Song Breakdown

Sweet Child o’ Mine: One Riff, Five Guitar Skills You Can Actually Steal

I know a handful of guitarists who all point to the same four notes as the reason they picked up the instrument. Ask around and you’ll hear a version of the same story: an older sibling’s tape deck, MTV playing in the background at a friend’s house, and then those opening notes stop the room. Nobody explains it. It just works, every time, on almost everyone.

What’s wild is how it happened. Slash wasn’t writing a hit. He was warming up, goofing around, pulling faces at his drummer while his fingers ran through what he later called a guitar exercise. Within an hour, the rest of the band had turned it into a song. Nobody in that room thought they were making the band’s only number-one single.

This issue breaks the song down piece by piece: the tuning trick and the theory hiding underneath the riff, the chart it was up against the week the single dropped, and open chord shapes you can put your hands on today.

Learning objectives

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

• Explain why the record is tuned a half step down and what that changes about the riff

• Name the chord progression under the riff and how the chorus borrows a chord from a different key

• Understand how Slash’s lead lines and Izzy Stradlin’s rhythm parts split the guitar work

• Place the song in its chart moment: what it was up against the week the single came out

• Play the four open chord shapes that make up the harmonic skeleton of the riff

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Buying Guide · Gear

Every Pedal Purchase Comes Down to One Box or Three, Here’s What Each Actually Costs You

Two browser tabs open, one guitar in your lap. In the first tab: a modeler promising three hundred amps and effects behind three footswitches, one checkout, one box on your board. In the second: an overdrive, a chorus, and a delay, three separate product pages, three separate boxes, adding up to more money than the modeler by itself. You’ve been sitting on this decision for twenty minutes, and every forum thread you’ve read gives you a different, equally confident answer.

So I ran the actual numbers. One multi-effects pedal against a matching three-pedal board, drive, modulation, and delay or reverb, at three real price points: budget, mid, and premium. Every price and spec below is current and pulled straight from the manufacturer or a major retailer, not a guess.

Quick disclosure before we get into it: I think gear matters less than most of the industry wants you to believe. Technique, timing, and touch move the needle more than what’s bolted to your board. But the money is still real money, so here’s how to spend it well.

What this guide covers

By the end, you’ll know:

• The real price and tone-option gap between one multi-effects pedal and a three-pedal board, at three budgets

• Why the math tips harder toward the multi-effects unit the more money you spend

• What failure risk, rig complexity, and resale value cost you that the price tag never shows

• Which one to buy this week, based on what you can actually hear, not what’s supposed to be better

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“Now, I’m talking directly to musicians and songwriters here, because let’s be honest, you’re always hunting for ideas. New angles. Something real to pull from. And I genuinely believe this can help. Instead of waiting around for inspiration like it’s running late, you create the conditions for it to show up.

These aren’t generic journaling questions. Every one starts with your hands actually on the guitar, a chord you already know, a riff you play without thinking, a mistake from today’s practice session. I’ll drop a new one whenever I’ve got one worth your time, not on a schedule I haven’t built yet.”

Warm-Up

1. Play whatever chord your hand lands on first. One sentence: what does it remind you of?

2. What song have you been putting off learning? Why?

3. If today were a key, what would it be, major, minor, somewhere in between? Say why.

4. Think of a lyric you’ve heard a hundred times without really hearing it. Write it down. Why’d it hit different this time?

