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This Week’s Focus

Record yourself playing a riff on the low strings and listen back with headphones. There’s a good chance you’ll hear strings ringing that you never meant to play: the open high E buzzing under a power chord, the A string humming along under a lick on the D string. None of that shows up when you’re standing in your room playing loud. It shows up the second you record, or the second you play through a clean amp, or the second the rest of the band drops out and it’s just you.

That noise isn’t a gear problem and it isn’t a fretting-hand problem. It’s a picking-hand problem, and the fix is one of the simplest techniques in guitar: resting the edge of your picking-hand palm across the strings you aren’t using. Not the strings you’re about to mute for a chunky riff, the strings you have no intention of playing at all. Done right, your fret hand keeps moving freely while your palm quietly kills everything underneath it.

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• Tell the difference between palm muting for tone and palm muting for silence

• Find the resting spot on your palm that kills unused strings without choking the ones you’re playing

• Adjust palm position as your picking hand moves across the strings

• Hear the difference a muted unused string makes on a recording versus live

• Build the habit into riffs, chords, and lead playing without thinking about it mid-phrase

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NOW LET’S GET INTO IT!

The spot that works for most players is the fleshy outer edge of the palm, right below the pinky, resting just in front of the bridge saddles. Too far back toward the middle of the strings and you'll choke notes you actually want to ring. Right at the bridge, you get just enough dampening to kill an open string's vibration without smothering a note your pick is actively attacking a few inches away.

Most players learn tone muting first because it’s the one with a famous sound attached to it. Noise muting gets skipped because nobody notices it’s missing until a recording exposes the silence that should have been there. That’s exactly why it matters: it’s invisible when it’s working and obvious the moment it’s gone.

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9 THINGS YOU CAN TRY THIS WEEK

1. Find the Spot With One String

Play an open low E string and let it ring. Now lay the outer edge of your palm across it near the bridge and listen to how fast it dies. Move your palm an inch toward the neck and try again. Notice how much faster it kills the note the further you are from the bridge.

2. Mute Everything, Pick Nothing

Lay your whole palm across all six strings and strum. You should hear almost nothing, just a faint percussive thud. If you’re hearing ring, your palm isn’t making full contact across every string.

3. Play a Riff on the Low E, Mute the Rest

Pick the open low E string repeatedly while resting your palm lightly across the A, D, G, B, and high E. The low E should ring clean and loud while the other five stay completely silent underneath it.

4. Move the Mute When You Move Strings

Play a lick that travels from the low E up to the D string. As your pick moves, your palm needs to shift slightly so it’s covering the strings below wherever you’ve landed, not the ones above. This is the part that takes the longest to feel automatic.

5. Test It With an Open Chord

Strum an open G chord, but only intend to ring the bottom three strings as a riff. Use your palm to kill the top three. This forces you to mute strings sitting right in the middle of your strumming pattern, not just off to one side.

6. Record Yourself Without It, Then With It

Play any riff for 30 seconds with no muting at all, then play it again resting your palm on the unused strings. Listen back on headphones. The difference is usually bigger than players expect the first time they hear it side by side.

7. Check Your Fret Hand Too

The palm handles strings near the bridge, but a fret-hand finger lightly touching an unused string higher up the neck catches noise the palm can’t reach. Use both together on wider chord shapes.

8. Apply It to String Skipping

Any time you pick a low string and a high string while skipping the ones in between, like in hybrid picking or wide-interval licks, those middle strings are exposed and ringing unless your palm is sitting across them.

9. Apply It to One Real Song

Pick a song you already play and run it through once paying attention only to which strings should be silent at each moment. Most players find at least one section where an open string has been ringing the whole time without them noticing.

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HOW WORKING PLAYERS USE IT

This isn’t a flashy technique, which is exactly why the players who rely on it the most rarely get asked about it. It shows up most in players whose tone has to stay clean enough that nothing can hide behind distortion.

From the Archive: Read These Next

• Hybrid Picking: what the pick can’t do alone

  Wide string skips expose unused strings fast. This is where palm muting earns its keep.

• The Nashville Number System

  Session players who read charts also play clean enough that every unmuted string gets heard. The two habits go together.

Next issue: we’re breaking down economy picking, the technique that decides when alternate picking should bend its own rule to cross strings faster.

TECHNIQUE DEEP DIVE

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B.B. King once watched a young Billy Gibbons fighting his way through a bend on a set of heavy strings and asked him a simple question: why are you working so hard? Gibbons took the advice seriously. He dropped down to a .007 high E, a gauge most players have never even held, and built an entire career on bends and vibrato that sound like they cost him nothing, because for him, they basically don’t.

Stevie Ray Vaughan went the opposite direction. He played a .013 high E, sometimes heavier, and bent it like it was nothing. It also wore holes in his fingertips and is part of why he eventually had to drop to an .011.

Same instrument, same techniques, two completely different physical experiences. The difference is string gauge, and it’s one of the cheapest, fastest changes you can make to how bending and vibrato actually feel under your fingers.

What Gauge Actually Controls

String gauge is just the diameter of the string, measured in thousandths of an inch. A “light” set might run .009 to .042 across six strings. A “heavy” set might run .011 or .012 up to .052 or higher.

Thicker strings need more tension to reach standard pitch than thinner ones do. More tension means more resistance every time you push a string across the fret to bend it, or rock it back and forth for vibrato. That resistance is the whole story. It’s why a beginner can wrestle with a heavy-gauge guitar for months and still can’t get a clean whole-step bend, then borrow a friend’s light-strung guitar and bend it on the first try.

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Career + Income

Skip the lesson studio. Here’s where working guitarists make money: session work, touring, music direction, theater pits, sync placements, and ships. Real rates, real ranges.

Ask most people what a professional guitarist does for money and you get two answers: tour in a band, or teach lessons. Teaching is real work and plenty of players build a good life on it. But it’s not the only road, and it’s not this issue.

This is about the other careers. The ones built around playing guitar for other people’s projects, records, tours, shows, and catalogs, where the paycheck comes from a union scale, a contract, or a royalty statement instead of a lesson rate. These are the jobs working session players, sidemen, and music directors actually do, with the numbers attached.

1. Session Musician

Session work means you show up, you play what’s needed, and you go home. No touring, no lessons, no audience. Just your part, recorded well, on time.

