The Steve Stine Podcast
The Steve Stine Podcast is about more than just music — it’s about life, faith, and finding meaning in the everyday. Join Steve as he shares honest stories from decades of experience as a musician, educator, husband, father, and believer navigating the highs and lows of life. Each episode offers heartfelt conversations about purpose, spirituality, personal growth, and staying inspired — even when life gets messy or uncertain. Whether you’re picking up a guitar, walking through a season of change, or just looking for encouragement to keep going, you’ll find something here to lift your spirit. With special guests, personal reflections, and real-world insights, this podcast is for anyone seeking a deeper connection to their creativity, their calling, and their faith.
Episodes
Major pentatonic and minor pentatonic get treated like separate skills, but that mindset slows down your playing. We break the whole thing down to one clean visual: a single pentatonic shape you can move anywhere on the neck, plus a simple way to find whether you are hearing the major sound or the minor sound.
We start with a clear A minor pentatonic example, naming the five-note set and locking in t...
Pentatonic scales can feel like a cheat code because almost anything you play “works” but that safety can also keep your solos from sounding like real melodies. Steve Stein from Guitar Zoom Academy shows a simple way to hear and see the difference between pentatonic and diatonic playing, using the fretboard shapes most guitarists already know and trust.
We start with the core definitions:...
I went Live on Social Media with this, so if you are interested in watching the video, here it is:
https://youtube.com/live/IaBZQVuPCDI?feature=share
Your solos can have perfect timing and perfect notes and still feel lifeless. Today I go live (on my birthday, no less) to show the opposite approach: how to make guitar leads sound more authentic by adding grit on purpose. We start in A minor pentat...
Your guitar can feel rock solid indoors, then completely unravel the moment you roll up to an outdoor gig. Heat, humidity, and direct sun push the wood and hardware into fast changes, and that shows up as tuning instability, sticky playability, and sometimes a neck that suddenly needs attention. We walk through what actually helps when the weather is the problem, especially during those brutal hot and humid...
Your major key solo sounds “happy,” but it does not sound believable. That is the gap we close here, using a track in A major and a chord progression that stays diatonic and musical: A major, C sharp minor, D major, and E major. We start with the practical foundation most players skip, knowing the key, hearing the chords, and understanding why those changes matter even if you are “just jam...
Thirty songs for Saturday. A totally different set for Monday. No rehearsals. If that sounds familiar, you already know the real enemy isn’t your technique, it’s the scramble to keep everything in your head while you switch styles and expectations from gig to gig. We talk through the exact approach we use to stay organized, reduce panic, and get songs back under our fingers fast when we’re...
Your guitar solo can have the “right” notes and still feel wrong. The gap is usually groove. We jump into a practical, no-hype approach to soloing that starts where real music starts: locking to the beat. Using a “Groovy Fine Blues in B Minor” backing track as the example, we focus on finding the quarter note, then treating the eighth note as the true pulse for most lead guitar. From...
You can love guitar for decades and still feel like you’re spinning your wheels. Ken joins me to talk through that exact frustration, from years of casual playing with no structure to a clear, focused plan that finally makes progress feel real. His story starts with classic rock inspiration and a powerful family moment, then turns into the question so many players avoid: what are you actually practici...
Your hands know what to do until someone is watching, and then everything tightens up. That’s where this conversation with Stan goes immediately: intimidation, shaky confidence, and the quiet fear that you’re the only one who doesn’t “get it.” Stan is a retired guitarist and a longtime student inside Guitar Zoom Academy, and he shares the parts most players don’t say out ...
You can spend 30 years with a guitar in your hands and still feel like you’re guessing. That’s why this conversation with Perry lands so hard. He grew up in Casper, Wyoming with music in the house, built a band in the early 80s, and even got the kind of wild, last-minute call every guitarist dreams about: his group stepped in as a backup band for Blue Oyster Cult when another act didn’t sh...
Remote collaboration sounds like magic until you try it and realize the real challenge is boring: everyone needs the same roadmap, the same tempo, and a track that starts cleanly. We walk you through the exact home recording process we use to prep a remote band collab, using a fast, punk-leaning version of “Help” (in the style heard in the movie “Yesterday”) as a simple, practical ex...
A kid gets a guitar with strings so high it’s basically unplayable, struggles for two years, and then hears the sentence that can haunt a musician for decades: “Stop wasting your money, it’s hopeless.” Our guest Elad did what a lot of people do after that kind of moment, he quit. Then life happened in a big way: he grew up in the suburbs of New York, found himself pulled toward ident...
Showing up to a gig with “the right notes” is not the same as showing up ready to perform. We walk through a real, working guitarist’s gig preparation process using Jesus Christ Superstar as the backdrop and it applies just as well to musical theater guitar, church gigs, and any band where the arrangement changes based on who’s on stage.
We start with the listening-first appro...
Someone calls a chord progression like “1 6 4 5,” then says, “Cool, now let’s do it in A,” and suddenly your brain starts flipping through a messy stack of chord shapes. We wanted a cleaner, faster way to find the chords that actually matter, no matter the key, and it starts with one practical slice of music theory you can see on the fretboard.
We walk through how the ma...
A lot of guitarists don’t quit because they stop loving music. They quit because life gets loud and practice gets messy. Steve Stine sits down with Chris Macry, a 62-year-old guitarist who played hard as a kid, stepped away for years while raising children as a single father, and then made a serious return with a new goal: stop feeling stuck and finally grow into the player he always wanted to be.
...
Octaves are one of those guitar “unlock” moments: suddenly the fretboard stops feeling like random dots and starts looking like a repeating pattern you can actually use. We walk through what an octave is in plain language, then immediately turn it into a practical guitar technique you can apply anywhere on the neck. If you’ve ever wondered why the same note seems to show up in multiple pla...
If you’ve ever felt buried under advice, tabs, tutorials, and “one more video,” this one is for you. We talk about the biggest mindset shift students need to make when they join an online music academy: your job isn’t to research every answer on YouTube anymore. Your job is to show up, interact, and let us guide you with a plan that actually fits your life and your playing.
We...
Your guitar playing probably doesn’t need more information. It needs less noise. We live in a world where presets, plugins, YouTube guitar lessons, short-form tips, and endless gear reviews are always one click away, and that abundance quietly steals the one thing that actually creates progress: focused practice. So we step back and get honest about why so many players feel stuck even though they &ldq...
You can love guitar for decades and still feel like you’re standing outside the music, looking in. That’s where Cary Bynum found himself: a creative professional from Birmingham, Alabama, raised on the Beatles, the Stones, classic rock, blues, and old-school country, with a house full of guitars and a long history of stalled-out lessons.
We talk through the pattern that kept tripping him ...
The fastest way to stall on guitar is to confuse memory with musicianship. That is where Levi takes us, starting with the honest origin story of learning guitar for the wrong reasons, then quickly finding the right ones: teaching, curiosity, and the addictive moment when a student’s “light bulb” turns on.
We dig into what actually makes practice work. Levi explains how his Guided Pr...
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