Turn Technique Into an Idea

5. Grab a progression you already know and swap one chord. What feeling walks in that wasn’t there before?

6. Play the saddest chord you’ve got. What’s the first line of the song it wants to open?

7. Take a riff you can play half-asleep. If it were a sentence instead of notes, what would it say?

8. Mute the strings, play just the rhythm. What does that alone bring to mind?

9. Noodle around in a key you never touch. What do you want to write about while you’re there?

Memory Prompts

10. What was the first song you learned start to finish? Write about learning it, not the song itself.

11. Pick a place that’s tied to a specific song in your head. What happened there?

12. Who taught you your first chord? Write them a line you’d actually send.

Practice Reflection

13. What did your hands pick up this week that your brain hasn’t caught up to?

14. Where’d you get stuck today? Write it as a character, not a mistake.

15. What’d you play today that you wouldn’t have tried a year ago?

When You’re Stuck (Quick Hits)

16. Set a timer for two minutes. Play anything. One line: what did you just hear yourself do?

17. Record yourself playing badly, on purpose. What do you notice?

18. Finish this ten different ways: “The song I haven’t written yet is about...”

Trend Report

Every Wearable at a Show Is Doing Something to You, Whether You Notice or Not

The house lights drop. Sixty thousand wristbands, handed out for free at the door, flash red in perfect unison before a single note plays. Nobody in the crowd coordinated it. A tour operator sitting at a laptop backstage did, sending one infrared signal to every wrist in the building at once. Twenty feet away, a fan taps that same wristband against a bar reader and walks off with a beer, no wallet, no phone unlocked, no line. Two rows up, a woman leans into the bass as it hits her chest through a $1,200 vest she didn’t buy, the venue lent it to her for free because she can’t hear the mix any other way and wanted to feel it instead. None of them are talking to each other about any of this. None of them have to. The show is already wired into what they’re wearing.

Ten years ago, “wearable tech at a concert” meant a light-up wristband handed out as a gimmick. In 2026 it’s five separate categories of hardware doing five different jobs: lighting the crowd, paying for your drinks, protecting your hearing, letting you feel the bass through your chest, and captioning the show in real time. Most of it you never notice unless you know what to look for, or what it’s quietly collecting about you while you’re having a good time.

I went through five wearables that are actually deployed at real venues and festivals right now, not concept videos or trade-show demos. What each one costs, who’s using it, and which ones are worth your own money versus the ones that only make sense for a venue to buy in bulk.

What this report covers

By the end, you’ll know:

• The real difference between LED wristbands that light up a crowd and RFID wristbands that pay for your drinks

• Why a single tour can run three different wearable systems at the same show

• Which hearing protection actually preserves the mix instead of just muffling it

• Where haptic and captioning tech is turning an accessibility tool into something every fan wants

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Song Breakdown

Only three chords hold this song together, and that’s exactly why it’s still one of the best songs a beginner can learn and one of the hardest to play well. Anyone can memorize E, A, and B7 in an afternoon. Almost nobody nails the feel on the first hundred tries, because the feel isn’t in the chords. It’s in a muted right hand doing an impression of a freight train, recorded live in a room full of inmates who had every reason not to clap.

That’s the version most people know: Johnny Cash, backed by the Tennessee Three plus Carl Perkins on rhythm guitar, recorded January 13, 1968, at Folsom State Prison in California. The song itself is older, Cash first cut it in 1955 for Sun Records, but the live take from behind those walls is the one that made it a No. 1 country single and a piece of American recording history.

This issue breaks the song down piece by piece: the technique that makes it chug like a train, the chart it was up against the week it came out, and a practice-ready chord chart so you can put your hands on it today.

Learning objectives

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

• Explain the palm-muted “boom-chicka-boom” technique Luther Perkins used to build Cash’s signature train sound

• Play the alternating bass note pattern that gives the rhythm its forward motion

• Understand the difference between Perkins’ lead part and Carl Perkins’ rhythm part on the Folsom recording

• Place the song in its chart moment: what it was up against on the Hot 100 the week it was released

• Play the E, A, B7, and E7 chord shapes and the turnaround from the tab below

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Technique. Theory. Feel. And the money behind it.

One T-Shirt Beats 3,750 Streams: The Real Economics of Gigging on the Road

What gigs actually pay, what touring actually costs, and the budget, tax, and packing system that keeps you solvent between shows.

