There are 27 bones in each hand and 8 bones in each wrist. Just playing, you use a total of 70 bones, wrapped in tendons and 34 muscles. There are 206 bones in the entire body so one third of your skeletal anatomy is used for shredding in your hands! Stretching your hands before you play loosens the muscles, promotes flexibility, warms up your fingers and helps the hands work longer.

There are many videos on “Guitar Playing Strength” exercises. I focused on the warm up before you play.

Hand Warm-Up Stretches for Better Playing

Rub your hands together. This starts to warms them up.

Holding the tips of the fingers, pull the hand gently out away from your body and down. Then, flex back towards the body. Do this a few times. This will give you flexibility.

Like getting the benefit of the wrist flex, hold the tip of the finger and gently flex the finger out away from the body and down. Then flex back towards the body. Again, do this a few times.

Holding your hands in front of you, stretch the fingers on your hands out as far as they will go. Hold for a few seconds and then rest. Repeat a few times.

Make fists and rotate each at the wrist gently clockwise about 10 times then switch direction.

Side to side, and up and down, shake your hands. This simple hand exercise wakes up the nerves and gets blood flowing. This is great before you play as well as after you play during your cool down. It seems very simple and silly but this one actually is one of the best.

This stretches the space in your fingers. Taking two fingers of the opposite hand place them in the web of your fingers and just massage it a bit.

Just massage the palms out to the tip of the finger.

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It seems like yesterday Ted J. McCann and I were getting ready to deliver The Unit to Revolver Magazine. What has it been now, like 3 years? 4 years?

The reason I am posting a new writing with a 3 (or 4) year old story is because Revolver Magazine recently posted all of the recorded songs online for you metal/rock fans to revisit and listen to. Brandon Geist, Executive Editor, called this promotion one of Revolver’s best yet, and he graciously made this all happen.

If you want to know how Core X2 and Bullet Cable sound in recording, you have a pretty extensive collection bands and musicians who have used them in the recordings of their “Unit Challenge”:

• The Agony Scene: “Untitled”
• Blind Guardian: “Snakes of Destruction”
• Burst: “Black Metal Shoes”
• Chimaira: “Bunk (Your Body Is)”
• Dillinger Escape Plan: “I Don’t Want You Playing With My Phone”
• Early Man: “I Wanna Set You on Fire”
• Eyes of Fire: “16 Degrees”
• Genghis Tron: “Relaunch the Dream Weapon”
• Made Out of Babies: “Concrete”
• Meshuggah: “666: The Strong Arm of the Law”
• Most Precious Blood: “Our Publicist Made Our
• Rhythm Section Stay Home (I’m Wanna Be Jerry Graham)”
• Mouth of the Architect: “That’s No Moon, That’s a Space Station”
• Seemless: “Death Rattle (Come Hither)”
• Sepultura: “The One”
• Sigh: “Salvation in Fear”
• Sonata Arctica: “Da Best Song Ever”
• Trivium: “Untitled”
• Wednesday 13: “Git R Done”

The links above are on Revolver’s site and clicking them are going to take you outside of our site.

The Unit was designed in Core One Creative’s studio, by Ted. Judd Silver, who used to be the Associate Publisher came up with the idea and he and Tom Beaujour, Editor-In-Chief, approached Ted about a traveling recording studio that would be taken on tour as part of a promotion to get artists to record on the spot so Revolver could develop their online membership. The musicians would get the opportunity to create on the fly and the readers would get the benefit of hearing the recorded songs they read about in the magazine. It was a really brilliant idea at the time and it ended up being a multi-year project for Revolver.

We had just received major recognition from the readers at Guitar Player magazine for our Core Equipment rolling amp head case and this was the type of case Tom wanted and so I think that was why they approached us. We thought it was an awesome opportunity to test our premium pro line cable, Core X2 which we had just launched through Musician’s Friend as a test in the market (and now sold in our own store). Bullet Cable had already been used in the studio for a few artists, and we wanted to see how they both did on the spot in a “traveling recording studio”. We told Tom that we would also supply the cables and he seemed really excited (Tom had already used some of our cables and his magazine had already given us great reviews).

Ted worked on the designs and then worked with Ed Udhus, drummer for Zebrahead, who is a friend as well as a quality craftsman when it comes to building solid road cases. The goal was to try to control sound and pack in sound recording equipment that would achieve some sort of balance in an uncontrolled environment that might be, for instance, a tour bus or back stage at a show. Revolver didn’t actually take it on the road, as it turned out, but we wanted to try to solve some foreseen problems that might occur.

We had a pretty well known Los Angeles tag artist (who I won’t mention his name) do the stencil for the outside, but he must have been high on the spray paint because he stenciled, “Revovler” right on the exterior diamond plate in pretty sizeable letters and then delivered it at 5PM the same night we were catching the red eye from LAX to New York.

One thing you can say about Core One, we rise to the occasion in good and bad times.

I ended up hand painting Revolver’s logo on it for the next three hours, trying to hide the stencil, not cover the diamond plate and making it look like we planned on painting the Revolver logo all along. It was late December, and although LA is warm by NY standards, the dampness of the weather was making it really messed up trying to get the paint to dry. My assistant and I were standing outside our office holding a blow-dryer and trying to keep the condensation to a minimum because we had to have the Unit ready by 9 so we could get to the airport by 10pm so we could pass security (post 911 travel sucks!).

Next, we put the Boss BR-1600, headphones and mics by Audio-Technica that Tom had sent us for The Unit and loaded it with Bullet Coil and Silver Bullet Cables and then, for production connections, we loaded it with our professional recording cables, Core X2 instrument, stereo and mic cables. I think we supplied some Kepur straps also.

I am telling you, there is nothing like deadlines and last minute ingenuity to make enormous impact possible.

The best part of the story was walking to Revolver lugging a portable recording studio in the snow through NYC because we had the wrong address and the taxi dropped us off two blocks away from their main office.

Diamond Plate gets really cold.

It was a great trip to NY by the way. We got a last minute invite from our friends at Guitar World and participated in their “office party”. There are amazing, talented musicians working at GW and the party consisted of spontaneous performances on the stage with trios, duos and solos playing some pretty cool rock and roll with no band practice beforehand that I know of. A true jam session filled with friends.

Core One Bullet Coil Cable by Darrin Fox

Nothing says “old-school cool” more than coiled guitar cords, which were the choice of Jimi Hendrix, Danny Partridge, and other guitar legends. Unfortunately, nothing says “crappy tone” more than these notoriously bad-sounding relics of yore. But Core One’s new Bullet Coil Cable ($70 retail/$40 street)–which sports 99.9 percent oxygen-free copper conductors and copper-braided shielding–is a major improvement on the “telephone wire” of the past.

The Bullet has a noticeable high-end roll off, but that’s hardly a surprise considering it contains 33 feet of cable (maximum extended length is 25 feet). Longer cables have more capacitance than shorter ones–which typically results in some loss of high-end–but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Early in his career, Stevie Ray Vaughan preferred the funkiest Radio Shack coil cords available, strictly for their tonal coloration. With my Tele plugged into a Fender Twin Reverb, I actually dug the way the Bullet rolled off some of the glistening treble spikes. However, one of the best things about the Bullet is that it looks cool, and that’s a rare thing to say about any guitar cord.

Guitar Player
Accessory File
January 2004