Union session pay runs through the American Federation of Musicians’ Sound Recording Labor Agreement. As of February 2025, a standard non-symphonic 4-hour session pays a side musician $813.31 and a leader or contractor $1,627.62, with an additional 14.09% pension contribution and $25 to $30 in health and welfare per session on top. Play two sessions in a day and you’ve cleared scale twice.

Nashville’s non-union demo and budget tiers run lower: a 3-hour demo session pays $170, and a low-budget master session (under a $99K total project budget, up to 12 songs) pays $274.32 for 3 hours. These are entry points, not the ceiling. Working A-list Nashville and L.A. session players stack multiple calls a week, often several in a single day.

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This morning, I found myself thinking about everything that needed my attention, not next week, not next month, but just today. Emails to answer. Projects to move forward. People to call. Family responsibilities. Health. Finances. Creative work. The list seemed endless.

It made me realize something important.

Life has a way of convincing us that everything is urgent. If we’re not careful, we’ll spend all of our energy putting out fires while quietly neglecting the things that matter most. Success at work can come at the expense of our health. Building a business can slowly steal time from our family. Chasing goals can leave little room for rest, friendships, or simply enjoying the life we’re working so hard to create.

I’ve learned that life balance isn’t about giving every area of your life equal time every day. That’s unrealistic. It’s about making sure no important area is ignored for too long.

When one part of your life thrives while another quietly deteriorates, the imbalance eventually catches up with you. Your body keeps score. Your relationships notice your absence. Your creativity fades. Even your work begins to suffer.

The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is awareness.

Take inventory regularly. Ask yourself where you’re investing your time, your energy, and your attention. Then make the small adjustments before the important things become urgent.

At the end of the day, real success isn’t measured by how many tasks you crossed off your list. It’s measured by whether you built a life that allows your health, relationships, purpose, finances, personal growth, and peace of mind to grow together.

Because when life is out of balance, something always pays the price.

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⚖️ Life Balance Prompts

Life balance isn’t about giving equal time to everything. It’s about giving the right attention to what matters most in this season of your life.

These prompts are designed to help you pause, reflect, and create a life that feels more intentional, not just more productive.

🌱 Daily Check-In Prompts

What gave me energy today?

What drained my energy?

When did I feel most present?

What am I carrying today that I don’t need to?

What is one thing I can simplify tomorrow?

🧘 Mind & Wellness Prompts

How have I been treating myself lately?

What does rest look like for me?

When was the last time I truly relaxed?

What habits make me feel healthier?

What small change would improve my well-being this week?

💼 Work-Life Balance Prompts

Is my work supporting the life I want—or replacing it?

What task consumes more time than it deserves?

What can I delegate, automate, or eliminate?

When do I feel most productive?

What boundary do I need to establish?

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❤️ Relationships & Connection

Who brings out the best in me?

Who haven’t I checked in with lately?

How can I become more present with the people I love?

When did I last express genuine gratitude?

What relationship deserves more of my attention?

🌿 Personal Growth Prompts

What kind of person am I becoming?

What am I saying “yes” to that deserves a “no”?

What am I avoiding because it feels uncomfortable?

What new habit would improve my life?

What would a balanced version of me do today?

💰 Financial Balance Prompts

Do my spending habits reflect my priorities?

What purchase has brought me the most value?

What financial goal excites me?

How can I reduce unnecessary stress around money?

What small financial decision today benefits my future?

🎨 Creativity & Joy Prompts

What activity makes me completely lose track of time?

When was the last time I created something just for fun?

What hobby have I neglected?

How can I add more play into my week?

What would I do today if productivity didn’t matter?

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🌎 Life Priorities Prompts

If I only had one year to live, what would matter most?

What do I want to be remembered for?

What currently deserves less attention?

What deserves more attention?

What does success truly mean to me?

🌙 Reflection Prompts

What part of my life feels most balanced?

What area feels neglected?

What lesson did this week teach me?

What am I grateful for today?

What am I ready to let go of?

⚡ Five-Minute Balance Challenges

Write down five things you’re grateful for.

List everything currently on your mind.

Identify one task you can eliminate.

Describe your ideal day from morning to bedtime.

Write one sentence beginning with:
“I feel most alive when...”

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🌅 Reset Prompts

What can wait until tomorrow?

What would happen if I slowed down?

How can I protect my peace this week?

What is one commitment I need to reconsider?

What does enough look like today?

🌟 Future Balance Prompts

What would my ideal week look like?

What habits would my future self thank me for?

If my calendar reflected my values, what would change?

What legacy am I building through my daily choices?

What does a truly meaningful life look like for me?

⚖️ Remember...

Life balance isn’t found by accident.

It’s created through thousands of small choices.

Every “yes” shapes your future.
Every “no” protects your priorities.
Every moment of rest fuels your next opportunity.

You don’t need a perfectly balanced life.

You need a life that feels aligned with your values, your purpose, and the person you’re becoming.

LUNDINKE OFF THE FRETBOARD

You wake up with a headache. You take something for it, and twenty minutes later you’re back at your desk like nothing happened. The headache is gone. The thing that caused it is still sitting there, untouched, waiting to show up again next week as something else: a stomach issue, bad sleep, a short fuse with your partner.

That’s the model most of us run on without ever choosing it. Something hurts, you make the hurting stop, you move on. It works often enough that we never stop to ask what we’re actually doing: treating the smoke alarm instead of the fire.

There’s a different way to look at health, and it’s not new age, not a wellness trend, and not about quitting your doctor. It’s about noticing that your body, mind, and life are one connected system, and that most of what we call “symptoms” are actually that system telling you something specific. Here’s what that looks like in practice, and why it matters more than the headline makes it sound.

By the end of this issue, you’ll have

• A clearer way to read what your body is actually telling you when something feels off

• Five areas of life that quietly shape your health, in order of how often people overlook them

• A handful of small, specific changes you can start today, no overhaul required

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THE IDEA

The connection most people miss

Here’s something that should be obvious and somehow isn’t: your body doesn’t run five separate systems. It runs one. Stress isn’t “a mental thing” that stays in your head. It shows up as a tight jaw, a knotted stomach, blood pressure that creeps up over months until a doctor flags it as a number on a chart, disconnected from the thing that actually caused it.

