Guitar Noise

Welcome to the first of a new series of articles entitled Into the Blue, which will explore the style, sound and key players within the Blues genre. This series will be pitched at an intermediate level and will build on techniques and practices that many players will be well aware of. But, of course, we’ll still start off slowly, making sure we leave nothing to chance.

Putting together solos is not easy for a lot of people, and the conventional teaching (”just use your scales”) doesn’t always make sense when you’re just starting out. In this, the first of a series of articles, we take a listen to the differences in tonal color between the major scale and the major pentatonic.

Guitar Noise welcomes the long-awaited return of Peter Simms to our pages! Peter’s been very busy with performing and teaching this past year but wanted us to know he’s still thinking of the Guitar Noise readers. So much, in fact, that he wrote this song (and the accompanying lesson) just for us!

Having made himself a terrific fretless neck, Mitch sets himself the task of finishing his budget bass guitar with the classic coral pink finish. It’s truly astounding to see the results of his project. What a beautiful bass guitar!

Just when you thought we were done with walking bass lines, along comes another song where they play an important musical role! Plus, we’ll take a look at getting started on barre chords (and also look at making substitutions for them to cut us some slack!) and learn a cool little guitar riff.