my ears. I sometimes wonder what might have happened had it been a didgeridoo.”
Reza’s album ‘ReStrung’ is a collection of original songs that he has been “re-creating” for the past ten years. He has been heard to call them practice pieces. “On most of the songs on ‘ReStrung’ what you hear, minus the percussion, is one guitar track. So all these songs can be performed as solos. However, they would all work nicely as duets, or even trios and quartets.”
Reza is currently at work on ‘RezaNation’, a follow - up to ‘ReStrung’.
Check out his song “Insignia” and keep reading to learn more about this talented guitarist!
In a follow-up to our last post featuring a beat-boxing guitarist, I would like to share with everyone one of my personal favorite musicians, Raul Midon. Not only does this guy have some exceptional right hand chops, but he can sing as well as play a mean mouth trumpet.
I am always fascinated and a bit envious of guitar players who can sing at the same time that they have some pretty complex and unrelated guitar work going on.
Being able to emulate a trumpet and improvise freely over your rhythm guitar work: Now that is just unfair!
Check out 1:45 and on to see how Raul Midon takes his musicianship to another level by pulling you into his performance even more by demonstrating his improv mouth trumpet chops.
You guys know of any other guitar players who combine unique skills with their guitar playing? Share with us!
This video demonstrates a cool concept that I think is a great way to set yourself apart as a musician. Mixing and fusing different elements from unrelated genres results in some cool new ideas that can set your style apart from the rest of the guitar playing herd.
There is a common misconception that Buddha left his wealthy lifestyle to seek enlightenment. In actuality, he left home to start a rock band with three of his buddies called The Four Noble Truths. Needless to say, things didn’t work out and yada, yada, yada….he found Enlightenment.
The following is written by Tobias Hurwitz, Zen guitar master:
I became aware of what I now call the Zen Guitar Movement in 1997 through reading Phillip Toshio Sudo’s first book, Zen Guitar. This made me consider the benefits of a contemplative and non-competitive lifestyle - as a working musician - in which music is the centerpiece of a near constant Zen-like meditation. The focus of Sudo’s personal meditation was his inspired composition One Sound One Song, which was as much a part of his essence as his own breathing, and which he played to the exclusion of most other music until his passing from cancer in June of 2002.Philip released a CD of this music called Zen Guitar, and shortly afterwards I included my own Zen Guitar song on my first solo CD, Painted Sky. The two of us soon collaborated on the sequel to Zen Guitar, which is called Book of Six Strings, and features and audio CD of music written by Sudo and me.
Even without Sudo, the musical movement he started continues to grow and diversify. Much has happened in recent years. Jeff Peretz authored Zen and the art of Guitar, which features a completely independent take on the topic. Salvatore Principato coordinated three successful Zen Guitar festivals in NYC’s Greenwich Village. These featured performances of ZG music by myself, DR Maybe, Ben Noir, and many others. Zen Guitarist John Prusinski has been web-mastering Sudo’s www.zenguitar.com ever since Phil’s passing. It features news, events, lessons, an active forum, and more. Now we also have www.guitarplayerzen.com. Dean Guitars sells a limited edition “Zen Acoustic Guitar” with Japanese ideograms on the neck and The National Guitar Workshop has been offering a Zen Guitar seminar, taught by Jeff Peretz and myself, for many years. Guitar Player magazine has published a short article on Zen Guitar, and there is even a Wickapedia entry on it. There’s so much going on, most of which I’m probably not even aware of (you know who you are) that I can’t even list it all in this short article, and that’s good!
Awesome new players like Ry Brown are emerging on the ZG scene. His Zen in the art of Guitar CD represents a very important addition to the growing Zen Guitar canon. Brown’s solo acoustic steel pieces conjure trance inducing moods by way of repetitive micro-tonal phrasing over open tuned drones. Are his choices of five compositions and two versions of each significant? Are they perhaps nods to the Chinese five elements and Yin Yang duality concepts? I could easily be reading too much into this, but ultimately, the sound is what matters. Its similarity to Raga encourages a meditative state and captures a sonic snap shot of Zen quite neatly.
My own musical contributions include The Way of Zen Guitar and Zen Shred Zone CDs, both of which contain versions of Sudo’s One Sound One Song , and also ZG music written by myself, most notably Truth Part I and Zen Guitar, both of which are also available as free live videos on you tube. The Zen shred connection is rather interesting, and can be explained by way of analogy: Much as a Samurai swordsman hones a difficult technique through concentration and disciplined practice, so does a Zen Guitar shredder hone an arpeggio or scale sequence. But the Zen shredder also values the concept of duality as expressed by Yin and Yang, so for every intricate passage he will balance the equation with a relaxing and melodic one. This can be heard clearly all over my Zen Shred Zone release, especially on the title track, which features performances by technical guitar masters, Michael Angelo Batio and, Mattias IA Eklundh. This is available on itunes, Guitar Nine Records, Angelo.com, etc.!
Perhaps these thoughts will inspire some of you readers to create your own personal versions of Zen Guitar. After all, ZG is about individuality and getting to know one’s self and one’s music!
. This made me consider the benefits of a contemplative and non-competitive lifestyle - as a working musician - in which music is the centerpiece of a near constant Zen-like meditation. The focus of Sudo’s personal meditation was his inspired composition One Sound One Song, which was as much a part of his essence as his own breathing, and which he played to the exclusion of most other music until his passing from cancer in June of 2002.
