Our featured artist this month is Kane Yoshida. He has been a student with Curtis Kamiya Music for two years. He comes to us for vocal lessons, guitar lessons, and career and performance coaching.

Kane's music is a blend of R&B and island reggae. He's a multi-talented performer who can sing, rap, and play the guitar.

This young musician has already accomplished quite a bit. He has appeared on TV. He has high quality recordings of his music, some of it original, and some of it new interpretations of classic songs. Recently he has landed a steady gig at Hank's Cafe, downtown on Nuuanu Ave, just a block from the Curtis Kamiya Studio.

His next show at Hank's will be on New Year's Eve, and you can find him there on Monday's in January.

Here are some places where you can check out Kane's music.

http://www.myspace.com/kaneyoshida

http://kaneyoshida.com/

http://www.reverbnation.com/Kaneyoshida

I hope to be highlighting several students in the coming months!

I saw a video of Melissa Etheridge doing this song when I was very young and it made a huge impression on me. She walked out there on stage with one guitar and one voice and she rocked the house! As I encountered this recently with the eyes of a music instructor, several things were very clear to me about her performance and I hope you can learn something from what she does.

1. She makes great use of dynamics. This note should sound familiar to every one of my students. Your song should utilize both soft and loud, and the song should go somewhere. We should take the listener on a journey. Melissa Etheridge delivers the verses in a smoldering whisper and the choruses in a full gallop. Then she takes a full two minutes to work up to a last chorus that blows the roof off. And she does this with three chords.
2. She makes a great use of a palm mute to add percussion to the guitar part. She has no drummer or bassist, so she needs to generate as much rhythmic interest as she can. She's constantly working her right hand palm mute to add a driving snare rhythm to her song.
3. Melissa Etheridge fills that full auditorium with every and enthusiasm and charisma. She's all alone, but she puts out enough energy to get the crowd stomping and clapping.

Consider this a master class in vocal and guitar performance. Especially if you're a solo performer, this is the gold standard.

I found Andy Mckee on youtube several years ago and I was totally floored. He’s a true internet phenomenon, in that he was an amazing but unknown guitarist. He put up some videos of him playing, namely a cover of “Africa” and some great originals. And he just bubbled to the top. He is now touring all over the world and I’m thrilled for him. This guy’s got skills.

Any of his videos are worth checking out, but just to highlight his cover of “Everybody Wants To Rule The World” by Tears For Fears. Here are a few things to be looking for that are noteworthy:

• His use of a fan fretted guitar. Supposedly it keeps better intonation along the fretboard.
• He uses his thumb to slap the top of the guitar and the lower strings on 2 and 4 of each measure to add a percussive rhythm.
• He’s using both upstrokes and downstrokes for picking with his right hand
• He’s using an alternate tuning with a dropped D
• Check out his use of harmonics in the melody for the bridge