Because, as you know, we at Guitar Noise believe that the true power, wonder and beauty of music comes when it gets shared with the world. So whenever you’re out playing, we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

Every Wednesday, we’ll post here about the gigs we know are coming up in the following ten days or so. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend a show should they happen to be in your corner of the world!

And don’t forget that you’ve still got a chance to help out a fellow Guitar Noise community member e ven if you can’t get to one of his shows! Tom McLaughlin and his band Life is Drama have made it to the final ballot stage for the readers’ favorites poll of the Chicago suburban magazine,  Nitelife. So if you can manage to get a few spare minutes while you’re on the Internet, head to the following URL: http://www.nitelife.org/ and then click on the banner that says “Best of the Burbs.” Then take a moment and vote for Life is Drama for “Best Cover Band” and “Best Rock Band,” and be sure to also add Mindi for  “Best Female Singer” and Rob for “Best Drummer.” And, of course, be sure to vote for Tom (who goes by “Tommy Gunz”) for “Best Guitarist.” On behalf of Tom and Life is Drama, we thank all of you in the Guitar Noise community for helping out! And Tom also informs me that if you delete your cookies after visiting the site, you can vote again! That’s definitely keeping with a time honored Chicago tradition!

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Time again for the weekly open mic at The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York. Hosted by singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller, it’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. The open mic runs from 7 to 9 PM and all ages are welcome.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Doesn’t Madder returns to George’s on the Lake, located at 101 Catawba Avenue in Rhodhiss, North Carolina. Show starts at 8:30 PM.

Life Is Drama brings a great night of rock to Heroes West Sports Bar and Grill at Rock Creek Drive in Joliet, Illinois).  8:30 PM start for this show.

Please feel free to email about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. As mentioned, we’ll be posting the latest schedule every Wednesday. We’d love to include you in our listing.

Also feel free to add upcoming dates in the “Comments” section of this thread. That way we’ll be able to add your next performance to our future updates.

We wish you the best with your shows as well as a great time at any show you can attend. Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends in person at long last!

Peace

Events Horizon – Wednesday, February 8, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

To demonstrate, we’ll start with a simple basic strumming pattern using two chords, E and A:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Take your time to practice this until you feel you’ve got a good handle on it. When you’re ready, we’re going to concentrate on the second beat, which is currently a regularly strummed downstroke. What we want to do is replace that strummed chord on the second beat with a percussive stroke. A “percussive” stroke is a way of getting rhythmic beat out of your guitar without sounding a chord or a note. There are many ways to do this and for now we’ll start with one of the easiest. When it comes time for the second beat, instead of making a downstroke, simply slap your strumming hand across all the strings at once. You do this with the palm of your hand flat against the strings. You don’t have to do it very hard, simply hard enough to deaden the strings. You will note that you actually produce two distinct sounds. Okay, the first might actually be called a non-sound, since what you’ve done is dampened the strings and stopped them from ringing. But you also create a “snap” or a “pop” from your fingers hitting the body of the guitar below the strings (away from your head). Obviously, how hard you slap the strings will dictate how much “pop” you get. Please, don’t go slamming your hand against the guitar and then writing me that you’ve broken the poor thing! Use your head and experiment a little. You can get different sounds depending on where you make contact with the guitar.

When you feel confident that you can do this, try incorporating the percussive stroke into your rhythm pattern. Here I’ve used the asterisk  symbol ( * ) to designate the percussive stroke:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That hopefully wasn’t too, right? As you heard in the MP3 file, you can get a lot of variation on your guitar depending on where and how hard you happen to hit it.

This “slapping” technique works well on acoustic and classical guitars, but it does have a few drawbacks. First, you can’t really use it on an electric (well you can, but that’s a whole other matter best covered at some later point…). More important, slapping your hand down in this manner can be fairly disruptive of the rhythmic pattern, especially if you’re playing songs with reasonably quick tempos.

Which brings us to our second percussive strumming technique, something that I call a “heel stroke” (and I should note that these are names that I use because people ask me “How do you do that thing with your strumming hand?” I have no idea as to whether or not there are universal names for these techniques  – although I suspect that there must be – and since I picked them up myself by watching and listening to other people and then experimenting on my own. I have tried to name them as simply as possible because, truth be told, I’m not really interested in what they’re called as much as I’m interested in what they do). This heel  stroke is going to sound more complicated than it is and I hope that I explain it well enough for you to get on the first try. If not, please feel free to write me and ask me to re-explain it.

Essentially, what you want to do is to make a downstroke with your normal picking motion while dampening the strings with the heel of your hand at the same time. The “heel” of your hand is the “outer” edge, from the side of your pinky to the wrist. It is the part of your hand that is in contact with the paper (even though I was told it shouldn’t be) when you’re writing something. Think of it as making a forty-five degree karate chop into your strings between the soundhole and the saddle, if you will.

To hear what this should sound like, place the heel of your hand against the strings and keep it there while making a downstroke. Even if you’re fingering a chord at the other end of the fretboard, you’re still only going to get a percussive sound from the guitar.

Now that you know what it should sound like, try to make the percussive stroke by doing both the downstroke and the hitting your strings with the heel of your hand at the same time. The best analogy I can come up with is that when you bring the heel of your strumming hand down against the strings, snap your wrist into a downstroke, kind of like as if you were throwing a frisbee. The dampening action and the striking of the strings should be almost simultaneous. And yes, I know this is not as easy as it sounds! But, like (almost) anything, it becomes much easier, almost second nature in fact, with practice. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey! I sound sort of like Dave Matthews!” then you are indeed on the right track. Let’s go back to our strumming pattern for this lesson and now use the “heel stroke” wherever you see the asterisk symbol. Remember to take things as slowly as you need to in order to get the timing right:

If you feel comfortable doing this, then move on to the next step. In addition to using it on the 2nd beat of each measure, add a heel stroke to the 4th beat as well, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can hear how smoothly this percussive stroke fits in with the rhythmic pattern. Essentially, it’s just playing a downstroke, which is something you do all the time.

This is a technique that is used constantly by guitarists. Chances are you’ve heard it over and over (as in our song lesson on Three Marlenas) and just didn’t know what it was. But now that you do, and now that you know what it sounds like, you can go back and try it out with other songs that you know. This is what learning should be about.

When you’re using the heel stroke, be sure to keep your strumming rhythm even and steady, as discussed in many of our strumming lessons. Being able to incorporate it into your strumming at the beat of your choosing will add a lot to the sound of your rhythm, making it more dynamic and interesting.

Peace

Playing Percussively was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

“I try not to think about those days. When I hear it on the radio, I get excited, until you think about the way things really were – the bad contracts, the arguments, beating people up, getting beaten up… But, in the end, hopefully, it will only be the music that is left.”   Dave Davies to Neil McCormack of the Telegraph

On February 3, 1947, Frederick and Anne Davies brought the youngest of their eight children into the world. David Russell Gordon Davies had a brother, Ray, who was three years older and six sisters. The Davies family lived at 6 Denmark Terrace in North London, a home that was filled with music from all ages, styles and genres.  More often than not, there would be huge musical parties in the front room (where the piano was!) on Saturday nights, with people playing music and laughing and drinking and singing. Growing up in this atmosphere, who wouldn’t make music a huge part of his or her life?

Dave and Ray formed bands during their days at William Grimshaw Secondary school – for a brief while their lead vocalist was fellow school student Rod Stewart – and when Ray left to attend Hornsey College of Art, Dave started a new group, The Ravens, with friend and band mate Pete Quaife on bass. When Ray quit school in 1963, he became part of the group, which managed to get a contract with Pye Records. About the same time they hired on Mick Avory, a local jazz drummer who’d played a gig with the still-forming Rolling Stones. And they also changed their name to The Kinks.

The Kinks recorded and released two singles, a cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and “You Still Want Me,” an original song written by Ray. When neither song managed to make the charts, Pye gave the group an ultimatum – they would annul the contract if their third single wasn’t a success.

Under pressure from Pye, Ray became a force to be reckoned with – insistent on getting both the band’s management and producer (Shel Talmy, who would go on to produce the Who’s first albums), as well as the record company to give the band the time (and money) needed to record the group’s third single as he heard it in his head. Ray wrote a new song and the band recorded it in several styles over the early weeks of the summer of 1964. Dave created the distorted guitar sound, one that would soon be the ideal tone for all rock guitarists, by slicing the speaker of his amplifier with a razor blade. And he played a burning solo that would also create as much legend as the song itself in a single take.

“You Really Got Me,” released in August, 1964, reached Number 1 on the British charts and later made it to Number 7 on the American charts as well. For the moment, all was well between the band and Pye.  In fact, “You Really Got Me” was the first of thirteen singles the Kinks would release over the next three years, all charting in the top fifteen on the British charts, with nine of them landing in the top five positions.

The band released its first album, Kinks, in October 1964 (which charted at Number 4 in Britain) and extensive touring followed. Stories of the group’s numerous fights and misfortunes are also numerous and, in some instances, legendary. They received a four-year ban from touring in the United States from the American Federation of Musicians, which pretty much limited their exposure to the radiowaves in America. And while Ray’s songwriting and the Kink’s musicality was much appreciated in their homeland that same respect didn’t carry over across the water.

Case in point: When the Kinks released the single “See My Friends” at the close of July, 1965, the single got both critical and public acclaim. Reaching Number 10 on the charts was nice, but having Pete Townshend say “‘See My Friends’ was the next time I pricked up my ears and thought, ‘God, he’s done it again. He’s invented something new.’” While the song used guitars instead of sitars, its Indian-inspired music was influential on all of the Kinks’ contemporaries. But in America, “See My Friends” couldn’t even crack the top 100, peaking at 111. Similarly, the sublime single “Waterloo Sunset” didn’t chart at all in America even though it reached Number 2 in Britain.

Ray continued to grow and evolve as a songwriter. As his songs became wry observations on life and society, he led the Kinks through many stylistic changes, from the folkish “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” to the bleak and jazzy “Dead End Street.” But while his skills as a writer and producer were improving, his mental health was succumbing to the pressures of touring and the rushed record-it-all-in-one-go pace of the studio. He suffered a nervous breakdown late in 1965 and seriously considered leaving the band.

But not really leaving it. He could still stay on as writer and producer and play in the studio, letting Dave front the Kinks. In the summer of 1967, the Kinks recorded “Death of a Clown,” a song written by both the Davies brothers and released as a Dave Davies solo record. The song reached Number 3 on the British charts and for a while there was talk of Dave becoming his own solo act. But subsequent singles did not fare as well and the project was shelved.

