“A good way to work on alternate picking is to choose three or four notes, and work on those.”

Too often, players who are trying to improve their right hand dexterity get hung up by playing too many notes with the left hand.I hear a lot of players running whole scales from the sixth string to the first ,

You have to be able to tap your foot or else none of what you doing you are not gonna have any control of your symptom.

Forget about every other lesson in the book.

And playing them really sloppy. Keeping it very basic-and using only a few notes-and playing slowly with perfect rhythm is a task in itself.

I have alternately been called an Aristocrat and a Democrat. I am neither. I am a Christocrat.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession.

I like having options, alternate lives unlived but always possible.