Monthly Archives: July 2008

We’ve already written about that consummate gentleman and guitar great David Gilmour on this blog. (See David Gilmour Signature Guitar Strings). Now there is something else for Gilmour fans and guitar players to get excited about. On September 22, Fender is releasing a David Gilmour Signature ‘Black Strat’. From David Gilmour’s website: In the two [...]

In this podcast we’ll look at the feel of swing and of how “swing eighths” differ from the “straight eighth” notes that we’ve been using in our strumming up to this point.

Here is a draft of a method I wrote to understand a nifty melody and produce your own nifty melodies. I hope you find it useful. What does “modeling a melody” mean? It means “doing what a particular melody does without duplicating the melody.” So we explore a melody, find out why it goes where [...]

The Guitar Noise Newsletter for July 18, 2008 deals with all the latest site news and updates, including yet another site redesign and a new podcast.

One of the best ways to cement what you learn on guitar, believe it or not, is to learn some of the basics of a different instrument. Guitar Noise extends a hearty “welcome back” to Bruce Fleming, who takes some of the rudiments of music theory and shows how to apply it to the keyboard, enabling you to get started with making chords.

Starpics are plectrums or guitar picks handcrafted in Australia from semi-precious and precious stones. Guitar Noise stalwart Vic Lewis gives us this thoughtful look at these stone beauties.

For lack of a better way of putting it, we’ll be “stretching out” our downstrum – turning it from a typcial downstroke to something that’s more of a musical punctuation mark.

Here’s a letter from a player who’s feeling a bit stuck. I’ve been playing guitar off and on for several years, but I feel stuck; I keep playing the same chords to the same songs every time I play. If you were me and could play only a few chords, what would you choose to [...]

Guitar Noise Newsletter for July 01, 2008 with all the latest site news and updates. Written by David Hodge.

After spending our last lesson looking at all the notes in a scale, this time we’re going to just look at a few. One of the best things you can do to get going as a soloist is to minimize the number of notes you use in a solo. Focusing on one, two, three or four notes will help you on both rhythm and phrasing, which make a solo a lot more interesting than just stringing as many notes together as fast as you can.