Dave did contribute two of his own songs (“Love Me ‘til the Sun Shines” and “Funny Face”) to The Kinks’ 1967 release, Something Else. The band was doing little touring, working instead in the studio to mixed results. Ray was taking total control of the production duties and while Something Else (co-produced with Shel Talmy) and their 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, fared poorly commercially in spite of almost universal critical acclaim and both albums are now considered masterpieces. Surprisingly, over time The Village Green Preservation Society became the Kinks’ best-selling non-compilation album! At the time, though, the biggest concern was that the record company had given Ray close to total control over making the record and he produced an album that didn’t have a single hit on it, although the bittersweet ballad “Days,” which appeared on the continental European version of the album, did hit Number 10 as a single in England.

Their next album, Arthur (or, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire), brought more of the same to the Kinks. Critics thought it was their best album yet but the charts told another story. Surprisingly, Arthur did better in the US than in the UK, where none of its singles even charted. Ray, who had been asked to produce the final studio album for The Turtles, took advantage of his trip to the States to negotiate an end to the band’s performance ban in America. Being able to tour in support of Arthur nicely paved the way for the group’s follow-up, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround (Part 1) to get the band back on the singles charts on both sides of the Atlantic. While working on Arthur, the Kinks also put together a number of songs intended for Dave’s long awaited solo effort, which again came to naught in terms of being finished or released.

Successful as “Lola” (the single, not the album) was, the Kinks never regained the commercial popularity they had in the mid-sixties. The band went theatrical for a while and then led the charge into “arena rock” with their late 1970s albums. While none of their albums after Something Else made the British charts, the group’s performance on the US album charts was certainly respectable, particularly between 1979 and 1983. Low Budget hit Number 11, Give the People What They Want reached Number 15 and State of Confusion, which took advantage of MTV to score a couple of hit singles  with “Come Dancing” and “Don’t Forget to Dance,” peaked at Number 12.

1980 also saw the release of a solo Dave Davies album, although very different from the one the Kinks had worked on during the recording of Arthur. Dave Davies (AFL1-3603) featured the youngest Davies boy performing all the album’s musical instruments by himself and reached Number 42 on the American album charts.

The Kinks continued on, touring and putting out music. Phobia (released in 1993), the band’s twenty-third studio album, featuring the wickedly funny “Hatred (A Duet)” would be their final disc and the Davies brothers officially broke up the band three years later. Fittingly, the Kinks’ final public performance was at the Clissold Arms’ Pub, right across the street from their childhood home in Fortis Green. The gig was to celebrate Dave’s fiftieth birthday.

Since disbanding, both brothers have continued to write, play and perform, and to pen autobiographies, as well. Ray created and performed the stage show, Storyteller, which gave inspiration to the series by the same name for VH1. While there has been a lot of talk about a Kinks reunion, both brothers taking turns saying “it’s possible” or “not at all likely,” a true Kink reunion can never happen as Pete Quaife passed away in June 2010.

Ray finally got around to making his own totally-solo and non-Kinks album, Other People’s Lives, which was released in 2006. On June 19, 2011, along with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Crouch End Festival Chorus (with whom he released The Kinks Choral Collection – a wonderful mix of Kinks’ singles done in choral arrangements), Ray Davies performed The Village Green Preservation Society in its entirety at the Royal Festival Hall. And his “duets” album, See My Friends, includes the last studio recording performance of Alex Chilton, singing “’Til the End of the Day.”

Dave also has been busy. His 2000 disc, Dave Davies Live at the Bottom Line, demonstrates how energetic and rocking the younger Davies brother’s shows were. And although he suffered a stroke in 2004, he has gotten back to the point where he can play and record again, as evidenced by his 2007 CD, Fractured Mindz. And this past November saw the release of Hidden Treasures, a compilation of virtually all of Dave’s songs that were meant to be his first solo album that shows that maybe both brothers could have easily fronted their own bands.

Kinks was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #20 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• Guitar Noise Featured Artist
• Topic of the Month
• New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
• Great Advice from Great Teachers
• Events Horizon
• Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. My wishes for a happy “February 1″ (not to mention the rest of the month!) to each of you.

Being the start of a new month, we’ve got the return of another classic Guitar Noise song lesson to our pages – “Three Marlenas,” written by Jakob Dylan and performed by the Wallflowers. This latest lesson joins “Horse With No Name,” “Hey There, Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” – back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page, where each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for continuing to work with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And, just in case you missed our last newsletter, I’m also pleased to announce that I’ve finished another “Complete Idiot’s Guide” for Alpha Books – “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Ukulele.”This title will be out in bookstores (online and on earth) on July 3 this summer.And it features our own Nick Torres, providing vocals for many of the song examples (wait ’til you hear him doing his best Robert Plant voice for “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain!”). Nick also was kind enough to contribute an original song of his own, one of my favorites of his, in fact – (“It’s Not a Love Song – for the chapter on how to play ukulele in a traditional band setting. And if that’s not enough, you’ll also get an incredible fingerstyle arrangement of “Over the Rainbow” for ukulele and voice.

We’ll be posting more about this upcoming book, including some cool ukulele lessons not included in the book, later on this spring. And Paul will be posting a link for the book on our bookstore page as soon as it’s available. As with all my previous books, I cannot thank the Guitar Noise community enough for all their support. I hope you’ll find this new to be up to the high standards you set.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Great songs transcend genres and when a particular band is cited as an influence by those in rock, punk, metal, pop and more, you have to know that it’s the music that made it so. This month Guitar Noise celebrates the Davies brothers – Dave and Ray – and their band, The Kinks. Read about them on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

With everything that’s been going on, I kind of forgot what the February “Topic of the Month” is supposed to be! So, the first thing I’m going to do today is to stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner. I’ll let you know what I find out in the next newsletter! Or you can visit our home page and find out for yourself!

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Guitar Tips: Faster Chord Changing
by David Hodge

We’ve gotten lots of questions from beginners about how to get faster at changing chords. While practice is important, here is one tip that can help a lot.

Q & A: Time In A Bottle
by David Hodge

“Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce draws together all sorts of things we have been learning. It uses capos, features two guitars, and even changes key mid-song.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 5
by Tom Serb

In our last post we learned there is only one kind of major scale. Now let’s look at the minor scale – and there are LOTS of different minor scales!

Q & A: “Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special”
by David Hodge

Time to dip into the “email bag” once again! Today’s question concerns two of the song arrangements from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar.

Fender Select Carved Maple Top Telecaster
by Steve Williams

The latest addition to the new Fender American Select range is the Fender Select Carved Maple Top Telecaster and it’s certainly special.

To Read Or Not To Read?
Part 1 – The Tyranny of Tablature
by Nick Minnion

It’s an eternal debate as to whether or not a guitarist should learn to read music as opposed to tablature. Nick Minnion gives us his take on the topic.Complete with video!

Three Marlenas
by David Hodge

Learn to play The Wallflowers’ “Three Marlenas” – picking up some easy and interesting chord changes and strumming tips along the way!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re incredibly lucky to have a good number of great guitar teachers as members of the the Guitar Noise community. We’re even luckier to be able to have them contribute to Guitar Noise News on a regular basis!

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 7

Exotic scales

After the pentatonic, major, and common minor scales and the modes, everything else – with one exception – can be considered an exotic scale; these won’t be used very often, but they’re still pretty cool, and each has its own sound.

The one exception is the chromatic scale. The word “chromatic” comes from the Greek word “chroma”, which means “color”. We can think of accidentals (sharps and flats) as adding a color, or inflection, to the natural note – so C# can be seen as a ‘color’ of C. If you use all the crayons in the box, you get the chromatic scale, or all the possible colors.

The chromatic scale is used sparingly in all sorts of music as a series of passing tones. It’s also used as the foundation for almost all atonal music, which avoids a sense of key by using all the possible notes equally. That means avant-garde composers are fond of it, and it’s worth knowing.

The guitar’s strings are mostly tuned in fourths, and perfect fourths are two and a half steps apart – five frets on a guitar. The exception is the second and third strings, which are a major third apart, or two whole steps (four frets). Since we can only fret four notes on a string without stretching or shifting position, the most common chromatic scale fingering will shift position on every string except the third/second – here’s a chromatic scale starting from 6th string 8th fret C:

4-5-6-7-8
5-6-7-8
5-6-7-8
6-7-8-9
7-8-9-10
8-9-10-11

In order to get two full octaves, I’ve put five notes on the first string. You could put the extra note on any string, so there are multiple fingerings of a two-octave chromatic scale. You can also shift on any finger – the first string in the example above could be fingered 1-1-2-3-4, 1-2-2-3-4, 1-2-3-3-4, or 1-2-3-4-4. This gives you a lot of possibilities, but a pretty simple structure.

If you use a chromatic scale run in an improvised passage, you’ll find it’s actually trickier than it looks. Because you’re constantly shifting position on each string, you’ll want to keep track of what base scale fingering you were using at the beginning, and know what fingering you’ll move to at the end.

For example, if I were playing in a 7th position C scale, and decided to do a one octave run up from C, I’d have this:

-
-
5
6-7-8-9
7-8-9-10
8-9-10

Now I’m in fifth position, which is very friendly for C major. But other chromatic runs, or other starting points, might not be so favorable. Always know where you are on the fretboard!

The chromatic scale is the simplest of the symmetrical scales – those that have an equal distance between each note. The other fairly common symmetrical scale is the “whole-tone” scale, which has six notes, each a whole tone apart: C-D-E-F#-G#-A#-C (or C-D-E-Gb-Ab-Bb-C). Like the chromatic scale, this requires shifts on most strings:

4-6-8
5-7
5-7
6-8
7-9
8-10

There are a few pieces of music composed entirely of the whole tone scale; most of the ones I’ve heard that sound decent are piano pieces. But there’s one chord where the whole tone scale is appropriate for improvising: the augmented chord.

A C+ chord (the ‘+’ is the symbol for augmented) or a C7+ (augmented seventh) is composed entirely of whole steps or double whole steps: C-E-G# for the C+ chord, and C-E-G#-Bb for the C7+. So even though the scale itself isn’t all that common, there are some situations where you can use a bit of it for good effect, even if your improvisational line is based on a different scale.

The augmented triad is one of two chords in music that is perfectly symmetrical: a double whole step from C brings us to E, another double whole step brings us to G#, and one additional double whole step brings us back to C.

