Fishing Gear For Sale

15mm UV F-Up Fritz £3 

This is a UV version of Dave’s popular 15mm translucent Fritz. Again, very easy to tie with and the strands are well-bonded onto the core. This Fritz is suitable for a range of Blob sizes from 10 to 14: use close touching turns of the material for the size 10, opens turns for the 12, and use it short dressed (start further up the hook shank) on the 14. Available in springwater blue, yellow peril, green glow yellow, cat green, sunburst, bubble gum pink, pimp pink, candy coral, biscuit, flame red, damsel olive and black velvet.

Mini 4mm F-Up Fritz £3 

Dropping right down the size range is this smaller diameter mini 4mm Fritz that comes in a great range of colours: springwater blue, yellow peril, green glow yellow, cat green, sunburst, candy coral, fire orange, flame red, pimp pink, damsel olive and black velvet, and you get almost four metres per pack. Perfect for mini lures, Dabblers, wet flies and for creating thoraxes on nymphs.

Semperfli fine wires £1.99

THESE new wires come in two diameters, a fine wire at 0.1mm and lure wire at 0.2mm. The 0.1mm wire is exceptionally fine and soft, but fairly strong for its diameter and it is perfect for ribs, butts and thoraxes on mini lures, wet flies and nymphs.

It is especially useful for creating secondary ribs on Crunchers and Buzzers. For instance, on a Buzzer, after laying in a body you rib it with your preferred tinsel and then use this lovely fine wire to rib counter-clockwise over the tinsel.

This not only reinforces it but can also give you another colour contrast. Because of its light weight and fine diameter this wire can also be used very successfully on dry flies.

The thicker 0.2mm lure wire is what I would call a medium wire and is great for larger patterns, especially lures, or also when you want to create a thicker, bolder tag, rib or thorax. It can also be used for wire bodies or thoraxes on nymphs,

Buzzers an Crunchers. In the Brassie variant (pictured below) I’ve tied it in close touching turns along the body. The 0.2mm wire has the same properties as the fine wire, being soft and malleable, easy to work with, and good and strong.

You get 20 metres of wire per spool and they come in a huge range of colours: black, hot green, brown, copper, ivory/white, red, chartreuse, deep purple, light gold, baby pink, bright gold, bright silver, hot pink, march brown, sea green, vivid green, bright damsel green and deep sea/opaque blue and ice blue.

There is something for both imitative tying and for lures and attractors that require bolder, brighter colours. All are supplied on spools with a retaining cap on the top.

For more information about hunting and fishing, visit my personal website at https://hunting-tips.net/

How to Exercise Dynamic Control

A huge part of guitar mastery could be the proper utilization of dynamics. Dynamics could add a great deal to your capability to move the listeners, sometimes literally: play something soft and gentle to draw in people in, or play something loud and brash to have people jumping along in excitement.
The essence of developing and playing music should be to ellicit a psychological response through the listener. As a musician and performer this needs to be the first thing in your thoughts when you play before a crowd. You want to be able to go your audience with the music, and dynamics plays a tremendous part in this particular.

• How To Make Guitar Scales Sound Good

I mentioned dynamics before during my post “Adding Depth To Your Playing: Dynamics”. It can be a good exercise to look at and focus on the two videos because post, and imagine whatever they would appear to be if everything was played for the same volume.

Proper using dynamics — choosing which portion of a song to experiment with at which volume — is usually a matter of artistic taste and insight, even so the mechanics of computer falls into the whole world of guitar technique. It requires some practice to be capable of play something at different volumes. The emphasis, however, will lie upon some practice; promoted does not take lots of time to master the mechanics, even so the effect it offers on your music is usually many times greater.
Here are two exercises you could incorporate for your regular practice (or playing) routine that will help you master dynamic control.

Exercise #1: The fade-out

Pick increase your best acoustic guitar, and play something: a song or a part of a song. Start off playing it in the volume you'll usually get involved in it. Now, when you are playing, gradually soften the actual, that you are playing the end of the song that gradually fades out. Make sure that you retain time as you grow softer. It is all to an easy task to change the tempo while you fade out. Resist this temptation. Tap your foot or employ a metronome if you want to.

