Monthly Archives: November 2008

Not so much a lesson as a nice chord melody arrangement of this beautiful Christmas song, courtesy of Peter. Never too early to get started on your holiday material.

Nine Christmas songs done in an “easy jazz feel” – right down to the vocals straight from the 1940s to the wonderfully articulated piano lines.

Welcome back to the one finger chord guitar primer. Last time, we introduced the single, foundation shape you need to start playing chords on the guitar. Please refer to the Guitar Noise newsletter archives for that lesson. I’ll summarize the lesson here: press the first finger of your left hand onto strings 2, 3, and [...]

Amazon.com Widgets I want to introduce you to a red hot guitarist that I met a few months ago. His name is Will Landrum. He has a couple of guitar instrumental CDs out in the vein of Vai and Satriani. “Living Digits” is his latest release and I have to tell you it totally rocks! He has distribution [...]

Guitar Noise newsletter for November 17, 2008 with two new song lessons, a bunch of new reviews and our replies to some of your email.

We’re going to combine a very simple walking bass with some of our Travis picking (and “pinching”) and create a light, lilting arrangement of this Simon and Garfunkel song. Even beginners can tag along as we’ll be using chord shapes that involve only one or two fingers of the fretting hand!

Our latest podcast begins a look at the Irish folksong, “The Star of the County Down.” Not to worry – we’ve prepared a “cheat sheet” for you.

While there is certainly more than enough guitar technique on display here, there is also a very welcome sense of melody and song. This alone makes “The Ninth Ring” worth the listen.

Nine songs that blend influences as diverse as Inglesias and Madonna. This is a thoughtful, soulful CD with many standout tracks.

Welcome back to the One Finger chord method. We’re going to learn the one foundation chord shape that will get us making music as fast as possible. That one shape will make it easier to learn more complex shapes later on. To make this lesson as easy to read as it is to do, I [...]

Jan Jankowski’s Tunes for Solo Guitar consists of thirteen wonderfully crafted tracks of Jan playing his guitar like a magician who can blur the borders of traditional genres.

In this podcast we’ll make use of rests, combining them with simple arpeggios to create space while strumming, especially in slower songs.

Since you’re already here it’s safe to assume you know a thing or two about learning guitar online. Recently the folks at Acoustic Guitar Magazine did a roundup of guitar lesson websites. Lucky for us, Guitar Noise gets a brief mention. More accurately, it’s an honorable mention for the honorable David Hodge. Think “guitar lesson [...]

It only takes a single note to change the minor pentatonic scale into the “blues scale.” And what a world of difference that one note can make! As in the previous lessons in this series, we’ll provide you with MP3 sound files in order to help you create your own solos.

Guitar Noise newsletter for November 1, 2008 with news about the latest site botches and a couple of new articles that didn’t get botched.