The other chord that’s perfectly symmetrical is the diminished seventh, written as C°7, or just C°. In this chord, you have a minor third between each note: C-Eb-Gb-Bbb (or A), and one more minor third brings us back to C.

All the scales we’ve looked at so far, except for the harmonic minor, have a whole step as the largest interval between notes. The most common exotic scale for improvising over a diminished seventh chord is called the diminished scale, but there are actually two different versions of it: the WH diminished (pronounced whole-half diminished) and the HW (half-whole) diminished.

Since a minor third is a whole step and a half step, if your chord contains only minor thirds you can add them in either order. A C WH diminished scale would be C-D-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-A-B-C; the HW scale would be C-Db-Eb-E-F#-G-A-Bb-C. Some people refer to these scales as “octatonic”, because they have eight tones in an octave.

Here’s a C WH diminished scale, starting in 8th position:

7-8-(10)
7-9-10
8-10
9-10-12
8-9-11
8-10-11

Notice we’ve got one stretch and one shift in that fingering. We could also do it with just one shift:

7-8-(10)
7-9-10
7-8-10
9-10
8-9-11
8-10-11

The HW diminished scale works out pretty much the same way, but with a little more moving around:

6-8-(9)
7-8-10
6-8-9
7-8-10
7-9-10
8-9-11

Next we’ve got a couple of scales that are from traditional styles of music. This one I could have presented earlier, right after the pentatonic (which is what I usually do in lesson) – it’s the blues scale, which is the minor pentatonic with the addition of a b5 note: 1-2-b3-4-b5-5-b7. Here’s the A blues scale in fifth position:

5-(8)
5-8
5-7-8
5-7
5-6-7
5-8

If you’re improvising blues with this, you might or might not fret the “blue note” or b5 – it’s pretty common to bend to it instead.

Then there’s the style of “Gypsy jazz”, like the music of Django Reinhardt. A common scale in this style is called the Gypsy minor scale; it’s the natural minor with a raised fourth, or 1-2-b3-#4-5-b6-b7. Here’s that scale in A, in 5th position:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
5-7
5-7-9
6-7-8
5-7-8

You could do the same scale with a shift:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
4-5-7
5-7
6-7-8
5-7-8

By now you’ve hopefully got a command of the most common scales, and if you’ve worked at it, an understanding of where the notes are on the fretboard. We’ve still got a lot of scales to cover, so from this point forward I’ll be outlining only the scale formulas, and leave it to you to find the fingerings. If you get lost, just go back to the major scale fingering patterns and adjust the notes to the formulas – if you find a lot of notes are out of position, shift the fingering forward or back.

The Hungarian minor scale, which is also known as the Gypsy minor or the double harmonic minor scale, has the pattern 1-2-b3-#4-5-b6-7. You might have noticed that I’ve already shown you a “Gypsy minor” scale – there’s no common naming system for scales, so sometimes the same name will be used for more than one scale. You’ll notice there are two places in the scale where there’s an augmented second (a three fret space): between the b3 and the #4, and again between the b6 and the 7. Since the only common scale that includes an augmented second is the harmonic minor, that’s led to this scale often being labeled the ‘double harmonic minor’ – having no common naming system, we can also end up with more than one name for the same scale!

Continuing the naming confusion a bit further, this isn’t the only Hungarian minor scale. The other one is 1-b2-b3-4-5-b6-7. It’s sort of a cross between the harmonic minor scale and the Phrygian scale, and it’s also called the Neopolitan minor scale, and some folks even call this the “Arabic” scale.

It’s not actually an Arabic scale, as the actual Arabian system is different from our 12 tone system… I’ll cover that at the end, along with scales from India, which is also outside our 12TET system (12 tone equal temperament) – our guitars are designed to produce 12TET tones, so these take some real work to achieve on the guitar.

You might also come across the Neopolitan major scale… but it’s the same as the Lydian mode. Exotic scales seem to have sprung up in many different styles of music, so there ends up being a lot of overlap in the names!

Some of our exotic scales are simple alterations of our common scales. The major/minor scale is a good example of that: it’s a natural minor scale with a major third, or 1-2-3-4-5-b6-b7.

Jazz has also given us a lot of scales, especially bebop jazz. Bebop scales have eight tones, with a passing note between two ‘normal’ scale tones. The scale that’s usually called the “bebop” scale is a cross between the major scale and the Mixolydian: 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7-7. This is also called the “bebop dominant” scale, because it includes the dominant chord tone of b7.

But we can put the half steps in other places, which gives us the Bebop Dorian: 1-2-b3-3-4-5-6-b7. That’s a cross between the Mixolydian and the Dorian scales.

We also have the Bebop Major, 1-2-3-4-5-b6-6-7. This scale works well over major 7th or major 6th chords.

If we lower the third of that scale, we get the Bebop Melodic Minor: 1-2-b3-4-5-b6-6-7.

Finally, we can lower the 3rd of the Bebop Dominant, and get the Bebop Harmonic Minor: 1-2-b3-4-5-6-b7-7. That’s a harmonic minor scale with the added b7.

Jazz also makes extensive use of altered dominant chords. If you’ve read my chord lessons, you might remember that dominant chords have a tension; altered dominant chords increase the tension by including notes altered from the underlying scale – substituting b5 or #5 for the fifth in the chord, or including the b9 or #9 note. These chords may be spelled out in the name, as in C7b9, or they may just be indicated on a chart as “C7alt”, leaving it up to the performer which non-scale tones to include.

Because these chords can include b9 (the same tone as b2), #9 (same as #2), b5 or #5, a scale that will work over any of them should contain those notes – as well as the root, third, and b7 common to dominant chords. The resulting scale is 1-b2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7.

This one takes a bit of explaining to unravel the spelling – we want it to have just one of each letter name; the b3 is the same pitch as #2 (or #9). Having used a 3, the natural third from the chord ends up being spelled as a b4. b5 is there, as is b6 – that’s the same tone as #5. And the b7 is needed to blend with a dominant chord.

Compare this scale with the Locrian mode, which is 1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7, and you’ll see it’s the Locrian with a lowered fourth. So this scale is sometimes called the “superlocrian” (which is how I first learned it), but a more common name is simply the “altered scale”.

Another big source of scales in music has been the deconstruction of chords used in specific tunes. If you take a chord like a m7b5, we have scale tones (I’ll show those in C): 1-b3-b5-b7. We’re missing 2, 4, and 6. We can fill those in with any tones from the scale, creating these:

1-b2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7
1-b2-b3-b4-b5-6-b7
1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7
1-b2-b3-4-b5-6-b7
1-2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7
1-2-b3-b4-b5-6-b7
1-2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7
1-2-b3-4-b5-6-b7

Any of these scales will work over a m7b5 chord, since they each contain all of the chord tones. One (the 1-2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7) is used commonly enough to call it a “half diminished” scale, but in fact ALL of them can be considered half diminished scales!

Some composers will create a chord and build a piece around it. They’ll usually follow the same process I showed above, filling in the missing notes with possibilities from our chromatic scale. The resulting scales are often named after the piece the composer created that contains the chord…

The Prometheus scale comes from a symphonic work by Alexander Scriabin called “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire”. The chord can be spelled in several ways, but it’s often seen in fourths: C-F#-Bb-E-A-D. Arranging these in scale order, we get C-D-E-F#-A-Bb, or 1-2-3-#4-6-b7. To continue the naming confusion, the chord is also called the “mystic” chord – and the scale is naturally also called the mystic scale.

Igor Stravinsky wrote a ballet called “Petrushka”, and in it he used the Petrushka chord. It’s a foray into bitonality, with two different tonal centers at the same time… if you have two guitarists, and one plays a C major chord while the other plays an Gb major chord, the result is the Petrushka chord. Combining the notes C-E-G and Gb-Bb-Db gets us the scale C-Db-E-Gb-G-Bb.

That causes a little problem because we’ve got two G notes. Spelling the second chord enharmonically (as F# major, which is what Stravinsky actually did) gets us two C notes (C and C#). So the scale ends up being spelled as a mix of the two: C-Db-E-F#-G-Bb, or 1-b2-3-#4-5-b7. It’s also known as the “tritone” scale, because it’s made up of several notes that are a tritone, or three whole tones, apart: C-F#, Db-G, and E-Bb.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

One thing we at Guitar Noise would really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!
And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. The latest one came got posted today and has events running through February 12,and you can find it here.

As always, you should feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig information (dates, venues, locations and times) to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. Remember that we’ll be posting these every Wednesday so plan accordingly!

And who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!That’s how Nick got to meet Lars when the Flea Market Band (all the way from Norway) played in Washington DC.

Random Thoughts

Working through “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Ukulele,” much like writing “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar,” involved creating quite a few arrangements of Public Domain songs. The idea in both books was to create arrangements that could stand up on their own and make the listener think, “Hey! This song is actually pretty cool!”

And when I listen to the arrangements that Nick and I created for these two books, with me handling the guitar or ukulele part and Nick the vocals, I find myself thinking that there’s a good reason these songs have continued to be sung for, in some cases, hundreds of years. They’re simply fun songs. Some are beautiful and moving and some are silly but it’s impossible to dismiss them as unworthy of attention and consideration.

As I mentioned in the blurb about our Guitar Nose Featured Artist of the Month, great songs transcend genres. A song should never be thought of as just a “guitar song” or a “piano song” or a “rock song” or a “pop song” or whatever. As musicians we have the ability to take the raw material, the gemstone of a song if you will, and place it in all sorts of different settings, each of which will give the beholder a new insight or appreciation of it.

Maybe this is a continuation of the “New Year’s Resolution” theme, but if you find yourself looking to kick start your creativity, try taking a song that you don’t really like and seeing what you can do to turn it into one you enjoy playing and performing. It’s a lot easier than you think! And it’s also usually a lot of fun as well.

More to the point, it gives you the chance to add your own personal touch to a song. Instead of producing a copy, you’ve come out with an original arrangement. And who knows? It may be your arrangement that inspires someone else to pick up an instrument and play.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 20 – February 1, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

This is one of the reasons that first few of Guitar Noise’s easy songs for beginners lessons use songs that  involve just two or three chord changes, and relatively easy chord changes at that. It’s also why that songs have been of a moderate tempo, as well. The most fundamental thing you can learn when you start to play is how to make smooth, confident and correct switches between chords, and then to make sure you can perform those chord changes in rhytym while playing the song in question.

Liner Notes: The Wallflowers

Hailing from Los Angeles CA, The Wallflowers are fronted by singer-songwriter Jakob Dylan, the son of Bob Dylan. The song Three Marlenas is from their 1996 album Bringing Down The Horse.. The band is reportedly in the studio working on a new album as recently as January 2012.

