Guitar Noise

Sometimes a simple sounding fingerstyle acoustic guitar part takes a bit of thought and tinkering to create. David looks at how to go beyond the chords offered up on a typical Internet tab sheet in order to get more of the flavor of the original recording of this great Mark Knopfler song.

Mark Knopfler is best known as the lead guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for the British rock band Dire Straits, which he co-founded in 1977 with his brother David. After Dire Straits disbanded in 1995, Knopfler continued to record and produce albums as a solo artist under his own name. Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits have sold in excess of 120 million albums to date.

Tom “Noteboat” Serb is celebrating the first year of his music school, the Midwest Music Academy. One year ago today we ran a short interview with Tom and this would certainly be a great time to post it once again.

All of us at Guitar Noise want to congratulate Alan as he starts off teaching guitar and music pretty close to full time! Get to know one of our Guitar Noise Moderators a little better – you might see him on television one day!

The Beatles are probably the most talked about and listened to rock band of all time. It’s very easy to forget that we’re talking thirteen albums, more than half of which were recording in the span of four years. This month we put the spotlight on the Beatles, as well as on all the various Beatles song lessons available here at Guitar Noise.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about how to turn a song into a single guitar arrangement and the first part of the answer is that you have to learn the song! In this lesson we break down this White Stripes’ song into its component parts – bass, rhythm and lead (learning them on the electric guitar) – so that we can later create a single acoustic guitar arrangement of this song.

This time out, Jamie guides you through the bridge section of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, providing detailed step-by-step instruction on how to move effortlessly from one fingering position to the next.

Back in August 2003, I was still in Chicago but I got my first look at where I would end up moving to the coming New Year’s Day. Looking back now, I’m tempted to say that some of the unsettledness had a subliminal effect in my choosing Cat’s Steven’s “Wild World” as a new Easy Songs for Beginners lesson.

There are few people who have contributed so much to rock music, to music in general, and to the recording industry, as Les Paul. Join us in honoring this true musical legend who passed away this week at the age of 94.

Setting the “Wayback Machine” for 2006 led me to Josh Urban’s first piece for Guitar Noise and since ear training and listening is a huge part of learning to solo, it seemed to make sense to use it as a feature. Plus, any lesson from Doug Sparling, be it new or old, is certainly worth a read!

I had to do a little checking, but this week is another Guitar Noise anniversary – somewhere around July 15, 2003, we posted our first (and only!) video lesson! If you’ve ever wanted to see what Nick Torres’ fingers looked like, here’s your chance! Plus we also had a great article on replacing pickups, courtesy [...]