I hope you had a great Christmas. It has been a busy time in the run up to the big day for me, with a variety of Christmas gigs.

From a three and a half hour solo acoustic gig, playing nothing but Christmas songs, to playing in the band of a Christmas spectacular show, I played more Christmas music than ever in 2017. It has been great fun playing all the Christmas parties at the Mecure Hotel with the Claire Barker Band throughout December and on New Year's Eve to see in 2018. Claire and I have also played many duo gigs ranging from a sub-zero Sunday morning gig outside, to a festive mulled wine sing-a-long evening. 

I usually stick to my usual December routine of a diary full of gigs in the lead up to Christmas, then not touching a guitar until my New Year's Eve gig. I find that having a break gives my mind a chance to rest and fills me with inspiration when I get back to playing. This year has been no exception and I have already developed many new ideas that can be incorporated into my playing.

The other time of year at which I have a break from playing the guitar is in the Summer. Getting away from the usual constant head full of music is very helpful to my playing, although I wouldn't want to do this more than twice a year!

As December is such a busy month, I had fallen behind with behind the scenes web site updates. Whilst easing myself back into playing, I thought I would apply updates to all my websites and to my horror, I encountered major problems with this site after applying the latest updates.

What should have been a simple task that did not take up too much time resulted in all the videos on this site disappearing! After a few hours of manually recoding behind the scenes, all videos have now returned to full functionality. 

I apologize to any users who were logged in when this disaster struck. The situation made me realise just how many videos have been uploaded. 

So have you made any New Year's resolutions for 2018? If one of your New Year's resolutions is to take your guitar playing to the next level and you are reading this post, you may not realise that this site offers a 24 hour free trial on all subscription packages.

I firmly believe that this site can help anybody wanting to improve their knowledge of the guitar fingerboard and because of this, I decided to give a 24 hour free trial so that you can see for yourself what is in the member's area, risk free. If you decide not to sign up, you will not be charged. There really is nothing to lose!