If you enjoyed this lesson you will also like learning some of the other songs from our Easy Songs for Beginners Lessons.

In this lesson, we’re going to up the ante a bit but not in a scary way. In fact, what we’re going to do is essentially let the guitar transform a two chord song into a three chord song for us! I know this sounds a bit weird, but I think you’ll catch on fairly quickly.

The song is Three Marlenas, written by Jakob Dylan. You can find it one the Wallflowers’ 1996 (man, was it that long ago?) CD, Bringing Down The Horse.

On the disc, the song is in the key of Eb Major and, before we go any further, let’s talk about that! If I happen to say a song is in, say Eb Major, for instance, this means that this is how I have worked it out on my guitar (standardly tuned) playing along with my CD player. I have seen this (and many other songs) tabbed out in various keys using various voicings of various chords. Please understand that I am showing you how I understand the song to be played and I am not in any way saying (in my best James Earl Jones’ voice), “THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE.” Those of you who have read my columns for any length of time know that (no pun intended) this is not my style. Not at all. If you have another interpretation of this or any song we go over that you like better than the one I demonstrate, then by all means, please use it. None of our lessons here at Guitar Noise is meant to be THE authorized of anything. These are just arrangements, ways to play the song as you would if you were performing by yourself or playing it with another person singing.

So, moving onward, by playing along with the CD, I’ve found Three Marlenas to be in the key of Eb major and also that the two prominent chords are Eb and Ab. Just reading that gives me the heebie jeebies! So, without a second thought about it, I decide to use my capo and find a better key in which to play this song, rather than to subject myself to these particular chords. If you’re not familiar with what a capo is and what it can be used for, I suggest you take a moment and read the column I wrote about a year ago (the one with the incredibly long title(The Underappreciated Art of Using a Capo)) on this subject. It also would be worth your while to check out our article on transposing, Turning Notes into Stone.

When I see the signature of Eb major, my usual choice is to think about playing in the key of D major instead. The key of D is simply a half-step lower in than Eb, so if I put my capo on the first fret of my guitar and strum a D major chord, I am actually playing an Eb major chord. Using the same logic, I realize that a G major chord, played with the capo on the first fret, is now an Ab chord. Our crisis, brought on by the prospect of playing Eb and Ab chords throughout the song, has been averted.

And for the sake of simplicity, we will now discuss this song in terms of the key of D Major. I know that this may be a bit confusing to some of you, especially those just starting out, and I apologize for that. Please feel free to write me and I’ll be happy to go over it in greater detail.

I’m sure that most of you know how to play both the D and the G chords, but I’m going to throw you off a bit here by introducing a different voicing for the G chord that some of you might not be familiar with:

My suggestions as to which fingers to use where on these chords are as follows:

Okay, now let’s take a quick moment and look at this “new” G chord.

As you can see, the only difference between the “standard” G and this particular voicing is the use of the D note (third fret on the B string) instead of the open B string itself. Since we know that the G chord is made up of the G (the root), B (the third) and D (the fifth) notes, you can see that all we’re really doing is changing the number of D notes we’re using in our chord. Some people like to call this a “G5″ or a “G add 5″ but neither of these names makes sense. “G5″ usually means playing what guitarists think of as a G “power chord,” namely, just using the G (root) and D (the fifth. or “5″ if you will) and “add 5″ makes even less sense since the normal G chord already has the D note in it. This new chord voicing is still just a G chord, pure and simple.

But why play this voicing of G in the first place? Well, if any of you have read the column I cowrote with Abel Petneki concerning sustained tones, you might already have a good idea. But I also have something a little more fun and practical in mind.

If you listen to the song on the CD, you could with me that it sounds like there are more than two chords in this song. And you would be right to do so. There is indeed another chord. You can hear it in between the D and G chords, both from D to G and then from G back to D again. It’s a rather peculiar chord at that, isn’t it? It sounds very vague.

What is going on here is we are letting the guitar do some of the chord changing work for us. If you look at the fingering of our D and G chords, you see that, because of this new voicing of the G chord, we don’t have to change the position of our ring finger when we change chords. It stays in one place. So, we’re going to start out with our D chord and then simply remove our index and middle fingers from the strings (all the while keeping the ring finger firmly in place) in preparation of placing them on their new positions on the G chord. And if we strum the strings while doing this, we end up with the following chord:

Do you hear and see what we’re doing? The D note, here being played on the third fret of the B string, is our sustained tone. It links all three of these chords together, serving as an anchor amidst all the changes. And this third chord, the “A7 sus4″ is nothing more than us strumming the guitar in the middle of a chord change! And the cool thing is that it works both ways – from D to G and from G to D. Because the notes involved not only form a chord, but a chord that perfectly fits in as part of the song, it carries us along these changes while creating a transition chord at the same time.

Now, I could call this chord by other names as well, but I am going with “A7 sus4″ because naming it so gives me, in essence, a variation of a I – V – IV chord progression. This is a fairly common progression and it easy to explain to someone playing along with me on an instrument other than a guitar. Now, having explained that, I’ll change my mind (and simply for a selfish reason!) From here on out, and simply to keep me from writing out “A7 sus4″ all the time, we’ll just call it A. But we all know it’s not really an A chord, okay? Here, then, are all the chords we are going to use:

When you play this progression back and forth, D to A to G to A to D, etc., you should note two things. First, it sounds very smooth and flowing. Second, the reason it sounds so smooth and flowing is not only because of the chord voicing (owing to the fingering), but also because you should be able to play it that way. By releasing your fingers (but not the ring finger!) to get the A chord, you are sort of giving you guitar and yourself some breathing space between the two main chords. And you should also find, even with a minimum of practice, that your changes will come very naturally. You should be able to play this along with the CD (or “at speed,” if you prefer) in no time at all!

Another thing I especially like about this song, from a beginner’s standpoint, anyway, is that it gives you a chance to work on the “range” of your strumming. Each chord has its bass note on a different string: the open D for the D, the open A for the “A” and the G note on the third fret of the low E string for the G chord. As you’re strumming the chords, it’s a good idea to work on concentrating on just how many strings you’re playing with each successive chord.

As for a strumming pattern, this is a fairly easy one to get you started. I also took the liberty of tossing in a percussive stroke (designated by the ” * “ ):

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

A very important thing to notice here is that, after the initial first beat, we’re jumping the gun a bit – changing the next measure’s chord on the half beat before the one. This is called an “anticipation.” You can read all about those in the ”Music Guide Mini-Lesson” that will be up online in the next few weeks or,  if you’d like a head start on the subject, might I suggest reading Dan Lasley’s bass guitar lesson, Playing Along.

Remember that if this particular strumming pattern seems difficult at first, slow everything down and count it out as deliberately as possible. This song, like the others we’ve done up to this point is of a medium tempo. It really won’t take you long at all to get up to speed.

Oh, that strumming pattern and that chord progression is the entire song, music-wise. Here’s the lyrics:

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns,  or even a song, riff or lead you’d like to see covered in a future “Songs For Beginners” article. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Three Marlenas – The Wallflowers was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Welcome, by the way, to the first  Guitar Noise Events Horizon for February 2012. This, as you hopefully know, is our weekly blog post where we do our best to catch you up on upcoming shows featuring members and friends of the Guitar Noise community, taking place all over the world. Or at least wherever and whenever people let us know they’re happening!

Because, as you know, we at Guitar Noise believe that the true power, wonder and beauty of music comes when it gets shared with the world. So whenever you’re out playing, we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

Every Wednesday, we’ll post here about the gigs we know are coming up in the following ten days or so. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend a show should they happen to be in your corner of the world!

Thursday, February 2, 2012

It’s not a show, but it could very easily lead to you having one! The Winter / Spring 2012 Guitar Workshops start this week at the Berkshire Community College at their South County Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. There are three beginners’ classes, two “Step 2″ classes and also a “Jam Class” as well as a Songwriting Workshop being offered at great prices (less than $10 per class). You can also find a beginner’s ukulele class being offered this semester. If you’ve ever wanted to learn to play an instrument, now’s the time! Plus you’ll get to take lessons in person from Guitar Noise’s David Hodge.  Classes meet on either Tuesday or Thursday nights and you get 15 lessons between now and the end of May.

The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York has its weekly open mic from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Doesn’t Madder kicks in February with an 8 PM show at the Conover Tavern, 116 1st Avenue South in Conover, North Carolina.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Doesn’t Madder plays the second of their weekend shows at The Vault, located at 100 South Scales Street in Reidsville, North Carolina. Show starts at 10 PM and the music continues until 2 AM Sunday morning.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Jazz guitarist Sheryl Bailey visits Beantown! She’ll be doing a “duo” show with guitarist Jack Pezanelli at Outpost 186, located at 1861  1/2  Hampshire Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  8 PM start.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Time again for the weekly open mic at The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York. Hosted by singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller, it’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. The open mic runs from 7 to 9 PM and all ages are welcome.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Doesn’t Madder returns to George’s on the Lake, located at 101 Catawba Avenue in Rhodhiss, North Carolina. Show starts at 8:30 PM.

Life Is Drama brings a great night of rock to Heroes West Sports Bar and Grill at Rock Creek Drive in Joliet, Illinois).  8:30 PM start for this show.

Please feel free to email about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. As mentioned, we’ll be posting the latest schedule every Wednesday. We’d love to include you in our listing.

Also feel free to add upcoming dates in the “Comments” section of this thread. That way we’ll be able to add your next performance to our future updates.

We wish you the best with your shows as well as a great time at any show you can attend. Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends in person at long last!

Peace

Events Horizon – Wednesday, February 1, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Time to dip into the “email bag” once again! Today’s question concerns two of the song arrangements from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar:

Hi David

I want to tell you that I’m enjoying your book, a lot, and making some headway in the difficult but fun voyage of learning to play.  It sat on my bookshelf for a few months.  My first impression was that these songs would not be near as much fun as your Guitar Noise songs and, to be frank, “Tom Dooley” and “Banana Boat” reinforced that impression.

Luckily, I picked up your book and CD again, skipped around on the CD and heard many songs I liked.  I have worked my way through half of the book, skipping a few things I already knew or already could do, trying some things I cannot yet do and planning to keep going back and trying (like barre chords).  Your arrangement of songs like “Oh! Susannah,” “Wayfaring Stranger” and “The Cruel War” enable a beginner guitarist to sound good.