Run that in reverse and the same thing is true. A bad night’s sleep doesn’t just leave you tired. It changes your mood, your appetite, your patience, your decision-making the next day. None of these are separate problems with separate fixes. They’re one system, talking to itself, and most of us only ever hear the loudest part of the conversation.

Instead of asking “how do I make this symptom go away,” start asking “what is this symptom connected to, and what would actually change if I addressed that instead.”

WHAT ACTUALLY RUNS THE SHOW

The five areas no one mentions when they tell you to “be healthier”

When people talk about getting healthy, they usually mean one thing: diet and exercise. Those matter. They’re also a fraction of the picture. Here are the five areas that quietly run the show, roughly in the order people tend to ignore them.

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A WORD OF SKEPTICISM

Why this gets dismissed, and why some of the dismissal is fair

If you’ve heard the word “wellness” and rolled your eyes, you’re not wrong to be skeptical. The space is full of people selling supplements with no research behind them, “detox” products that do nothing your liver and kidneys weren’t already doing for free, and influencers with no training making confident claims about your hormones. That’s real, and it’s worth staying skeptical of.

But skepticism of bad actors shouldn’t turn into dismissal of the underlying idea, because the underlying idea has real research behind it.

The honest takeaway: question the person selling you something, not the idea that your body is one connected system. Those are two very different things, and treating them as the same one is how good ideas get thrown out along with bad marketing.

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WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO

Pick one. Run it for a week.

You don’t need to restructure your life to start. Pick one of these and run it for seven days.

None of these will fix everything. That was never the promise. What they will do is start to show you which parts of your life are quietly running the show, the parts most of us never think to look at until something forces us to.

The actual point

The next time something feels off, before reaching for the thing that makes the feeling go away, try asking one question first: what is this connected to? Not in a mystical sense. In a literal, practical, “my body runs one system, not five” sense.

You might find the headache was never really about your head.

Gear + Gaming

Guitar Hero’s peak was 2007. At that point, Activision was moving roughly $1 billion in plastic instruments per year. Then the market collapsed, the series died in 2011, and for the next decade the rhythm game genre mostly ran on fan projects, nostalgia, and Clone Hero.

Something shifted in 2023. Fortnite added Festival, built by Harmonix, and put a note highway inside the most-played game on the planet. The numbers followed: 2.2 million daily players, according to publicly shared figures from CES 2026. That’s not a niche. That’s a lot of people pressing colored buttons in sequence to music.

Now comes the next piece. A LA-based hardware company called Drakong debuted the InfinaKore ‘Telecaster Edition’ at CES in January 2026, and tied the launch to Sound System, a new rhythm game from Marcus Henderson and Lennon Lange, two of the original Guitar Hero and DJ Hero developers. The InfinaKore ships sometime this year. Sound System hits Steam Early Access on October 16.

This article is about whether either of them is worth your attention, and what the combination actually means for people who care about guitars.

THE RHYTHM GAME LANDSCAPE RIGHT NOW

Before getting into the hardware, here’s where the active player base actually sits as of 2026:

The gap between Fortnite Festival and everything else is enormous. But the real number to watch is Clone Hero’s 75,000 monthly players. That’s a free fan-made game kept alive by a community that never stopped caring. Sound System is what happens when the people who built the genre try to formalize that.

THE INFINAKORE TELECASTER EDITION

The InfinaKore is made by Drakong, a Los Angeles company. They first announced it in June 2025 and brought it to CES this past January for the first public hands-on. The name is a collaboration with Fender, and the Telecaster silhouette isn’t coincidental: 2026 is the Tele’s 75th anniversary.

What makes this controller different from the ones you owned in 2008 is the build philosophy. It’s fully modular. The body, fret buttons, tuner head, whammy bar, and strum bar are all swappable components. Drakong is releasing 3D print files on launch day so players can make their own parts. That’s a real departure from the sealed, break-and-replace peripherals of the Guitar Hero era.

Key Specs

The Fret-Tapping D-Pad is the gameplay angle worth watching. Drakong hasn’t fully detailed how it works yet, but the framing suggests it’s meant to add a technique layer that maps more closely to actual guitar playing, specifically the kind of tapping you see from players like Eddie Van Halen or Steve Vai. Whether that translates to something meaningful in-game or is just a marketing hook is something we won’t know until more hands-on coverage comes out post-launch.

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InfinaKore vs. The Controllers You Already Know

On paper, the InfinaKore is the most forward-looking guitar controller ever announced. The question is whether that modularity holds up in practice and whether the parts actually feel good to play. CES impressions were positive but controlled environments don’t tell you much. We’ll know more once production units hit hands that aren’t at a trade show.

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SOUND SYSTEM | THE GAME

The case for Sound System starts with who made it. Marcus Henderson and Lennon Lange founded Echo Foundry Interactive after working on Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and Band Hero. They know what made that genre work and they know what killed it (largely: too much hardware, too expensive, too fast).

Sound System launches on Steam Early Access on October 16, 2026 for $24.99. Console versions (PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2) are in development.

The song mix at launch is covers of familiar hits plus original tracks from indie and emerging artists. Core indie tracks are free. Studio-recorded covers run $0.99 each. The pricing model is a direct response to the licensing problem that eventually strangled Guitar Hero and Rock Band: if you build around free and community-made content, the game can’t die because a label pulled a deal.

Feature Breakdown

The PulseMap Editor is the part I keep coming back to. Clone Hero’s longevity is almost entirely explained by user-generated charts. Songs go up days after release, fans chart obscure catalog cuts that no licensing deal would ever touch, and the game stays perpetually fresh. Sound System is building that in from day one instead of hoping a community builds it around them later.

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WHAT THIS MEANS FOR GUITAR PLAYERS

I want to be straight about something: the InfinaKore is a game controller. It is not a guitar. It will not teach you to fret chords or develop your picking hand. The buttons are arranged by color, not by pitch. Playing through a note highway on Expert difficulty will not translate to playing “Little Wing.”

That said, here’s what’s actually happening in this space that matters if you care about guitar culture:

Fortnite Festival has 2.2 million people per day who are actively engaged with music in a way that’s structured around the guitar’s layout. That’s a pool of potential converts. The rhythm game genre has historically created real guitarists. There are working musicians who picked up a real instrument because they got good at the game version first. The pipeline is real, even if it’s not guaranteed.