Nobody budgets for the van. Players budget for the guitar, the amp, maybe a new pedal. Then the first real tour happens and the math shows up uninvited: gas, hotel rooms, a flat tire outside Amarillo, a bar that pays partly in wristbands instead of cash.

Touring feels like the reward for taking this seriously. The money behind it is less romantic and more knowable than most players assume. Here’s what a gig actually pays, what a tour actually costs, and the numbers worth knowing before you load the van.

What a Gig Actually Pays

$100 is the informal floor. Most working musicians won’t take a gig for less than that, regardless of market, because below it the math against gas, gear wear, and a wasted night stops working.

Typical pay by gig type

• Open mic or songwriter round: $0 to $50, often just stage time or a tip jar

• Bar or restaurant, solo or duo: $100 to $300 flat, plus tips

• Full band, bar or club: $200 to $600, split among the band

• Private, corporate, or wedding: $500 to $2,000 or more

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More than ten years ago, I started using a simple phrase: #GETUPGETOUT.

There wasn’t some complicated philosophy behind it. The idea was actually pretty simple. Get ou…

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This Week’s Focus

Inversions: The Same Four Chords, Twelve Different Voicings

Play C, then Am, then F, then G, all in the position you learned them in year one, and you’ll hear the problem before you can name it. The chords are correct. The progression is also flat. Your hand jumps around the neck, the bass note lands somewhere different every single time with no logic connecting one to the next, and after sixteen bars the ear checks out even though nothing was played wrong.

Every major or minor triad has exactly three positions: root in the bass, the third in the bass, or the fifth in the bass. Same three notes, different note on bottom. Guitarists call the second two “inversions,” and they’re written as slash chords: C/E means play a C chord with E as the lowest note. Nothing about the chord changes. What changes is which note anchors it, and that single choice is where most of the variety in a progression actually lives. Take a plain four-chord progression like C-Am-F-G. Each chord has three positions. That’s twelve distinct voicings sitting inside a progression most players only ever play one way.

This issue covers the three positions of one chord, how to read and write slash-chord notation, a documented real-song example built entirely on inversions, ten practical ways to use them, and how Jimmy Page, John Mayer, and Chet Atkins each lean on the same idea differently.

Learning objectives

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

• Name and locate the three positions, root, first inversion, second inversion, of any major or minor triad

• Read and write slash-chord notation (C/E, G/B, D/F#) without stopping to think

• Build a moving bass line under a progression using inversions instead of new chords

• Explain how the “Stairway to Heaven” intro uses inversions to create its descending bass line

• Apply at least 10 practical uses of inversions to progressions you already play

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Slash-chord notation just describes that bottom note. The letter before the slash is the chord. The letter after the slash is what's in the bass. C/E is a C major chord with E on bottom, which is first inversion by definition, since the third of a C chord is E. C/G is second inversion, the fifth in the bass. Second inversion tends to sound the least settled of the three, since a fifth in the bass is a shakier foundation than a root or a third, so most players save it for passing motion rather than parking on it.

📚 Related skill - Slash chords are how session players chart this stuff live. If you've never read a Nashville Number chart, The Nashville Number System covers the exact shorthand a player would use to write "G/B" fast enough to play it cold.

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Stand in front of a room enough times with a guitar in your hands, and something shifts that has nothing to do with music. You start walking into other rooms differently too.

I still remember the first recital where I forgot a passage halfway through “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” My hands were sweating before I even sat down. I got two lines in, blanked, and had about a second and a half to decide: stop and apologize, or keep moving and let the next note cover for the one that didn’t happen. I kept moving. Nobody in the audience clocked it.

That second and a half taught me more than the six months of practice that came before it. Years later, sitting across from a lender explaining why a rehab budget had gone sideways, I felt the same spike in my chest. Same racing pulse, same dry mouth. And the same instinct kicked in: don’t freeze, don’t apologize your way into looking unprepared, just keep moving and let the next sentence cover for the one that didn’t land clean.