I’m struggling with playing both “The Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special” at anywhere near correct tempo.  I’m wondering if this is typical, at my stage of development.  I’ve been working hard at learning the guitar for about eighteen months.  I find fingerpicking style easier (I can do your earlier Guitar Noise version of “Scarborough Fair”) but I do like the sound of the pick, too.  Perhaps, I should concentrate on learning just the fingerpicking style because I do not have the luxury of limitless time.  Any thoughts, David?

Thank you for writing and thank you as well for your kind words concerning The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar. Thank you, too, for giving it a chance! I know that “Tom Dooley” and “The Banana Boat” song are reasonably easy, but it’s hard to come up with something that a total beginning can play easily and still sound like a cool song. I did try to get my publishers on the “Horse with No Name” bandwagon, but they were totally set on using only Public Domain material (or my own songs, which is how I snuck in “Julia and John” at the very end).

With “Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special” you’ve chosen two of the hardest pieces. Not because of the speed but because of the thought behind it. When I recorded both of these songs for the book, my intent was to do something very spontaneous, just as one would when playing a song on the fly. Then came the wonderful task of transcribing it all afterwards!

Of the two, “Gallows Pole” is a little easier because pretty much everything is a variation of the pattern given at the top of page 111. And that’s really the key to playing it at speed - work on just the first two measures at as slow a tempo you need to get the rhythm and the feel comfortably in your fingers. The first measure is totally based on the Am chord, so try to keep that in place – keeping your index and ring fingers very close to the strings after performing the pull-offs. Your middle finger should be at the second fret of the D string even though you don’t play it during the first measure.

Once you’ve played the first measure, then use your ring finger to get the third fret of the A string. Because you’ve not moved your middle finger, you should see that you’ve got two-thirds of a C chord. Pick the A, D and G strings and then slide your fingers up two frets to get the last three notes.

First try doing this without worry at all about the timing. Your object is to get your fingers to perform their assigned task. Once your good with that, then start very slowly and gradually increase your speed. You should find that, with surprisingly less repetition than you’d think, you’re getting faster than you’d imagine.

The strategy with “Midnight Special” is pretty much the same, only you want to work one phrase at a time. For what it’s worth, I’m going to be doing a Guitar Noise step-by-step piece on this arrangement of”Midnight Special,” much in the same manner as the “Oh! Susannah” lesson, sometime in the Spring of 2012. Hopefully that will be of help, too.

I should mention, too, that you can play either of these with just your fingers. I do it all the time. The percussive hits don’t sound quite the same but it still works. If you were to put twenty minutes a day into it I think you’d probably get it all fairly quickly.

I hope this helps and I look forward to chatting with you again.

Peace

Q & A: “Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Okay, now let me welcome you once more to the latest Guitar Noise Events Horizon, our weekly blog post where we do our best to catch you up on upcoming shows featuring members and friends of the Guitar Noise community, taking place all over the world. Or at least wherever and whenever people let us know they’re happening!

Because, as you know, we at Guitar Noise believe that the true power, wonder and beauty of music comes when it gets shared with the world. So whenever you’re out playing, we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

Every Wednesday, we’ll post here about the gigs we know are coming up in the following ten days or so. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend a show should they happen to be in your corner of the world!

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York has its weekly open mic from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Saturday,  January 28, 2012

Marilyn Miller has a solo gig at the Hyde Park Brewery, located at 4076 Albany Post Road in Hyde Park, New York. It’s a great restaurant and bar so come on by and have a great meal to go along with the great music. Show starts at 8 PM.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012 and Thursday, February 2, 2012

It’s not a show, but it could very easily lead to you having one! The Winter / Spring 2012 Guitar Workshops start this week at the Berkshire Community College at their South County Center in Great Barrington, MA. There are three beginners’ classes, two “Step 2″ classes and also a ”Jam Class” as well as a Songwriting Workshop being offered at great prices (less than $10 per class). You can also find a beginner’s ukulele class being offered this semester. If you’ve ever wanted to learn to play an instrument, now’s the time! Plus you’ll get to take lessons in person from Guitar Noise’s David Hodge.  Classes meet on either Tuesday or Thursday nights and you get 15 lessons between now and the end of May.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York has its weekly open mic from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Doesn’t Madder kicks in February with an 8 PM show at the Conover Tavern, 116 1st Avenue South in Conover, North Carolina.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Doesn’t Madder plays the second of their weekend shows at The Vault, located at 100 South Scales Street in Reidsville, North Carolina. Show starts at 10 PM and the music continues until 2 AM Sunday morning.

Please feel free to email about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. As mentioned, we’ll be posting the latest schedule every Wednesday. We’d love to include you in our listing.

Also feel free to add upcoming dates in the “Comments” section of this thread. That way we’ll be able to add your next performance to our future updates.

We wish you the best with your shows as well as a great time at any show you can attend. Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends in person at long last!

Peace

Events Horizon – Wednesday, January 25, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Dear Mr. David Hodge,

I am new to guitar with a few months of experience. I really like Jim Croce’s music, and recently I picked up a DVD by Pete Huttlinger entitled: Learn to Play the Songs of Jim Croce; Guitar Accompaniment and Techniques. I was glancing through the tabs for Time in a Bottle (Maury Muehlelsen’s part for 2nd guitar), and I am confused. Here is the part, the very beginning of it anyway:

 

And here are my questions:

1) Why is there a capo on the fifth fret and why do you think the musician put it there? My observation: The key is C or Am, puts a Capo on the fifth fret, and plays an Am chord on the tenth fret… this does not make sense to me.

2) The chord for the first measure is an Am; however, this chord does not look like a regular Am. Why and what type of chord is this?

3) There are chords I do not recognize since they are not chords I am used to like C, G, D etc.. Why are there weird chords names like D7/F#, E7 (b9) etc..

After making this list, I kinda feel like this song is too hard or difficult for me right now. Anyhow, thanks for helping me. Oh and sorry for the poor display quality of the photo.

Take Care…

You’ve asked a lot of questions and I hope that I can answer them all to the best of my abilities. It’s going to get a little involved, so please don’t hesitate to write again if you’re not sure you understand any of the explanations.

A little bit of background on both the song, capos, and on the different philosophies people have when writing out notation:

Time in a Bottle is a song that changes keys. The verses are in the key of D minor (relative minor of the key of F major) and the choruses switch to the key of D major. Many of the intricate arrangements of Jim Croce’s songs are the result of the interplay between his guitar part and that of Maury Muehelsen. Muehelsen. A typical technique of guitar-duos is to have one guitar playing notes on one section of the neck while the second uses a capo to play higher up. This allows both guitars to make use of the ringing open strings and create some cool harmonies. They do the same sort of thing on I’ll Have To Say I Love You In A Song, with Croce playing in open position and Muehelsen playing with a capo on the seventh fret, if I remember correctly.

As you know from reading some of the earlier posts here on this blog, not to mention my Guitar Noise articles on capos and transposing, when someone plays a second guitar part with a capo, they use the familiar open chord shapes but the capo itself means that they are playing in a different key. Usually, when someone tabs out a guitar part for a guitar with a capo, they use the open position chords as the reference.

Hopefully all of this will help tie in to your questions. So here goes:

1) Why is there a capo on the fifth fret and why do you think the musician put it there? My observation: The key is C or Am, puts a Capo on the fifth fret, and plays an Am chord on the tenth fret… this does not make sense to me.

As mentioned, when we put a capo on the guitar, we raise the chord by the number of half steps equal to the fret where the capo is placed. So putting the capo on the fifth fret means that we have raised all the open string notes (and chords) by five half-steps, which is two-and-a-half steps. So playing an Am chord with the capo on the fifth fret means that you’re playing Dm, which is the key of the verses of Time in a Bottle. If you’d prefer, the key of C is raised two-and-a-half steps, which means it’s the key of F (relative major of D minor), so we’re still good whichever way you’d like to look at it.

We’ll get to the “Am chord on the tenth fret” in just a moment…

As to the “why,” there are all sorts of possible reasons, but the most likely would be that since the song switches between D minor and D major, the second guitar would want to find a place where playing in both the minor and major of a particular key worked out well. For open position chords, the easiest keys to play in both major and minor are D, A and E. Playing in E minor and E major, with the first guitar playing D minor and D major, would mean using a capo at the tenth fret, which most people tend to avoid as it really cramps the amount of space available for one’s fingers.

You’ll notice in both the verses and the chorus of this song that Muehelsen makes use of many open chords as well as arpeggios that make use of open strings. Without a capo, he’d find many of the fingerings for the voicings he wanted to use close to impossible to play.

2) The chord for the first measure is an Am; however, this chord does not look like a regular Am. Why and what type of chord is this?

Any chord is a combination of specific notes. A minor is made up of A, C and E (D minor is made up of D, F and A), so anywhere you can find the notes A, C and E on the fretboard, you are playing an Am chord. For instance (and we’re not using a capo here for this example), if you put your ring finger on the tenth fret of the B string (which is A), your index finger on the ninth fret of the G string (which is E) and your middle finger on the tenth fret of the D string (which is C) and strum all six strings, or even just from the A string down, you’re playing an Am chord.

When two guitarists play together, the harmony is often shared between them. It is implied by all the notes that both guitarists are playing together, so one (or both) guitarists don’t have to play all the notes of the chords involved. In this case, Muehelsen is playing just the A (fifth fret of the E string) and E (fifth fret of the B string) notes of the chord. Taking the capo into account, he’s actually playing D (tenth fret of the high E) and A (tenth fret of the B), so he’s playing two notes of Dm, while Croce’s guitar has the F note (first fret of the high E) as part of an arpeggio.

The chord itself is still Am (Dm with the capo), it is simply a different voicing of the chord, meaning that the notes are being played in different places on the neck than they are played with open position chords.

3) There are chords I do not recognize since they are not chords I am used to like C, G, D etc.. Why are there weird chords names like D7/F#, E7 (b9) etc..

Guitarists are peculiar in that most of them insist that they don’t want or need music theory, but then they go out of their way to describe chords in such a way that they have to know music theory in order to understand them. It’s actually quite amusing when one thinks about it.

What’s going on with the weird chord names is that whoever has written out the chords has decided to base the choice of chord name on the harmony of both Muehelsen’s and Croce’s guitar parts, and then transpose it to Am (or A major in the chorus) to go along with the use of the capo. Things like “D7/F#” are simply “slash chords,” meaning that they are meant to be played with a note other than the chord’s root note in the bass (you can read more about these in the Guitar Noise Easy Song’s for Beginners’ Lesson on Eleanor Rigby, among others). Others, like the “E7(b9)” are based on both guitar parts being played together. You truly don’t need to worry about this too much at present. It shouldn’t keep you from learning the song.

