Head is out for repair; spotlighting one of my favorite guitar players

Yesterday was a pretty miserable day for me. Not to mention the weather was disgusting, I had to go get my broken Line 6 head at the house to bring it somewhere for repair. I searched up and down the internet to, almsot fortuitously, run into a music repair shop right on campus at Berklee College of Music. If there were any group of people I'd trust 100% with fixing my equipment, it would be Berklee alumni. The guy said it could end up costing close to $200, but that was before he even looked at the amp and he said that only happens if the main function source of the amp is broken, and mine is most likely just a case of overheating. The first time it broke, Line 6 tried to charge me $120 to replace the part, but I argued that off. It'll be about 2 weeks before I hear from them again. Their website can be found at this link. Just crossing my fingers at this point, hoping it won't be too long, hard or expensive to fix the head.

Now I'd like to spotlight one of my favorite guitar players. His name is Andy McKee, and anyone who surfs Youtube even occasionally must have come across one of his videos. He is a classical acoustic guitarist, and he plays only with his fingers. After you watch the below video, you'll understand why he doesn't use, or need, a guitar pick.

His finger movements are uncanny, especially with his thumb. The way he plays, he sounds like 4 or 5 guitars at once. That's an ingenious cover of Toto's "Africa," which made me actually like what I previously thought was just another piece of 1980s cheese. This video has nearly 3 million hits on Youtube, which at its time was a tremendous number. His most-viewed video, "Drifting" has over 7.5 million hits, putting it in the top 50 most-viewed music videos. He has 5 videos ranked in the top 20 for all-time ratings for music videos, all with at least 4,526 ratings.

I'm sure he's translated his monumental success on Youtube into something bigger in terms of sales, but I really feel he's missing a huge marketing opportunity. He doesn't really need a band, because his guitar work and percussion styles work well on their own musically, but lyrics and vocals is something he could definitely add. I would keep them to a minimum, as to not take much away from the guitar, but if he could put together a song with a nice hook he could experience even bigger success.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll be posting later today with another video!