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Now that Amante Duo has played its last gig before the holidays, I had a chance to take the family to Cliff and Sally’s place to work on the guitar. Holy crap. Cliff even let me do some light carving of the neck… Friggin' scary! While I tried to keep it together and stay focused as I use this extremely fine wood file from Asia on the back of the guitar neck, deep down I felt this overwhelming realization that this was really happening. All the sacrifice, man hours, effort

This past Saturday, I found myself staying up until 3:30am in the morning working on the Violetta Parra piece called “Gracias a la vida”. The challenge with this piece is that I don’t have any sheet music for it, so I'm having to learn it by watching the YouTube video at half speed then annotating it on paper by hand… It’s tedious, but it’s fun and I’m getting it. I’ve been doing stuff like this since high school, just never as complex. But back to this 3:30am thing, it was

I’m finally complete the neck jig, tested it and happy with the results. I’m sure I’ll find additional improvements along the way as I use the jig on these next few guitars. It took a lot longer than I expected, but why am I surprised. Anything I do always takes longer. I go down rabbit holes, go after near-perfection, I go after quality. I think that’s the attraction for me. I get to explore my limits, patience, and challenge myself to seek a final result that gets my dop

We had a shoot last night. We needed to complete some overdue interviews for the documentary. It’s also a good time to get together with the crew and get on the same page. I think I scared the crew lol. During my on camera interview I was asked about what my plans were for the performance. I’m not sure why, but I thought most of the team had an idea of what my plans were based on my blog posts and even the Facebook live concert. Although the concert will be Classical Gui

I have 5 months left… That might seem like a lot of time to people in terms of preparing for a concert but based on the learning gap and expectations I have on myself, I’m really starting to freak out. My guitar will be ready in December, and I want nothing more than to be able to play something BEAUTIFUL on it and have my pieces ready by then. That will give me another month or so to refine, and really focus on making the show itself memorable and unique. I’m glad to have

It’s been too long. I’ve thrown in some half ass blogs since I’ve been away. From Colombia to Beijing and back, its been crazy. In fact, as I write this, I’m counting eight times where I’ve left Canada in just this year alone. The opportunities, the ideas, the sights I’ve seen have been nothing but awesome. Although, I did hit a low point in the last month when my day job took over my life. A ridiculous amount of deliverables needed to be generated in an impossible timefr

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Medellin is beautiful. Everything about it. History, people, architecture, culture, food, coffee, music, arts. -- Cliff #Journey #Video #Growth #Inspiration

What a rush! Our voting week for Telus STORYHIVE’s Documentary Series is behind us, and what an amazing experience. I’ve never felt so close to the project and felt so much responsibility to give this project everything I can. The amount of support and love we’ve received from our friends, family and even new friends has been nothing short of life changing. In the week leading up to this past Monday and the 4 voting days, we’ve gone from being a passion project whose mean

Life comes with challenges, and with each challenge, comes opportunity. Even though I’m stressed at work trying to get everything done all at once, I need to step back and do one thing at a time. And for that one thing, do it well. This also means that there are some things that may take priority at certain moments and time and then it will flip. Just as in the GuitarBorn project grant application, that was the last month’s priority, and now it’s flipped to my day job. So t