I know that this is a basic and simple explanation. It could get a lot more involved and detailed, but I have been working on a single guitar arrangement lesson of this song for Guitar Noise for quite a while now and it will hopefully be up online sometime this coming spring. And, again hopefully it should answer more of your questions and also give you a way to play a combination of both Muehelsen’s and Croce’s guitar parts as well as an appreciation of how they went about creating their two-guitar arrangement.

As I mentioned, please feel free to again if you need a better explanation than the one I’ve given you. But I do hope this does help you to get started on learning this wonderful song.

Looking forward to chatting with you again.

Peace

If you’ve got any questions, we at Guitar Noise are always happy to answer them. Just send any of your questions to David at dhodgeguitar@aol.com. He (or another Guitar Noise contributor) may not answer immediately but he will definitely answer!

Q & A: “Time in a Bottle” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

I’d like to start with an announcement: Tom McLaughlin and Life is Drama have made it to the final ballot stage for the readers’ favorites poll of the Chicago suburban magazine,  Nitelife. If you can, take a moment and vote for Life is Drama for “Best Cover Band” and “Best Rock Band,” and be sure to also add Mindi for  “Best Female Singer” and Rob for “Best Drummer.” And, of course, be sure to vote for Tom (who goes by “Tommy Gunz”) for “Best Guitarist.” You’ll find the ballot by going here: http://www.nitelife.org/ and then click on the banner that says “Best of the Burbs.” On behalf of Tom and Life is Drama, we thank you in the Guitar Noise community for helping out!

Because, as you know, we at Guitar Noise believe that the true power, wonder and beauty of music comes when it gets shared with the world. So whenever you’re out playing, we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

Every Wednesday, we’ll post here about the gigs we know are coming up in the following ten days or so. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend a show should they happen to be in your corner of the world!

This is the sort of week where I wish I had the ability to be in more than one place at a time. It’s not every Thursday that there are three acts in different parts of the country featuring people I’ve had the honor and pleasure to make music with!

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Tonight’s the Thursday night song circle-style open mic at The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Tony Nuccio (my favorite lefty guitarist!) is playing at Goose Island Wrigleyville Brewpub (located at 3535 North Clark, mere steps down the street from Wrigley Field) in Chicago, Illinois as part of a three-act acoustic evening. Catch Tony, along with Gretchen Erickson and Model N, when the music starts at 8:30 PM.

And in Princeton, New Jersey, you can catch Greg Nease of 2nd Shift Music playing with Chris Jankowski and Kevin Marcoux at Triumph Brewing Company, located at 138 Nassau Street.  Music starts at 9 PM.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Doesn’t Madder rocks out at Rockin’ Risto’s Place, 123 North Center Street in Statesville, North Carolina. Music goes on from 9 PM until midnight.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Life Is Drama, with longtime Guitar Noise Community member Tom McLaughlin, lights up Shakers, located out in the middle of nowhere (that’s 121 West Stevenson Road in Ottawa, Illinois). 9 PM start for this show.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York has its weekly open mic from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Please feel free to email about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. As mentioned, we’ll be posting the latest schedule every Wednesday. We’d love to include you in our listing.

Also feel free to add upcoming dates in the “Comments” section of this thread. That way we’ll be able to add your next performance to our future updates.

We wish you the best with your shows as well as a great time at any show you can attend. Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends in person at long last!

Peace

Events Horizon – Wednesday, January 18, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

But there is one tip that I’d like to pass on to you. Try to form your chords from the “bottom” up whenever possible. That is, from the bass note to the high note. More often than not, you change chords on the downstroke, so you want to get the lowest notes in place right before you strum. Take a G chord as an example. If you get your fingers on the low E (6th) and A (5th) strings just as you start your strum, you have a lot of time to get that finger on the high E (1st) string before you actually strike it. I know that it may not seem like a lot of time to you right now, but trust me – it is more than enough.

Another thing to remember is to minimize your finger movement whenever possible. If you go over the chord lesson in our first Absolute Beginner piece, you notice that I gave you fingerings deliberately chosen to allow for easy switching between chords. But there is no one correct way. Take the time to try out different things yourself. And also remember that whatever way you come up with, be open to exploring others.

Check out our absolute beginners lesson on chords Absolute Beginners Part 1: Chords.

If you’ve got any questions, we at Guitar Noise are always happy to answer them. Just send any of your questions to David at dhodgeguitar@aol.com. He (or another Guitar Noise contributor) may not answer immediately but he will definitely answer!

Guitar Tip: Faster Chord Changing was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #18 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• Guitar Noise Featured Artist
• Topic of the Month
• New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
• Great Advice from Great Teachers
• Emails? We Get Emails!
• Events Horizon
• Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

So, did you notice that I still had 2011 in the date of our last newsletter? The one which started out with the bold “In case you’ve not been told, it is now 2012″ as its opening line? If not, forget I even mentioned it! Instead, let me welcome you to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. And I hope that your New Year has been a good one so far.

We’ve also another New Year coming up! A week from tomorrow, which is Monday, January 23, is Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dragon! If you happen to be born this year or (much more likely) happen to be turning 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84 or 96, then this is your year.

Not that it really has all that much to do with anything, but when Nick was up here in the Berkshires last fall to record some songs, we got breakfast at a local shop that had a zodiac based on various delicatessen items. Turns out I was born in the Year of Chopped Liver. No lie. And I swore I’d never tell what year Nick was born in, so don’t ask!

In case you missed the last newsletter, we’ve brought back “Horse With No Name” to the pages of Guitar Noise. It joins “Hey There, Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page, where each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And at the risk of being predictable, I’d also like to repeat a bit from our last two newsletters concerning the “Sparks of Life” program at New York Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New You. They are looking for volunteer musicians to spread the joy of music to their patients in their various pediatric, physical rehabilitation, geriatric and oncology units. They are very flexible in terms of scheduling and more than willing to work with you to help them brighten the days of their patients. It can be a once-in-a-while gig or a regular ongoing one depending on your schedule.

Any musician, guitarist or otherwise, is more than welcome. You should have a variety of music to play as you’ll be dealing with people from all ages and background. Obviously you’ll also want to have good communication and people skills.

If you live in the Brooklyn area and are willing to help by sharing your talent, please give Amand Nable a call at (718)780-5397, extension 105, or email her at abn9006@nyp.org.

Here’s hoping we can get some of our New York Guitar Noise community members hooked up with Amanda’s program and bring some music to people truly in need of it throughout 2012 and beyond. This is the sort of New Year’s Resolution you might find beneficial to yourself and to many, many others as well.

Finally, just in case you’re wondering exactly what Nick was up here recording last fall, I’m please to announce that I’ve finished another project for Alpha Books. It’s another in their “Complete Idiot’s Guides” series – “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Ukulele” and it will be out in bookstores (online and on earth) on July 3 this summer. Nick recorded vocals for many of the song examples and also contributed an original song of his own (“It’s Not a Love Song”) for the chapter on how to play ukulele in a traditional band setting. We’ll be posting more about this upcoming book, including some cool ukulele lessons not included in the book, later on this spring. And Paul will be posting a link for the book on our bookstore page as soon as it’s available. As with all my previous books, I cannot thank the Guitar Noise community enough for all their support. I hope you’ll find this new to be up to the high standards you set.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

The plan is to have Eddie Van Halen be the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of January and Paul’s whipping up a bio of this celebrated guitarist and you’ll be able to read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

On top of everything else, we’re doing some revamping of our Guitar Noise Topic Pages. For over fifteen years now we’ve been a premiere guitar tutorial website and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of beginner guitarists have found help and advice to start them on their musical adventures. We’re going to be putting the best of all our beginner lessons together in one place. So whether you are totally starting from scratch or whether you’re just looking to get some beginner advice for a particular topic like finger picking or basic theory, you’ll now find them all in one easy step.

Stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” – Beginner Guitar Lessons – up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Gustavo Assis-Brasil – Hybrid Picking Lines & Licks For Guitar For All Styles
by David Hodge

An excellent companion book for Gustavo Assis-Brasil’s “Hybrid Picking for Guitar.” A great source for lead guitarist whether you use hybrid picking or not.

Andrew DuBrock – Easy Fingerpicking Guitar
A Beginner’s Guide to Essential Patterns & Techniques
by David Hodge

“Easy Fingerpicking Guitar” has to be the best step-by-step fingerpicking tutorial for beginners that exists. You’ll learn great technique immediately.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 4
by Tom Serb

Believe it or not, scales are your friend. There is no reason scales should scare or confuse guitar players and with Tom’s help we’re going prove that. Part 3 covers various the Major Scale, which is considered by most musicians to be the most important one you can learn.

Adding Some Personal Touches
by David Hodge

Our lesson of “Horse With No Name” continues with a advice on how to spice up your strumming as well as a look at the solo from the original recording.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re incredibly lucky to have a good number of great guitar teachers as members of the the Guitar Noise community. We’re even luckier to be able to have them contribute to Guitar Noise News on a regular basis!

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 6

Modes

Modes are probably the single most confusing element of music for guitarists. There’s a ton of mis-information out there, which just makes things worse. But they’re not that difficult to understand and use if they’re approached properly.

What we think of today as “modes” are simply scales. Several of them are very old – the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes were used in Gregorian chants written over 1500 years ago. At the time, they weren’t called “modes” (at the time, a mode was actually a rhythm!), but the word was first used in the 6th century by a theorist named Boethius in translating some 1st century Greek music theory. About 300 years later, a monk named Hucbald applied the term to the already existing church scales, and we’ve called them “modes” on and off since then.

The church modes were simply considered different scales that composers could use in creating chants. There wasn’t any relationship between them, and no one thought of them as the same notes. That changed in 1547, when a guy named Heinrich Glarens (or Henricus Glareanus as he called himself in Latin) realized that the four church modes and two secular scales – the major and natural minor – made use of the same notes. Glarens created all the confusion by organizing the six scales this way:

C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C = the major scale

D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D = the Dorian “mode”

E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E = the Phrygian “mode”

F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F = the Lydian “mode”

G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G = the Mixolydian “mode”

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A = the natural minor scale

Since the four church scales had Greek names, Glarens decided the major and minor scales should also have Greek names; he called the major scale the “Ionian mode” and named the natural minor the “Aeolian mode”. He also theorized that there should be a scale which started with B:

B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B

Glarens called this one the “Locrian mode”. That’s pronounced “luh-cree-in”, “lock-ree-in” or “low-cree-in”; I use “lock-ree-in”, but I’ve heard different theory professors use all three… I suppose it depends on where you went to school! He quickly discarded the scale as useless in practice, but it remained a part of music theory.