Make an area to relax your fingers, wrists as much as possible throughout this exercise. Proper control can be a side effect of relaxation.

Keep on fading out, soon you can barely hear the notes. By this point it is best to barely be strumming the strings, the truth is the sound of your respective fingers moving through the frets, or maybe your pick (or fingers) of the picking hand touching the strings must be louder compared to notes actually played.

Can you are doing this?

Exercise #2: Three different volumes

Again, choose a song or portion of a song and act. Start off playing it at normal volume. Do this for a few bars, then participate in it at a soft, brittle volume for few bars. Then participate in it at a LOUD VOLUME for an additional few bars. Rinse and repeat.

Again, make a spot to relax hands, fingers, and wrists. Read my post “Building Finger Speed: Relaxation” in case you are having trouble on this.

As with Exercise #1, make an effort to stay in rhythm, don’t slow or speed up when you play at different volumes.

How To Make Guitar Scales Sound Good

When it comes to improvising using scales many guitarists get into the habit of playing in a linear and predictable fashion. This is mainly because of how we initially learn scales, using sequential patterns on the neck.

A question I often get asked is how to make scale movements sound more musical. In the first lesson on major pentatonic, we learned the importance of using target notes to give our scale movements more purpose and keep them connected to the backing music. But how we approach these target notes is also a key factor in melodic soloing. If you listen closely to some of the best loved solos out there you'll notice that they often mimic vocal dynamics in terms of moving from one note to the next.

The most memorable melodies, whether vocal or instrumental tend to avoid prelonged linear movements through a scale. So how do we escape the trap of simply running through a scale in straight, predictable runs? Once you've learned a pattern, you'll know how to get from one note to the next in the scale's natural sequence. But you'll also know how to skip notes in the sequence.

For example, in this major pentatonic pattern we could start on the 5 on the second string, and instead of moving down to the 3, we could skip the 3 and move to the 2 before targeting the 1. We could of course reverse this movement and skip a note moving UP the scale. Or we could play from 5 to 3, but skip the 2 before landing on 1.

These are two simple examples of how skipping notes in the scale sequence can create more melodically interesting phrases. Now, when fingering these note skips, especially with pentatonic scales we'll often have to use a technique called "rolling". This is where we consecutively play two adjacent strings on the same fret, using the same finger for both. Using just one finger keeps our fingering economical especially when playing at speed.

In the previous example, we'd fret the second string with the flat part or pad of our finger, just below the tip and then "roll" it to a more vertical position so the tip frets the third string below. This technique is quite subtle and takes some practice. But being able to roll will allow you to skip certain notes in a scale seamlessly. The rolling technique is also essential for many arpeggio patterns, especially for sweep picking.

We can create exercises covering the entire pattern that use this roll technique. Such as this one... Once you can play through the entire pattern like this break it down, isolating parts of the sequence as a lead up to your target note. Try also skipping two notes in the scale sequence.

For example... We can then experiment with combining the different sequences with linear movements. You can find more skipped note sequence ideas, with tabs, on the lesson page. We can make linear runs sound more interesting by staggering them.

For example, here I play three notes down from the top... Now I take one step back in the sequence and play another three notes down... Repeat this sequence and you get the following... Simply reverse the sequence to move up the scale. Just like the skipped note sequences, we can break down this full exercise into small phrases that resolve to a target note.

Pedal sequences involve playing one static note and alternating between that static note and a sequence of other notes. It's quite difficult to explain in words, but here I identify the pedal note, or pedal point, marked in red. I then alternate this note between other notes in the scale. Again, the idea is not to play through an entire pattern using these sequences rather isolate small phrases that lead to your target note.

Already we have countless combinations of skipped, staggered and pedal sequences to create melodic phrases. Once you've practiced each type of sequence individually, it's time to practice combining them seamlessly.

Of course, you don't want to completely crowd your solo with drawn out sequences so be sure to also include simpler phrases, that give your solo some breathing space. If you like, you can try out what you've learned in this lesson over my guided jam tracks. Try applying different sequence techniques over other patterns across the neck. There are other ways to bring your scale phrases to life, including techniques such as bending, slides and legato but we'll look at adding those to our repertoire at a later time. For more help with the techniques covered here, including tabs, visit the lesson page. Cheers!