The Telecaster silhouette on the InfinaKore is not an accident. Drakong is explicitly connecting the controller to the 75th anniversary of one of the most played guitar shapes in history. That framing matters for the guitar-adjacent audience, the person who has always been curious about playing but hasn’t committed to lessons or a real instrument. A controller that looks like a Tele and feels like it has some craft behind it is a different sell than a cheap plastic toy.

And Sound System’s PulseMap Editor means someone can chart a song you love, with the actual guitar part mapped to the note highway, and you can play it. That’s still not playing guitar. But it’s closer to understanding what the song is doing than just listening to it.

THE RHYTHM GAME MARKET | CONTEXT

The rhythm game market is growing again after a decade of dormancy. Numbers vary by source but the direction is consistent:

The $1.5 billion figure is from 2024, and it covers rhythm games broadly (mobile included). The 9.2% projected CAGR through 2033 runs parallel to the period when Sound System, the InfinaKore, and whatever comes after them will be building their player bases. Whether those projections hold depends on whether new titles can actually retain players, not just attract them at launch.

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BOTTOM LINE

Both products are still pre-launch at the time of this piece. Hands-on reviews post-ship will tell us whether the InfinaKore’s modularity is actually durable and whether Sound System’s community editor gets real traction. The foundation is there. Whether the execution matches is a question we’ll have a better answer to by the end of the year.

More information: drakong.com | playsoundsystem.com

Core6 🔴🔴🔴🔴 | Personal Brand & Creative Identity

There’s a moment every serious guitarist eventually hits. Someone tells them to “put themselves out there.” Post the clips. Build the following. Grow the account. And something inside them says: absolutely not.

The recoil is understandable. The word “influencer” carries a specific kind of baggage. Ring lights. Sponsored content. Posting for the algorithm instead of the music. The idea of trading your practice time for caption-writing and thumbnail design feels like a betrayal of the whole point.

But there’s a thing that gets lost in that reaction. Building a digital presence around your playing is not the same thing as becoming an influencer. The two are fundamentally different activities with different goals, different audiences, and very different relationships to your identity as a player.

This issue covers what a genuine guitar identity looks like online, how to build one without burning your credibility, and the specific numbers that tell you whether what you’re doing is working.

Where This Fits: The Core6

1 | Mindset & Personal Growth: Build discipline, emotional resilience, and confidence through consistent action. Reframe setbacks into growth. Create identity rooted in long-term momentum.

2 | Strategic Foundations: Design clear systems and simple frameworks that reduce friction, prevent reactive decisions, and support sustainable creative and professional growth.

3 | Personal Brand & Creative Identity ← You are here: Clarify your sound, message, and positioning so your identity becomes recognizable, differentiated, and aligned with meaningful opportunities.

4 | Audience & Community Growth: Grow through connection, not vanity metrics, by showing up consistently, communicating value clearly, and building relationships that compound over time.

5 | Financials, Skill Monetization & Income Streams: Translate practice into products, expertise into offers, and knowledge into sustainable revenue streams that protect creative freedom.

6 | Execution, Productivity & Time Leverage: Eliminate decision fatigue, prioritize what compounds, and turn focused daily actions into measurable progress that builds lasting momentum.

DOCUMENTING VS. PERFORMING

The distinction that changes everything

Influencers perform. They create content designed to attract the maximum number of people. The product is the content itself, and the metric is reach.

Guitarists who build a real digital presence document. They capture what they’re already doing: practice sessions, technique breakthroughs, gear experiments, and musical ideas. The product is the playing. The content is just evidence of it.

The difference sounds subtle. In practice it changes everything: what you post, how often, what you optimize for, and who you attract.

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Craft + Session Life

The Nashville Number System is the shorthand that keeps session floors moving and gigging musicians employable. Here’s how it works, and why you should know it.

Picture this. You get a call on a Tuesday night. The rehearsal is Wednesday at 7. You show up, meet four musicians you’ve never played with, and someone slides a handwritten chart across the music stand. It’s a column of numbers. No chord names, no key signatures, no staff lines. Just: 1 4 5 1.

You have to know what that means. Because the singer is already at the mic.

That’s the Nashville Number System. Not a music theory exercise. Not something from a textbook. A live, practical tool invented in recording studios because people with no time to waste needed a way to communicate chord changes across any key in seconds.

If you gig, you will encounter it. If you session, you need it yesterday.

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WHERE IT CAME FROM

The Nashville Number System was developed in the late 1950s by Neal Matthews Jr., a member of the Jordanaires, the vocal group that backed Elvis Presley. Nashville’s session scene at the time was running on speed. A session musician might walk into RCA Studio B, get a chord chart with no key signature, and be expected to play on a record in under an hour.

The problem with traditional notation in that context: it’s key-specific. Write a chart in G major and every musician has to read it in G. If the producer wants to try it in A, someone rewrites the chart. That costs time no one had.

Matthews started using numbers to represent chords relative to the key, whatever the key happened to be. Charlie McCoy and other session players adopted it. By the 1960s, the system was standard practice on Music Row. It’s been there ever since, and it has spread well beyond Nashville into country, gospel, pop, and any genre where live musicians need to communicate fast.

HOW IT WORKS

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Gear & Sustainability

Walk into any guitar shop today and you will hear the word “sustainable” on a hang tag within about 30 seconds. Taylor’s got an ebony mill in Cameroon. Martin’s been printing FSC logos since before most players knew what FSC stood for. Gibson spent years fighting the government over its wood sourcing before pivoting to certified alternatives. The story is everywhere now.

But here is the question most of those hang tags don’t answer: if your guitar is made from FSC-certified wood instead of whatever they were using before, does it sound different?

Short answer: the certification itself doesn’t change a thing. What does matter, and what most players are actually asking about without knowing it, is species substitution. Because when the regulations started closing in, guitar companies didn’t just get paperwork on the same wood. They switched to different trees entirely. And that is where the tonal question gets real.

WHAT FSC ACTUALLY CERTIFIES

The Forest Stewardship Council is a non-profit that sets standards for forest management: labor practices, ecological impact, replanting, chain of custody. If a guitar company buys FSC-certified mahogany, it means the wood was harvested from a forest operating under those standards. That is it.

