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
405 episodes
Major And Minor Pentatonic Made Simple
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 ...
Turn A Five-Note Box Into A Full Scale
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 differe...
Gritty Blues Bends
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=shareYour solos can have perfect timing and perfect notes and still feel lifeless. Today ...
Outdoor Guitar Survival Guide
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,...
Four Practical Steps To Make A Major Pentatonic Solo Musical
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 t...
Stop Panicking And Start Organizing Your Gig Prep
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 expectati...
Why Your Guitar Solos Don't Sound Musical (And How to Fix Them)
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” ...
A Practical Plan For Learning Guitar As An Adult
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....
King Of Guitar Rabbit Holes Learns To Focus
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.” ...
Learning Guitar After Retirement
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 th...
How to Collaborate Remotely (Even If You’ve Never Done It Before)
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 p...
Never Too Late For Lead Guitar
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...
My Overkill Gig Prep That Saves Rehearsals
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 t...
Find Every Essential Chord In Any Key
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, n...
Inside GuitarZoom Academy: A Real Student’s Experience
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 rais...
How To Find And Play Octaves Across The Guitar Neck
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...
What If Progress Is Just Better Conversations
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 o...
Too Much Advice Can Make You Worse At Guitar
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 ...
A Student's Experience inside the GuitarZoom Academy
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, ...
Levi Clay Interview - The Master of Guitar Transcription
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, an...
If You’re Not Setting Deadlines, You’re Wasting Practice Time
Your practice can be consistent and still feel like it’s going nowhere. When there’s no deadline, it’s easy to drift through scales, licks, and exercises without ever feeling finished, and that “unfinished” feeling quietly kills motivation. We ...
Why Most Practice Doesn’t Work (And How to Fix It)
Noodling feels like practice until you realize you’re getting the same results month after month. We sit down and get blunt about what actually creates progress on guitar: a plan that matches your real schedule, plus the discipline to practice ...
How Great Guitar Players Use Slides (And How You Should Too)
Want your solos to breathe, sing, and feel human without learning a new scale? We dive into the art of slides and show how three simple categories—intentional slides, subtle half-step drifts, and “airplane” landings—transform stiff lines into v...
The One Guitar Pedal I Always Travel With (My Live Rig in a Backpack)
Ever wish your live rig could fly under the seat and still sound huge? Steve Stein breaks down a travel-first guitar setup that trades heavy amps for a Quad Cortex without sacrificing feel, clarity, or stage confidence. We walk through why port...