Having received his undergraduate degree in composition from the Berklee College of Music and a graduate degree in guitar performance from CalArts, Scott Collins is a guitarist who performs a wide range of western and non-western music on fretted and fretless instruments. He is a featured baglama (Turkish lute) performer on the Sony Playstation, “God of War 2” video game.

In addition to numerous live performances, he has toured in both the U.S. and Germany, performed in the world premier of composer Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City”, the U.S. premier of composer Tim Brady’s, “Twenty Quarter Inch Jacks” and co-composed and performed the thematically improvised score for the About Productions stage adaptation of Norman Klein’s “Bleeding Through” with Vinny Golia.

Scott is committed to an art of real time composition he calls GuitArchitecture. When not performing improvised loop based solo guitar performances, he is a member of several projects including The Rough Hewn Trio with Warr Guitarist Chris Lavender and Craig Bunch, Duodenum, an improvising duo with Carmina Escobar that specializes in silent film accompaniment and OniBaba (with Daren Burns, Vinny Golia, George McMullin and Craig Bunch).

A guitar teacher with an active teaching schedule, Scott is the author of “Symmetrical Twelve-Tone Patterns for Improvisation”, and is currently working on a pedagogical/reference series about GuitArchitecture that will cover multiple volumes to be released over 2011-2013.

Check out Scott's website http://guitarchitecture.org/

Sweep picking (i.e. two or more pick strokes in the same direction on adjacent strings), is typically associated with arpeggios but can also be used to play scales more efficiently. This lesson will focus on sweep picking pentatonic scales but the process can be adapted to any scale. While this lesson will cover some initial steps, familiarity with sweep picking technique will help you to proces this material more quickly. If you're unfamiliar with sweep picking, Frank Gambale's books or DVDs may be a great place to start.

While companies run amok selling $4000 dollar mass produced versions of their signature guitars – FNH guitars has been quietly perfecting custom hand-made electrics in the Northeastern USA at a price-point normally associated with Asian imports. I recently caught up with Chris Fitzpatrick and John Harper (the F and H in FNH guitars) and found out more about the concept behind both FNH and their instruments.