That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not a personality trait some people are born with. There’s a specific mechanism behind it, researchers have measured it directly in musicians, and it explains why people who play an instrument tend to walk into high-pressure work situations with a steadiness that looks like natural confidence but was actually built one rehearsal at a time.

By the end of this issue, you’ll have

• The psychological mechanism that explains why stage confidence shows up in boardrooms and job interviews

• What a nationwide survey of working musicians found about the specific skills that transferred to their non-music careers

• Why performance anxiety fades with reps, backed by longitudinal research on musicians

• Three ways to build work confidence the same way you build confidence on an instrument

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Gear & Culture

Why Vintage Guitars Still Dominate Blues Performance

In 2019, one of B.B. King’s Lucille guitars sold at auction for $280,000, nearly three times its $80,000 to $100,000 estimate. A well-preserved 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, the model blues and blues-rock players call “the Burst,” lists for as much as $450,000 today. A brand new Gibson Custom Shop reissue of that same 1959 Les Paul, built to the same specs with the same materials, runs about $6,500. That’s roughly 1 to 3 percent of the original’s price. Yet touring blues players keep chasing the old ones, not the new ones. Here’s why the decades-old wood, cracked lacquer, and beat-up hardware still run the genre.

WHAT THIS ISSUE COVERS

By the end, you’ll know:

• The specific guitars, and their real histories, behind B.B. King, SRV, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Clapton

• Why most of these guitars weren’t rare or expensive when the players bought them

• What actually happens to wood and lacquer over 60 years, and where the science is genuinely settled versus still debated

• The real price gap between original vintage instruments and today’s reissues, with verified numbers

• What you can actually do to get closer to that sound without the six-figure guitar

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Technique. Theory. Feel.

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If someone had asked me twenty years ago whether I would one day return to playing the guitar with more passion than ever before, I probably would have laughed. At that …

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Jubu Smith: The Soulful Virtuoso Bridging Generations

Jubu Smith, a name that resonates deeply within the realms of soul, R&B, gospel, and jazz, is one of the most versatile and accomplished guitarists of our time. His journey as a musician is a testament to the power of passion, persistence, and the ability to transcend genres while staying true to one’s roots. For those familiar with his work, Jubu is not just a guitarist; he is a storyteller whose instrument of choice conveys emotions as vividly as any vocal performance. For those new to his music, a dive into his career is akin to discovering a hidden gem in the vast landscape of contemporary music.

Early Life and Influences

Jubu Smith, born John “Jubu” Smith, hails from Oakland, California, a city known for its rich musical heritage and cultural diversity. Growing up in the vibrant environment of the Bay Area, Jubu was exposed to a wide array of musical influences from an early age. His father, who was also a musician, played a significant role in nurturing Jubu's love for music. The sounds of gospel, jazz, and soul that permeated his household would later become the foundation of his musical identity.

Jubu's journey with the guitar began at a young age. He was drawn to the instrument not just for its sound, but for its expressive potential. Influenced by guitar legends like Jimi Hendrix, George Benson, and Wes Montgomery, Jubu sought to combine the raw energy of rock with the smooth, intricate melodies of jazz and the deep emotionality of gospel music. This fusion of styles would come to define his approach to guitar playing, making him a unique figure in the music world.

Career Beginnings and Breakthrough

Jubu’s professional career took off when he joined the R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné! in the early 1990s. As the lead guitarist, his contributions were instrumental in shaping the band's signature sound. Hits like “Anniversary” and “Feels Good” showcased his ability to blend soulful melodies with rhythmic precision, earning him recognition as one of the top guitarists in the industry. His work with Tony! Toni! Toné! not only highlighted his technical prowess but also his ability to adapt to different musical contexts, a skill that would serve him well throughout his career.