FSC certification doesn’t change the species. It doesn’t change how the wood was dried, cut, or graded. It doesn’t change the grain pattern or the density or the stiffness. A certified Honduran mahogany neck and a non-certified Honduran mahogany neck, from the same region, same growth rate, same cut, will sound the same.

The Actual Question

The tonal debate isn’t about certification. It’s about what happened when companies had to stop using the wood they’d always used and replace it with something else. Two back-to-back regulations made that substitution unavoidable for most major builders.

First, the Lacey Act. Amended in 2008 to cover plants and plant products, it made it illegal to import or sell wood harvested in violation of foreign laws. The US Fish and Wildlife Service raided Gibson’s Nashville factory in 2009, and again in 2012, over rosewood and ebony imports from Madagascar and India. Gibson settled in 2012 for $300,000. The message was clear: provenance mattered now.

Second, the 2017 CITES Appendix II listing of all Dalbergia species. Dalbergia is the genus that covers most rosewoods: Brazilian rosewood, Indian rosewood, Madagascar rosewood, cocobolo, kingwood. Under CITES Appendix II, any international trade in Dalbergia requires permits and documentation. That turned rosewood fretboards into a supply chain headache overnight. Companies building 50,000 to 500,000 guitars a year could not sustain the paperwork burden. Most of them moved to something else.

WHAT THEY SWITCHED TO

This is where tone enters the picture. The table below shows the common substitutions that happened across the industry after 2017. These are real species changes, not just sourcing changes. Each one has different physical properties, which means each one potentially has different acoustic properties.

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THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE WOOD

Wood tone is physics. Density, stiffness, and internal damping are the three variables that acousticians actually measure. Density affects how much mass the vibrating string has to drive. Stiffness affects how efficiently the wood converts string energy into sound. Internal damping affects how quickly that energy dies out.

The chart below shows density figures for the tonewoods that matter most to this conversation. Higher density generally means more sustain and a tighter, brighter response. Lower density generally means easier to vibrate, which can translate to more warmth and faster attack decay.

The density gap between Indian rosewood (800 kg/m³) and pau ferro (870 kg/m³) is real but small. The gap between Indian rosewood and roasted maple (680 kg/m³) is much larger, and roasted maple is now one of the most common fretboard substitutes on production instruments. Whether your ear catches that is a different question.

DOES ANY OF THIS ACTUALLY CHANGE WHAT YOU HEAR?

This is where the conversation usually turns into a religion war. So let’s separate what is known from what is debated.

What is physically true: different wood species have different density, stiffness, and damping properties. These properties affect how vibrations travel through the instrument. Acoustic physics says this should produce measurable differences in the frequency response of the guitar body and neck.

What blind testing tends to show: players are significantly worse at identifying these differences than they think they are. Multiple informal tests and at least one published study (Hahn & McIntyre, 2014, on acoustic guitar backs and sides) found that listeners could not reliably distinguish between tonewood species when the guitar was played behind a screen or when they couldn’t see what wood was in the instrument. The “rosewood sounds warmer than maple” claim has very weak blind-test support.

Where the substitution probably does matter: fretboards. This is the one place where your fretting hand is in direct contact with the wood, and the open-string resonance of the fretboard material contributes more directly to the tone you hear than a back or side panel that’s further from the strings. The jump from Indian rosewood to roasted maple is the most significant substitution in common use right now, and a real density difference of 100+ kg/m³ is more likely to be audible than a swapped back panel.

Where it almost certainly doesn’t: body wings on solid body electrics. The physics of how a solid body electric converts string vibration to electrical signal via a pickup means the wood body contributes far less to the raw output than on an acoustic. The pickup hears the string. Not the body. Ash vs. alder debates on a Stratocaster body are real enough that they affect resonance and feel, but the recorded output difference through an amp is far more subtle than most players claim.

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THE PRACTICAL VERDIT

Here is what this actually means for you as a player shopping for a guitar right now.

If you’re buying an acoustic, the fretboard material matters more than the back and sides. A rosewood-to-pau-ferro swap on an acoustic dreadnought is audible under the right conditions and worth comparing in person. A rosewood-to-Richlite swap may be harder to hear but will likely feel different under your fingers. If you’re sensitive to texture and warmth, play both before committing.

If you’re buying a solid body electric, the fretboard swap matters less, and the body wood swap matters very little. A Stratocaster with a pau ferro fretboard will sound like a Stratocaster. The pickup, the amp, and your hands are doing 90% of the work. Don’t let a tonal debate about fretboard wood distract you from the setup, the fret work, and how the neck feels in your hand.

If you’re buying a semi-hollow or archtop, you are in the middle ground. Body resonance is genuinely part of the tone in a way it isn’t on a solid-body. The wood matters more than it does on a Les Paul, less than it does on a Martin dreadnought.

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THE PART NOBODY IN THE INDUSTRY WANTS TO SAY

FSC certification is genuinely good. The forests it protects are real. The certification process has real standards. Supporting it by buying from manufacturers who use it is a real choice with real consequences for logging practices in places where oversight is otherwise minimal.

But the way it gets marketed to guitar buyers is mostly about feel-good branding, not tone. “Sustainable tonewoods” printed on a hang tag tells you almost nothing about how the instrument sounds. It tells you something about where the wood came from.

The actual tonal question, which is more honest, is: does the species substitution your guitar underwent sound different from what it replaced? And the answer to that is: sometimes, a little, in specific positions (fretboard more than body), on specific guitar types (acoustic more than solid body), and mostly less than you’d expect from reading the forums about it.

Play the guitar. Judge the sound. The certification is for the forest, not for your ears.

Send this to someone about to buy a "sustainable" guitar.

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A few weeks back I had to pick up my mother’s prescriptions. The pharmacy had that slow, no-schedule kind of wait where you just sit until they call your name. I grabbed a chair, pulled a book out of my bag, and started reading.

I looked up at one point and noticed something. Everyone else in that waiting room had a phone out. Not really reading anything. Just scrolling, that glassy, half-there look on their faces, thumbs moving on their own. And there I was with an actual book in my hands, fully in it.