On to how to use them… I first encountered a mention of modes in a book on rock guitar in the early 70s, accompanied with a brief explanation of Glaren’s classification and a few exercises. They seemed interesting, but it wasn’t enough information for them to actually be useful to me. Then I headed off to college, and modes were covered in a music history class – we had to learn the names of them, again by Glaren’s system: test questions included things like “which mode begins on the third note of a major scale?” I tried my best to use them on my guitar, but they really didn’t sound different from other scales.

Then I took improvisation lessons from Paul Zibits, who still teaches – he’s currently with California State University at Long Beach. I told him the problem I was having, and he told me I was doing it wrong – I was focusing on a related scale – trying to play F Lydian while I was thinking in C major, the “related” major scale. Since modes are scales, and scales relate their pitches to the key note, I needed to be thinking in F, not C. That’s the whole trick!

So let’s start by looking at the F major scale and the F Lydian scale:

F-G-A-Bb-C-D-E-F = F major

F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F = F Lydian

The only note that’s different is the B. Looking at Lydian as a scale formula, it’s 1-2-3-#4-5-6-7. All you have to do to play a Lydian scale is to take a major scale and raise the fourth note! Here’s how it would finger in second position:

(2)-(3)-(5)
(3)-(5)
2-4-5
2-4-5
(2)-3-5
(2)-(3)-(5)

And in fifth position, with a shift on the third and fourth strings:

5-7-8
5-7-8
4-5-7
4-5-7
5-7
(5)-(7)-8

I’m sure you can apply this logic to the other positions of the major scale.

The Mixolydian mode works out the same way:

G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G = G major

G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G = G mixolydian

This means the mixolydian scale is 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7, or the major scale with a flatted 7th. Here’s G Mixolydian in 2nd position:

1-3-5
3-5
2-4-5
2-3-5
2-3-5
(1)-3-5

There are two important things to take away from our look at modes so far:

1. Modes are just scales. If you’re going to relate them to something, relate them to a scale with the same key note; any other approach is extra thinking at best, and musically misleading at worst.

2. There’s no such thing as a “modal fingering”. We’ve already seen that in 2nd position you can play in C major (C Ionian), G Mixolydian, or F Lydian. We can actually play almost ANY mode in this position, and that’s going to be true anywhere on the guitar. If you’re thinking in fingerings, you’re not thinking in sound – so your results will probably seem mechanical.

Time for one quick detour – when I say you can play “almost” any mode in this position, some will be easy, some hard, just like the many varieties of the major scale fingering. The ones that will be impossible will be the ones that are “related” to Eb major. Because of the guitar’s tuning, none of the 2nd fret notes (F#/Gb, B, E, A, C#/Db, F#/Gb) are in the Eb major scale (Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C-D-Eb). I call this the “guitar’s gap”; each major scale has exactly one position (and possibly its octave) with no notes.

The remaining modes could also be compared to the major scale, but the ones that are left all have something in common – a flatted third. (The Ionian mode is the major scale, and the Aeolian mode is the natural minor; we’ve covered both of those earlier)

D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D = D major

D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D = D Dorian

1-2-b3-4-5-6-b7

E-F#-G#-A-B-C#-D#-E = E major

E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E = E Phrygian

1-b2-b3-4-5-b6-b7

B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#-B = B major

B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B = B Locrian

1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7

Since each of the remaining modes has a b3, I find it easiest to treat them as alterations of the natural minor scale.

D-E-F-G-A-Bb-C-D = D natural minor (relative to F major)

D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D = D Dorian

Compared to the natural minor, Dorian has a raised sixth. So if you want to play in A Dorian, just take the A natural minor and raise the sixth – make all your F notes sharp. Here’s fifth position:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
5-7
5-7-9
5-7-9
5-7-8

Or you could shift on the fourth and third strings:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
4-5-7
4-5-7
5-7
5-7-8

Next up is Phrygian:

E-F#-G-A-B-C-D-E = E natural minor (relative to G major)

E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E = E Phrygian

Compared to the natural minor, Phrygian has a b2. To play in A Phrygian, think in A minor, and flat the 2nd (B):

5-(6)-(8)
5-6-8
5-7
5-7-8
5-7-8
5-6-8

The final mode, Locrian, is the only one that requires changing two notes from the natural minor:

B-C#-D-E-F#-G-A-B = B natural minor (relative to D major)

B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B = B Locrian

There are two ways you can approach this one, mentally… you can either alter two tones from the natural minor scale, or if you’ve got the other modes down cold first (which I’d recommend), you can alter ONE note from the Phrygian – simply play Phrygian and flat the 5th. Here’s how A Locrian will shape up in fifth position:

5-(6)-(8)
6-8
5-7-8
5-7-8
5-6-8
5-6-8

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy, at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Emails? We Get Emails!

We’ve not dipped into the “email bag” for a bit (not that there haven’t been questions! not a day passes without at least two or three!) so I thought I’d share this one, concerning the CAGED system of learn and other things, with you all:

Hi Dave,

A couple questions, if you don’t mind!

A) Are you familiar with the whole “CAGED fretboard layout” (I’m 99% sure you are!) and what is the “best” way to go about memorizing/utilizing this?? I rack my brain every night, but always feel I’m one piece short of the puzzle!

B) What is the best methodology for learning to sing & play, simultaneously?? Metronome? “Hearing both guitar and vocals, simultaneously”, etc.?

C) Not to be vague, but how can you, objectively, determine if you have the “raw talent” to rock professionally?? If at all.

Thanks for writing.

In regard to “Question A” about the CAGED fretboard layout. While this is a standard traditional way for guitarists to learn their way around the fretboard, for the average guitarist, it can be a lot to take in at once. That’s one reason why I first try to work with students to get through three forms of the CAGED system first, namely the “E,” “D,” and “A” parts of CAGED. Why? Because it’s easy to associate these three shapes with open chords that you already know and use a lot. You might want to check out the article at Guitar Noise called “Moving On Up” to get you started.

As for singing and playing at the same time, most people have troubles with this initially. We have quite a few lessons (including a few of our Podcasts) at Guitar Noise that deal with this topic. You can find them here: Singing Lessons.

Personally, I find it easiest to do this by getting the rhythm of a song down first. A lot of beginners strum to the melody of the song when the reality is that the rhythm has to hold steady while the melody dances around it on its own rhythm. If you can’t hold the rhythm steady you’re always going to have problems doing both strumming and singing.

And as to the “raw talent” needed to rock professionally, well, there’s a lot of things that I have to ask about that. First off, what do you mean by “rock professionally.” There are a lot of people who make their living playing music and only doing that, but it’s more of the living you might associate with being a tradesman like a contractor or a plumber (or even a teacher) more than with the dream life style of a rock god (name your favorite band or guitarist here).

More times than not, the reality is that it’s not about talent but rather about the business effort one puts into making music his or her business. It helps to be good, but that’s secondary to spending pretty much all your time marketing and getting yourself gigs. Essentially you (or your band) is a small business and you have to be willing to put all the effort and energy into it like someone who owns a restaurant or a store or someone who is a commission sales rep does.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to email again with any more questions you may have. I look forward to chatting with you again.

Peace

Events Horizon

One thing we at Guitar Noise would really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from today through January 22.

As always, you should feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig information (dates, venues, locations and times) to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. Remember that we’ll be posting these every Wednesday so plan accordingly!

And who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!That’s how Nick got to meet Lars when the Flea Market Band (all the way from Norway) played in Washington DC.

Random Thoughts

Imagine for a moment that you’ve taken a trip to a place where the majority of the people don’t speak your language. And imagine that you enjoyed the trip so much that you’ve decided to spend some serious time there, seeing the sites, enjoying the food and culture, taking part in the life that you find attractive enough to want to be part of it.

Would you think twice about learning how to say “hello” or “thank you” or “please” in whatever the native language happened to be? I highly doubt it. You’d probably make a point of doing so. And simply being there every day would give you the chance to pick up new words every day. Learning one new word a day, even for the most language-challenged of us (that would include me!) isn’t that strenuous a goal.

And before you knew it, you’d have more and more of the language in your ears and head. Obviously you wouldn’t be fluent at it for quite some time, but at least you’d have the ability to communicate. And you’d improve on your abilities with each use of the language.

I think that most of us would agree on this scenario, even though I suspect some would be more of the “what kind of person would choose to live in a foreign place and not learn at least enough of the language to get by comfortably?” Whatever, the point is that learning something, anything about your surroundings would be to your advantage. If not today, certainly at some point in the future The only reason that anyone would not do so is simply that one chooses not to.

So why shouldn’t we apply this logic to learning to read music? I’ve mentioned this in past newsletters, I’m sure, but it bears repeating. The true reason most guitarists don’t learn to read music is simply because they don’t want to. And I can respect that, provided they are being truthful about that reason and not dressing it up as “I don’t because I don’t need it” or “I don’t because it’s not necessary” or “I don’t because someone-who-s-been-in-the-music-business-all-his-life-doesn’t-and-he’s-doing-okay.”

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of how I could possibly know what I might need in the future or what is or isn’t necessary to my lifelong enjoyment of playing guitar. And since I’m not that one particular “someone-who’s-been-in-the-music-business-all-his-life” I certainly wouldn’t be so presumptuous to put myself on the same plane as my idol.

What I do know is that any musical knowledge that I have learned over the years has always helped to make me a better player at some point down the road. Not always immediately, but definitely at some point. If I had only learned what I needed to know for that moment, it would have taken me another dozen decades or so to get to the point where I am now. Not that I’m even a fraction of a percent of where I would like to be as a player.

If you’re still looking for a New Year’s Resolution, I’d like to suggest learning a new language. You can start out very easily and learn one note a day. If you do, you’ll have all the vocabulary you need for guitar music in less than a month. Then it’s all about practicing and using your vocabulary and you can find lots of ways to do that.

And, as with all your skills and knowledge, you’ll find ways to use that will surprise and hopefully delight you!

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 19 – January 15, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

But at some point, the individual personality of the fledgling guitarist starts to emerge. It may be in very minute details, like a favorite picking pattern or a fill that he or she does extremely well and (consequently throws in wherever the situation allows). From these basic riffs, fills and rhythm patterns will blossom leads and more complex techniques. We call this growth a musician’s style.