After his success with Tony! Toni! Toné!, Jubu became a sought-after session musician and touring guitarist. His reputation for delivering electrifying performances and his ability to seamlessly transition between genres led to collaborations with some of the biggest names in music. From R&B legends like Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross to pop icons such as Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys, Jubu's guitar work has graced the stages and studios of countless artists. His versatility and deep understanding of music have made him an invaluable asset to every project he’s been a part of.

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TECHNIQUE. THEORY. FEEL

Every guitarist has a strong hand and a weak hand, and inside that weak hand, two fingers doing most of the work while the other two ride along. Your index and middle finger show up. Your ring finger and pinky lag half a beat behind, buzz on the fret, or refuse to move without dragging a neighbor with them.

I spent six months on this exact problem when I was learning scales on an acoustic, then a classical guitar. Nylon and steel strings both fight back in their own way, and finger independence work is where that fight shows up first. My fingertips hadn’t built calluses yet, so every session came with real discomfort, and my ring and pinky fingers barely moved on their own; they wanted to drag the rest of the hand with them. I stretched through it daily, kept the same drills on repeat, and for a long stretch of those six months I couldn’t tell if anything was changing. It wasn’t dramatic. There was no single day where it clicked. The calluses built up, the stretch got less painful, and somewhere around month five or six my pinky started acting like its own finger instead of a passenger. That timeline is exactly why the numbers below matter: if you don’t know what “normal” progress looks like, six months of slow, boring drilling feels like failure. It isn’t.

That gap is finger independence, and it does not close by playing more songs. It closes with isolated drills, done daily, in small doses, tracked against a metronome. This issue breaks down the exercises, the numbers that tell you it is working, and how three well-documented players built their own independence from scratch.

Learning objectives

Learning objectives

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

• Explain what finger independence is and why it fails to improve on its own through normal playing

• Run the spider walk and chromatic 1-2-3-4 drills with correct hand position

• Use the 5 BPM rule to track real progress instead of guessing at it

• Build a 6-week daily practice plan with specific tempo and time targets

• Turn musical phrases into independence drills, so the work doubles as repertoire

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I looked at accomplished guitarists, successful entrepreneurs, confident executives, and thought they possessed something I didn’t. They seemed fearless. Comfortable…

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Song Breakdown

I heard this song for the first time in my parents’ living room, off a record that never sat on the shelf for long. My dad would drop the needle, the vinyl would crackle, and that 12-string would chime in before anyone said a word. I was just a kid. I didn’t know what a capo was. I didn’t know two guitarists had spent hours working out that ending solo note by note. I just knew the room went quiet every time it played, and something about it stuck with me.

Decades later, I still get that same small chill on the opening notes. That reaction is not an accident. It is the result of a capo position, a chord progression built on a descending bass line, and two guitarists who refused to fake the hardest part.

This issue breaks the song down piece by piece: the techniques that make it work, the chart it was fighting for the top spot on the week it dropped, and a practice-ready tab so you can put your hands on it today.

Learning objectives

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

• Explain why the song is capoed at the 7th fret and what that does to the sound

• Name the chord progression and the descending bass line that drives it

• Understand how Don Felder and Joe Walsh split the guitar parts, live and in the studio

• Place the song in its chart moment: what it was up against the week it was released

• Play the intro chord shapes and a fingerstyle picking pattern from the tab below

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Ten years ago, “folk influence on indie music” meant a handful of bearded guys with banjos getting played on NPR. That framing is dead. Zach Bryan has 26.1 million monthly Spotify listeners and 18.7 billion total streams, more than most pop stars. Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” just earned a SoundExchange Hall of Fame award for being one of the most streamed tracks in that organization’s 20-plus year history. Newport Folk Festival sold out in under a minute in 2025, before a single artist was announced. This isn’t a niche influence anymore. Folk and Americana are the load-bearing wall of a huge chunk of what gets called “indie” today.

Here’s what actually changed, who’s driving it, and the numbers behind it.