I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not better than anyone else in that room, just… full. Present. Like I was doing something for myself instead of just killing time. I sat there beaming, and I’m not exaggerating that word. I haven’t forgotten that feeling. I carry a book with me everywhere now.

That fifteen minutes in a pharmacy waiting room taught me more about what reading actually does than any article ever has. So here’s what’s actually happening when you trade the scroll for the page, backed by what the research and the numbers say.

Pick up a book tonight instead of your phone, and here’s what happens in your head: your brain has to build the whole scene from scratch. The room, the faces, the tension in someone’s voice. No screen is doing that work for you. That’s the whole case for reading in one sentence: it’s one of the few habits left that makes your brain do the heavy lifting, and it pays you back for the effort.

Your brain on books

Reading is closer to a workout than a pastime. You’re holding character names, plot threads, and unanswered questions in your head all at once, then connecting them as you go. That’s a real cognitive load, and your brain adapts to it the same way a muscle adapts to resistance: memory improves, focus stretches longer, and the wiring that handles language and reasoning gets reinforced. Researchers have linked regular reading in later life to a slower rate of cognitive decline, which is one more reason to treat it as routine maintenance, not a luxury.

Where your imagination actually gets exercised

A book hands you a setting and a voice and asks you to build the rest. That’s different from watching a show, where every visual choice has already been made for you. Fiction in particular puts you inside heads that aren’t yours: a different era, a different set of values, a different way of solving a problem. That mental rehearsal carries over. People who read regularly tend to generate more original solutions and hold onto more than one way of looking at a problem, because they’ve spent hours doing exactly that on the page.

The empathy effect is real

Spend three hundred pages inside someone else’s head and you come out the other side understanding people a little better, including the ones who don’t think like you. Researchers studying “narrative transportation” (the feeling of being pulled into a story) have found it’s connected to higher empathy and a better read on other people’s emotions. Fiction in particular seems to do this: when you’re tracking a character’s choices and consequences, you’re quietly practicing the same skill you use to read the people in your own life.

One of the few screen-free ways to actually slow down

A book doesn’t notify you, autoplay the next thing, or reward you for staying longer. You set the pace. That alone makes it one of the simplest ways to lower your stress level and give your attention a rest. Plenty of people already use it that way: relaxation is the single biggest reason Americans say they read.

Vocabulary and knowledge compound

Every book you finish adds something: a fact, a phrase, a way of framing an idea you didn’t have before. None of it shows up overnight. But two years from now, the person who read forty books and the person who didn’t will not sound the same in a conversation, and it won’t be close.

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READING BY THE NUMBERS (2025–2026)

The picture has shifted since the last time anyone wrote about this, so here’s where things actually stand:

If you read even one book a month this year, you'd already be ahead of 80% of the country. That's not a high bar. It's just one most people have stopped clearing.

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5 BOOKS WORTH STARTING WITH

Not a “must-read” list. Just five that earn their place on a shelf, picked across genres so there’s an entry point no matter what you’re into.

1. “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren: An old book about reading better books. Sounds dry, isn’t. It’ll change how you take notes and what you actually remember six months later.

2. “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles: Fiction, and an easy one to fall into. A Russian count is sentenced to house arrest in a hotel for the rest of his life, and somehow that becomes one of the warmest stories you’ll read this year.

3. “The Storytelling Animal” by Jonathan Gottschall: A short, sharp look at why humans can’t stop telling and consuming stories, and what that says about how your brain is wired. Pairs well with the empathy point above.

4. “Atomic Habits” by James Clear: If you want the practical end of this list: a clear, no-fluff breakdown of how small, repeatable actions (like, say, reading ten pages a night) compound into real change.

5. “Deep Work” by Cal Newport: Makes the case for sustained, undistracted focus as a skill you can build, and reading is one of the best tools for building it. Useful whether your distraction problem is your phone, your inbox, or both.

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5 SMALL HABITS THAT MAKE READING STICK

1. Set a number, not a vibe. “Ten pages a night” beats “I should read more.” Specific goals get finished; vague ones get postponed. Track it in something simple like Goodreads or a Notes app so you can see the streak build.

2. Match the format to the moment. Print at home, audiobook in the car, e-book in the waiting room. Apps like Libby let you borrow e-books and audiobooks free through your local library, no extra subscription required.

3. Read what actually pulls you in. Skip the “best books of all time” list if nothing on it interests you. Read the first chapter before committing. If it’s not grabbing you by page 30, put it down. Life’s short and there are 2.2 million new titles published every year. One of them is for you.

4. Stack it onto something you already do. Coffee in the morning, the last twenty minutes before bed, the bus ride to work. The habit sticks when it rides on the back of a habit you’ve already built, not when it’s one more thing competing for a slot in your day.

5. Write down one thing per book. A line that hit you, an idea you want to try, a question the book raised. You don’t need a full reading journal (though Kindle’s highlight feature or an app like Evernote makes it painless). You just need one sentence that proves the book left a mark.

Issue · June 2026 · 10 min read

Know a guitarist who needs this?

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Most people reach for their phone when work gets overwhelming. Scroll for a few minutes, step away from the problem, come back. It doesn’t work, but it’s automatic now.

Guitar players have something that actually does work and most of them don’t use it on purpose. They just know they feel better after playing. That’s not a coincidence or a placebo. There’s a specific biological reason it happens, and once you understand the mechanism, you can use it deliberately instead of stumbling into it.

This is what music therapy research shows about stress, and what it means for anyone who plays.

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The Science

Why your nervous system responds to music differently than to anything else

Your autonomic nervous system runs two modes: sympathetic (fight-or-flight, stress response) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest, recovery). Chronic work stress keeps most people stuck in sympathetic mode longer than the body is designed to handle. Cortisol stays elevated. Sleep gets disrupted. Focus drops.

Music is one of the fastest-acting inputs that can shift that balance, not through relaxation in the vague sense, but through specific, measurable changes. A 2019 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE looking at 400+ studies found that listening to music lowered cortisol in people undergoing surgery preparation more reliably than anti-anxiety medication in some cases.

Active playing takes that further. When you play an instrument, you’re engaging motor cortex, auditory cortex, prefrontal cortex, and the limbic system simultaneously. That level of whole-brain engagement is rare —and it’s why it’s almost impossible to spiral into work thoughts while you’re mid-phrase. The cognitive load doesn’t leave room for it.

