It doesn't matter if you play blues, rock, classical or jazz, or whether you play electric, acoustic, semi-acoustic or classical, this tip will make you a better player. It will make your playing more accurate, faster (if that's your thing) and much more enjoyable.

It was shown to me by a guitar teacher about 10 years ago and helped my playing immensely; I only wish I'd heard of it earlier. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else, so here goes. It assumes you're playing right-handed, so if you play left-handed obviously switch left and right when you're reading this.

1) Play the following sequence over and over, each time hit the strings harder. Let the notes ring freely, i.e. no muting.
E----------------------------------------
B----------------------------------------
G----------------5-7-------------5-7-----
D--7-7-7-7-7-7-7-----7-7-7-7-7-7---------
A----------------------------------------
E----------------------------------------

2) Still playing at your loudest, just play the the D string, 7th fret over and over.
3) Release the pressure in your left hand until the note starts rattling, then increase it gently until it stops.

Notice how much less effort you need to play the note than you had been using before? How much more relaxed you feel? Now go back to step 1 and play that sequence again, starting quietly and gradually getting louder, but this time only pressing down with your left hand enough for the notes not to rattle.

The hardest part is trying to seperate your left and right hands, and not automatically pressing harder with your fretting hand when you hit the strings harder.

Pressing down too hard with the left hand is a habit most of us pick up the first time we play. Get out of the habit and everything becomes much easier - vibrato is less effort because you're not fighting against so much friction from the frets, bending strings the same, and you can play far quicker and more accurately because your fingers aren't so rooted to the spot.

Enjoy!!

It didn't take long for the vultures to put their tickets to the London concert on ebay. It looks like some people put them up within minutes of receiving the text message confirming they'd won; they obviously had no intention of going and entered purely for the profit. The people selling these are scum, so here's what to do:

Register a new ebay account - use fake name and address details, but you'll need a real email address. If you use a Hotmail or Gmail account they'll ask you for a credit card number, so use a disposable one from your ISP, or on your own domain if you have one. Then go to an auction for live8 tickets and bid silly money. If you happen to win the auction just don't pay - the worst that can happen is that your new account will get banned.

It looks like Ebay only allow you to bid on one item without giving them your credit card details - no problem, just create more accounts and repeat.

It's your call if you bid on the ones that say they'll give anything less than 100% of the money to charity. My opinion is that they're just as bad - why aren't they giving all the money?

I hope anyone profiting from Live8 is thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

**Update 07:30 14 June 2005**
Our first entrant into the live8 tickets hall of shame:

Paul Bullivant, Strood, Kent

who left his full address in his Ebay payment instructions. Any more, let me know.

**Update 08:15 14 June 2005**
Another idea is to bid sensible winning amounts on other items being sold by people selling Live8 tickets. If you win the auction you'll be able to leave them negative feedback (something Ebay sellers are terrified of.)

Oops, looks like someone at BBC online hit the wrong button. This screenshot taken as the verdicts were being read out.

I've been threatening to buy a PVR for the last 6 months, trouble was there was always something new around the corner. I started off planning to get the DigiFusion FVRT150, then moved to the Panasonic TU-CTH100 and then the Inverto IDL-7000T. Finally I found one that seemed to match my requirements - large hard drive, USB connection and the ability to upload custom applications - the Topfield TF5800 PVR.

I hadn't heard of Topfield before, but reading around they seemed to be very popular in Australia and Germany. The Toppy, as the Ozzies affectionatly call them, also has a good reputation for reliability. So I took the plunge, and £300 later I was the owner of the newly released box.

For those thinking looking around for a PVR, here's my opinion of it.

Read more!

Yes, this site has a Google Page Rank of 5. Yes, there is a recent and top referers section on the front page. No, you won't get on it by hitting the page every 6 seconds with a faked http_referer header. The site automatically checks for fake referers and any subsequent hits from that referer are redirected back to themselves. So it's your own bandwidth you'll be using up, not mine.

I've been using this now for about 4 months. If you live anything further than about a mile from your local video shop I highly recommend it. If you're like me, getting the DVDs out wasn't a problem, but taking them back was, so you always end up spending double the original amount on fines.

Renting them by post means you don't have to worry about getting them back on time, nor having to drive miles to return them.

I started off with Movietrak, who were fine for about 2 months, but then they got taken over by DVDS365.com and the service suddenly became appalling - the website was unusably slow, they started taking an extra day between receiving my returned DVD before sending out the new one and didn't bother replying to an email when a DVD was lost in the post.

I'm now using Tesco DVD rental and couldn't be happier. There's a much wider choice, more often than not I get one of my first choices and they send a new one out on the day they receive my return.