The Storytelling Backbone Never Left

Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez built folk’s reputation on narrative songwriting: specific people, specific places, real stakes. That tradition runs straight through indie music’s most acclaimed records. Sufjan Stevens built “Illinois” and “Carrie & Lowell” out of the same instinct: turn a place, a death, a memory into a song that means something specific instead of vague. Phoebe Bridgers does the same thing with mental health and grief on “Punisher,” which picked up four Grammy nominations in 2021. She’s now at 11.5 million monthly Spotify listeners, more than double what she had at the time of that album’s release.

The Instrumentation Never Left Either

Acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, upright bass: these built folk and Americana’s sound, and indie bands kept using them because they still work. Fleet Foxes’ 2008 self-titled debut turned vocal harmony and acoustic texture into a genre-defining sound. The band sits at 3.5 million monthly Spotify listeners today, nearly two decades later, which tells you the record still gets discovered, not just remembered. Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” recorded alone in a Wisconsin cabin in 2006, did the same thing with sparseness instead of density. Bon Iver now pulls just under 16 million monthly listeners, more than four times Fleet Foxes’ number, partly because Justin Vernon kept evolving the sound (his 2025 album “SABLE, fABLE” moved toward a more radiant, pop-adjacent register without dropping the folk bones).

Streaming Numbers: Who’s Actually Pulling Weight Right Now

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Gear Guide

Six years ago, a Bluetooth guitar meant a plastic toy with light-up frets and a tinny app. In 2026 the category split into two real products: guitars with built-in speakers and effects you run from your phone, and guitars that output real MIDI, meaning they can play a synth patch, a string section, or a drum kit from the exact neck you already know. Those solve different problems. Most gear coverage still lumps them together and calls the whole pile “smart guitars.”

I went through six 2026 releases that shipped or are shipping this year: a $339 stringless practice pad, a $999 carbon-fiber acoustic with a touchscreen, and a $2,199 headless guitar built to drive hardware synths from the stage. Below is what each one actually does, what it costs, and where the built-in tech earns its price versus where you’re paying for an app that adds nothing to your playing.

What this guide covers

By the end, you’ll know:

• The real difference between a Bluetooth-speaker guitar and a true MIDI guitar

• Six 2026 releases, with verified prices and specs, not marketing copy

• Which one fits a total beginner, which fits a gigging player, and which is overkill for both

• Where the useful tech ends and the gimmick starts

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Three of these six are audio-and-app guitars: built-in speaker, onboard effects, maybe a screen. Fun, and in two cases genuinely useful. But if there's a MIDI jack at all, it's decorative. The other three actually speak MIDI and can drive outboard gear or a DAW. That distinction should decide your purchase more than any spec sheet does.

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Your System for July

You’re not getting a list of tips this month. You’re getting a system: four weeks of practice that build on each other, a way to check if it’s actually working, a place to point your creativity, and one idea about how this month on the guitar connects to the rest of your life.

Barre chords are the wall most self-taught players hit and never get past. Open chords can be learned off a chart in an afternoon. Barre chords don’t work that way. They expose every weak habit in your fretting hand at once: where your thumb sits, how flat your finger is, how much of the work your arm is quietly doing instead of your hand. That’s why so many players get three or four open chords under their fingers, hit the barre wall, and stall out for months without knowing why.

This month is built to take that wall down in order. Week one finds exactly where the barre is failing. Week two builds the shape with no time pressure at all. Week three is where it gets uncomfortable, because moving between shapes is harder than holding one still, and most players quit right there. Week four proves it on a real song. Skip a week and the next one gets harder than it needed to be, so don’t.

What’s in this Blueprint

1. The Practice Plan: four weeks, each with a specific job, not just “practice barre chords more.”

2. The Progress Check: four tests that tell you the truth about where you stand, no guessing.

3. The Creative Assignment: what to build with this technique once you’ve got it.

4. The Bigger Lesson: what barre chords teach you that has nothing to do with guitar.

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