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Technique Deep Dive

Turn on the radio mid solo and most guitarists can name the player before the chorus hits. Not from the tone, not from the band, just from the way one note starts to move the second it’s struck. That shake, that wobble, that controlled wavering pitch is vibrato, and it might be the single most personal thing a guitarist does with their hands.

That’s not just a feeling. Researchers studying violinists have built systems that identify individual performers from recordings using vibrato as one of the core features, the same way you’d pick a friend’s voice out of a crowded room. Your vibrato isn’t decoration sitting on top of a note. It’s closer to a signature, something you’re writing every time you let one ring.

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Most guitarists spend years chasing the right guitar, the right amp, the right pedal, convinced that’s where their sound lives. Meanwhile the one thing that actually identifies them as a player, the thing that survives a guitar swap, a different amp, a bad room, sits in their fretting hand the entire time, mostly ignored.

Here’s what’s actually happening when you shake a note, and how to start building a vibrato that’s recognizably yours.

What Vibrato Actually Is

Vibrato is a small, repeated change in pitch around a target note. You’re not bending up to a new note and holding it. You’re oscillating around the note you’re already on, fast enough that it reads as one sustained, living sound instead of a wobble between two pitches.

Two variables control everything: rate, how fast the pitch oscillates (measured in cycles per second, or Hz), and depth, how far you push the pitch away from center.

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The Creativity Gap Is Structural, Not Personal

In 1943, Abraham Maslow published his hierarchy of needs. Near the top sat self-actualization: the human drive to create, contribute, and solve at the highest level of one’s capacity. Eighty years later, most organizations still treat creativity as a bonus trait rather than a core operating condition. The result is a staggering amount of wasted potential sitting inside teams that could be producing far more than they do.

This is not a motivation problem. People want to contribute meaningful work. Survey after survey confirms it. The problem is structural. Workplaces are built for execution and compliance, not for the kind of divergent thinking that produces original ideas. Meetings reward consensus. Hierarchies reward caution. Deadlines reward speed over depth. Inside these conditions, creativity doesn’t thrive. It retreats.

What organizations rarely grasp is that creativity is not a trait distributed unevenly across a workforce. It is a behavior that responds to environment. The same person who stares blankly in a conventional brainstorm will generate sharp, original ideas in a session structured to produce them. The environment determines the output. Change the environment and you change what your team is capable of.

The research on this is consistent. Companies that deliberately build creative cultures outperform peers on revenue growth, employee retention, and product innovation. The gap between high-creativity and low-creativity organizations is not marginal. It compounds over time. The companies at the bottom of that gap rarely trace it back to the structural conditions they built. They blame talent.

This article lays out a practical system for changing those conditions. Not a theory. Not a workshop you run once and forget. A repeatable set of practices your team can install and maintain, with a step-by-step 90-day roadmap for doing it.

The core argument is simple: creativity doesn’t show up when you wait for it. It shows up when you build the right conditions and protect them. Organizations that do this deliberately produce more ideas, act on more of them, and hold on to the people who generate them.

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What the Research Shows

The business case for workplace creativity is not anecdotal. Decades of organizational research point to the same conclusion: environments that support creative thinking produce measurably better outcomes across every major business metric.

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Gear Deep Dive

You walk into a Guitar Center. On the wall: a new American Professional II Stratocaster at $1,599. Next to it, a Gibson Les Paul Standard at $2,799. You ask about the Custom Shop. The rep smiles. “Depends what you want,” he says. “Usually starts around $4,000. Lead time is about 12 to 18 months.”

You go home and start Googling. Somewhere around page three, you find a forum thread from a working guitarist who paid $3,200 for something called a Kauer Daylighter. He says it’s the best guitar he’s ever owned. The fret work was perfect out of the box. The setup didn’t need touching. It arrived in 10 weeks. He’s gigged it 200 nights since.

Most players skim past that and go back to looking at Gibsons. That’s a mistake.

Gibson and Fender have raised prices every year since 2022. Their entry-level lines, Squier and Epiphone, now run $500 to $1,500. Their production American instruments sit at $1,500 to $2,800. Custom Shop work starts at $4,000 and goes up from there. And at every tier, the complaint you hear most is the same: quality control is all over the map. Two Les Paul Standards off the same rack, different neck feels, different fret work, different weight. You’re rolling dice at $2,800.

Meanwhile, a dozen small builders across the country are making 300 to 750 guitars a year, setting them up by hand, and shipping them in 8 to 14 weeks. Players who own them say the same thing. The guitar was right when it arrived. Not pretty good. Right.

This article is about who those builders are, what you get from them, and why more players are choosing them over the Big Two.

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The Big Two Have a Problem

The pandemic created a buying surge that guitar companies chased hard. Fender overproduced so aggressively in 2022 that they ended up holding $100 million in canceled orders. Costs went up globally: materials, shipping, labor. The price increases hit every tier and never came back down.

The result is a market where “affordable” costs $1,000 and “premium production” costs $2,800. Quality control on production instruments has not improved proportionally. Players and techs who work on these guitars regularly describe Gibson’s QC as inconsistent at best. Fender is more stable but still a production line: no one at the factory is losing sleep over your specific guitar.

When you spend $3,000 on a guitar and need to pay a tech $150 to set it up properly, the value proposition starts to look different.

What Boutique Builders Are Actually Doing

Suhr (Napa, CA): John Suhr built guitars for Fender’s Custom Shop before going independent in 1997. Players consistently report that every Suhr they’ve picked up was set up correctly out of the box, fret work done to a standard that production Fenders do not hit. Modern Classics run $2,800 to $4,200.

Tom Anderson Guitarworks (Newbury Park, CA): Anderson makes around 750 guitars a year and has since 1984. No bankruptcy, no hype cycle. Players who’ve played multiple Andersons use one word: great. Not great for the price. Just great. Classics run $3,200 to $4,500.

Kauer Guitars (Sacramento, CA): Doug Kauer started in 2007. His artist roster includes Scott Holiday of Rival Sons, Brad Whitford of Aerosmith, and Tom Dumont of No Doubt. His instruments take Fender shapes and add something stranger: Guyatone weirdness, Teisco character, a feel you don’t get from a production guitar. Daylighters and Starliners run $2,500 to $3,800.

Collings Guitars (Austin, TX): Built its name on acoustics, makes electrics that players consistently rank above comparable Gibsons on playability and build. The 290 and I-35 get described as “a few steps beyond PRS.” Semi-hollows now run $7,000 to $8,000, so this is not the budget end of boutique. But at that price, players say it beats a Gibson ES-335 from the Custom Shop.

Grosh Guitars (Broomfield, CO): Don Grosh builds Strat and Tele styles with out-of-the-box setups that players routinely describe as the best they’ve received on any new guitar. Price range: $3,000 to $4,500.

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Let’s get this out of the way: you are probably charging too little.

Not because you lack confidence. Not because you’re bad at teaching. But because almost every guitar teacher starts out the same way, picking a number that feels “fair,” that won’t scare anyone off, that sits just below what they think they’re worth. They call it being humble. It’s actually just fear with a price tag on it.

Here’s what that costs you: burnout, resentment, and a schedule packed with students you’re not fully committed to because you can’t afford to say no to anyone.

So let’s fix it.

Start with the market, not your feelings

Before you set a rate, know what the market looks like in your area. Spend 30 minutes searching for guitar teachers nearby on Google, Lessonface, TakeLessons, local Facebook groups. What are they charging? What’s the low end? What’s the high end?

Most markets have a clear spread. The data below shows average private lesson rates in major US cities. Use it as a benchmark, not a ceiling.

In cities like Los Angeles and New York, expect rates of $70–$100+ per hour. Mid-size markets generally run $50–$75. Smaller towns or rural areas typically land between $30–$50. Find your real range, not the one in your head.

The bottom of a market is a race you can't win. There will always be someone willing to charge less. Don't compete on price.

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Most guitarists plateau around the same place. They can play the things they already know, fast, but the moment they try something new at speed, it falls apart. Nine times out of ten, the culprit is …

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Musicians spend the majority of their time failing. Practicing a phrase means playing it wrong, over and over, until your hands stop making the mistake they’ve been making for years. There’s no illusion of progress. The metronome doesn’t lie. Your ears don’t lie. If it’s wrong, you know immediately.

And yet, the musicians who last are some of the most resilient people you’ll meet. Not because they’re wired differently, but because the instrument teaches you something that most self-help books never get around to: a positive mindset isn’t optimism. It’s a process you follow when things aren’t working.

Think about what a musician actually signs up for. Years, sometimes decades, of playing something imperfectly before it sounds any good. The first year of guitar is mostly frustrating. The calluses hurt. The chords buzz. Your brain can hear exactly what it should sound like, and your hands can’t get there. Most people quit in month three. The ones who don’t keep showing up anyway, not because every session is rewarding, but because they’ve made a quiet agreement with themselves: progress comes from the work, not from feeling ready to do it.

That agreement, repeated over years, builds something most people are still searching for: a reliable way to stay positive when results aren’t coming yet. Musicians don’t call it a mindset. They call it their practice routine. But the mental habits underneath it are exactly what coaches, therapists, and performance researchers point to when they talk about resilience, self-regulation, and long-term growth.

This issue breaks down what that process looks like, pulled from how musicians think, practice, and recover, and how you can use it whether you’re working on your playing or anything else in your life.

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GEAR & CULTURE ·

Picture the scene. A YouTube comment section, circa any year since YouTube existed. Someone posts a demo of a $200 guitar. Within seconds, like moths to a fluorescent tube, they arrive. “Tone is in the fingers,” types one commenter, smug as a cat that has just knocked a mug off a table. “Try doing that on a $79 Walmart starter pack,” fires back another, presumably surrounded by vintage Dumbles and first-year Bursts. And so it begins again: the argument that has outlasted forum platforms, outlasted hair metal, and will likely outlast Western civilization itself.

This is not a frivolous debate. Or rather, it is, intensely and magnificently frivolous, but underneath the posturing and the gaslighting, there is a genuinely interesting question about what makes a guitar player sound like themselves, what gear actually does, and why musicians have such catastrophically complicated feelings about both.

Let’s get into it. Let’s really get into it.

Where the phrase comes from (and how it got weaponized)

No one knows exactly who said “tone is in the fingers” first, which is appropriate, because the phrase has the energy of a saying that evolved rather than was invented. It was distilled from decades of jazz musicians watching each other swap instruments and still sound like themselves. The sentiment is ancient. The argument is modern.

In its purest form, the idea is intuitive and even beautiful: two players, same guitar, same amp, same room, and they sound different. Immediately. Unmistakably. Eric Clapton doesn’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan even when playing the same Stratocaster. John Mayer sounds like John Mayer whether he’s on a $10,000 vintage guitar or a demo model he picked up at a trade show. The human being, somehow, is stamped into the sound.

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What stands out most about Andrea is not just technical ability, but the atmosphere he creates through the instrument. There’s a calm intelligence behind the phrasing. Every note feels considered rather than forced. That kind of maturity is rare because it requires patience, listening, and deep musical awareness.

As guitarists, many of us spend years chasing complexity before realizing the real challenge is clarity. Andrea’s style reflects that shift. The ability to say more with less. The confidence to let melodies breathe. The understanding that tone and feel can communicate more than endless runs ever will.

What also makes his work compelling is how naturally it blends emotion with discipline. You can hear the study, the dedication, and the refinement behind the scenes, but none of it feels mechanical. It feels human. Honest. Intentional.

That balance is something creatives in every field can learn from.

Not everything powerful needs to be loud.
Not every great player needs to dominate the room.
Sometimes mastery sounds calm.

And in many ways, that level of control is harder to achieve than chaos ever will be.

But beyond the signature effect, Frampton’s playing is rooted in restraint and intention. His phrasing feels conversational, built on strong melodic ideas rather than speed or excess. You hear blues influence in his bends, pop sensibility in his hooks, and a touch of prog in his structure all balanced with precision and feel. It’s not about showing off. It’s about saying something.

What makes this even more powerful is the longevity. Through health setbacks and evolving eras of music, Frampton continues to play with urgency and purpose. There’s no coasting on legacy. Every note still carries weight.

That’s the real takeaway: tone isn’t gear. It’s touch. It’s experience. It’s honesty. And Frampton proves that when those elements are locked in, your sound doesn’t age, it just evolves.