Liner Notes: America

A Horse With No Name by America is a classic folk-rock song written by Dewey Bunnell. This song bears some resemblance to Neil Young’s folky acoustic rock. Ironically, back in 1972 “A Horse With No Name” is the song that replaced Neil’s “Heart of Gold” as the number one single in America.

Learn the basic chords and strumming of this song in Part 1 – The Simplest Song.

If you enjoyed this lesson you will also like learning some of the other songs from our Easy Songs for Beginners Lessons.

So how and when does one start to develop a style? Well, personally (obviously), I think that one’s style starts at day one. When you learned your first song, did you copy the strumming pattern right off the recording? Maybe you followed your guitar teacher’s suggestions. Maybe you came up with something all your own. And maybe you did all of the above.

It’s like cooking or telling a joke. You get the basics from somewhere and then you add your own touches (or not) to make it fit your tastes (or to cater to someone else’s tastes). Well, that’s essentially the same thing that happens with your playing.

In our lesson on “Horse With No Name,” you learned the basics of the song along with some simple strumming patterns. Today we’re going to work on adding a bit of accessories to the basic model. Feel free to use any of the ideas, riffs or leads we develop here or use them as a foundation on which to create your own musical ideas.

Picking And Choosing

It amy seem that I probably never play the guitar ’cause I seem to spend so much time thinking about things. The reality is that there are a lot of things to think about before (and while) playing. Most of it takes less time to deal with then you will spend in reading this sentence. Do I know the song? How well do I know this song? How many people are playing the song? What instruments are they going to play? What sort of role should I play? What role do I want to play? Do I intend to sing? What key is the song in? Do I want to play it in that key or use a capo? What chords changes are there going to be? Will those chord changes affect the scales I plan to use? Do I need to rethink my fills or leads? What sort of tone or effects do I think will work? All this (and more) passes through my head when I’m getting ready to strum the first chord or join in with a fill or sing a harmony part or whatever.

Let’s start with the obvious things first. As we discussed last time, the song is in the key of E minor and consists entirely of two chords: the aforementioned Em and the mysterious Dadd6add9. Each chord lasts for four beats; there is no variations to the pattern. It truly doesn’t get much simpler than this.

You’ll also recall that last time, we came up with this simple strumming pattern:

Listening or playing the song again, I realize that virtually all the singing takes place in the Em measures of any given verse. The last two beats of an Dadd6add9 measure, except during the chorus, are usually free of vocal traffic. This makes those spaces particularly attractive spots to throw in a fill. I don’t have to worry about stepping on the vocal line (which could be bad) or trying to sing and play something a little complex at the same time (which, in my case, could be really bad!).

Now a fill, as we discussed in Tricks Of The Trade, need not be some flash of technical wizardry. It can be something as simple as a well placed hammer-on:

I could easily use either of these fills while playing the song by myself or while playing with someone else. If I trust my fellow guitarist(s) with the rhythm, and if someone else were singing the lead, I might attempt something slightly more complicated, like any of these:

Again, there’s nothing phenomenally complicated here. Fill A is an “expanded” version of our first fill. Fill B utilizes a slide from the A note to the B and then some pick-offs to get us back again. More (and simpler) pick-offs are used in Fill C while, a combination of slides, pick-off and hammer-ons is used for Fill D. Fill E is something I might use if there is no bass player and I want to give a bit more interesting bottom to the song.

Mood is important, too. If I think it’s important to have something to steady the beat, then I will not only play something simple, but play the same one over and over again. If I’m being a bit playful, then who knows what fill might pop up at its designated place.

Let me stress that these are not “be all and end all” transcriptions. Any riff or fill you learn is meant to be played with, to be tinkered with so that you can use it when and where you think it might add a bit of zest to a song. Add an additional note or two here or there. Stretch or shrink the timing to your liking. Think of a fill as silly putty, if you will. But above all, have fun.

The Origin Of The Species

Ah, but I hear someone asking the age-old question, “Where do they come from? If I only have notes, how do I turn them into a fill or a lead?” This answer is going to really disappoint some of you (and really excite others). There is no “formula.” You simply arrange the notes into a way that (A) you can play, (B) that sounds good, to you at least, and (hopefully) (C) that fits the song.

Points A and B are almost constantly evolving as you learn to play. By starting out with riffs and fills, you subconsciously develop playing patterns, just as you do with strumming patterns. As a consequence, certain things might be easier for you to play than others. Some people learn “the box” and work it to death. Eric Clapton has mentioned in interviews that he tried to learn as many riffs and leads as he could off records and then worked on incorporating them (or altered versions of them) into the music he was playing.

Notes (and the patterns in which we play them) are often dictated by scales. The scales are (again, usually) determined by the tonality and the modality of the song itself. This is where things can get a bit confusing. Take Horse With No Name, for example. The song is in E minor. E minor is the relative minor of G major. So if we were to look at the music for this song, it will undoubtedly be written with one sharp (F#) on the staff. And this is indeed the case.

But, as we’ve read in Scales Within Scales, there are many E minor scales and it is conceivable that we don’t want to even work with any of them. How do we choose what to use? In most cases, the music will initially do that for us. Since there are only two chords used in the song, let’s look at the make up of each:

Remember, too, that we do not play all the Dadd6add9 notes on the guitar. With the fingering used in the song, the G# and C# are eliminated from the chord.

Technically, we can make the case that a G could easily stand in place of the G#, especially if we call decide to call our Dadd6add0 an F#m (b)13. This would be much in keeping the center of the song in E minor and that is something that is not open to debate. Everything about the song – the chords, the melody and the harmonies – dictate that the tonality of this song is E minor. The Em chord (with its notes of E, G and B) is its tonal center.

But the “flavor,” or modality, is still up for grabs. Looking at all these notes (and eliminating the G# for the reasons we’ve discussed), I see that there are two sharps (F# and C#) to deal with. Two sharps dictates the key of D major. Again referring to Scales Within Scales (or to our soon to be new-and-improved scales and modes page), I know that in this scenario I can use an E Dorian scale in order to get the notes that I want.

Another question, though: Why can’t I simply use the D major scale? What is the difference between the D major scale and the E Dorian scale? And the answer to this is probably as close to Zen as any answer I’ve ever given you: There is no difference between the two and there is every difference. Here’s why:

Each note in the E dorian scale has an exact counterpart in the D major scale. But because you start (and end) one scale on D and the other on E changes the whole color of the scale. If you refuse to believe that, try singing each scale note for note (and use an instrument to accompany you). Sing “do, re, mi…” if you like or simply to phrases. By making E the focal point (the “I,” “do” or root) of the scale, by making E the “center” of tonality, you change how each and every note corresponds and interacts. Yes, for all intents and purposes, you are playing the notes of the D major scale but they no longer have anything to do with that particular tonality. This is a difficult concept to grasp and we will be devoting more time to it this winter, but I hope this gets you started to think in the right direction. You can check out any of our many articles on the subject here at Guitar Noise, such as Part 6 of our Turning Scales into Solos series.

Take a look at the lead from the original recording and you should see that it’s pretty much created from simply going up and down the E Dorian scale:

It’s important to point out here that this lead finishes with three different acoustic guitars playing lead in the final two measures. One trills away on the E note at the twelfth fret of the high E string (as shown in the last example) while the other two play a series of descending triplets like this:

It’s close to impossible to play all three of these guitar parts at once on a single guitar, which is one of the reasons why you shouldn’t worry a lot about playing everything according to the original recording. However, you can use the open high E string as a droning note and play one of the other two guitar sequences an octave lower as well, las in the first two of the following these examples:

The last line of the above example uses the original “3rd Soloing Guitar” line from Example 5 and pairs it with the open high E string. You might find this the easiest of the three to play.

Making adjustments of this nature is part of how you develop your own style. It’s also a perfect example of what I told you at the beginning of this section. Point A, being “what I can play,” will (hopefully) always be improving and, because of that, my leads will become more interesting (technically and musically) as I evolve as a guitarist. And as I expand my musical tastes (and abilities), “what sounds good” (Point B) will also change radically. It’s up to me to make sure that Point C (“fitting the lead to the song”) follows suit.

This is how your “style” develops. It is a natural process that will occur as fast or as slow as your musical abilities do. Let it happen.

Sharing The Wealth

And then share it with the world. I can tend to go on and on about things, but this will always bear repeating: music is meant to be shared. It is its nature. The high that you get from playing is amplified enormously when playing for and (more so) with others.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or topics you’d like to see covered in future columns. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

More in this series

Learn the basic chords and strumming of this song in Part 1 – The Simplest Song.

A Horse With No Name – Adding Some Personal Touches was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

As you know, we at Guitar Noise believe that the true power, wonder and beauty of music comes when it gets shared with the world. So whenever you’re out playing, we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

Every Wednesday, we’ll post here about the gigs we know are coming up in the following ten days or so. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend a show should they happen to be in your corner of the world!

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York has its weekly open mic from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Doesn’t Madder has a 8:30 PM show at George’s on the Lake, 101 Catawba Avenue in Rhodhiss, North Carolina. Music goes on until midnight.

Here in the Berkshires, you’ll find Trice Atchison singing some classic jazz and blues standards at the Brick House Pub, located at 425 Park Street in Housatonic, Massachusetts. She’ll be backed by Richard Evans on piano, Roger Suters on bass and the incomparable Don Mikkelssen on trombone. Music starts at 7:30 p.m.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Tonight’s the Thursday night song circle-style open mic at The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Tony Nuccio (my favorite lefty guitarist!) is playing at Goose Island Wrigleyville Brewpub (located at 3535 North Clark, mere steps down the street from Wrigley Field) in Chicago, Illinois as part of a three-act acoustic evening. Catch Tony, along with Gretchen Erickson and Model N, when the music starts at 8:30 PM.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Doesn’t Madder rocks out at Rockin’ Risto’s Place, 123 North Center Street in Statesville, North Carolina. Music goes on from 9 PM until midnight.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Life Is Drama, with longtime Guitar Noise Community member Tom McLaughlin, lights up Shakers, located out in the middle of nowhere (that’s 121 West Stevenson Road in Ottawa, Illinois). 9 PM start for this show.

Please feel free to email about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. As mentioned, we’ll be posting the latest schedule every Wednesday. We’d love to include you in our listing.

Also feel free to add upcoming dates in the “Comments” section of this thread. That way we’ll be able to add your next performance to our future updates.

We wish you the best with your shows as well as a great time at any show you can attend. Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends in person at long last!

Peace

Events Horizon – Wednesday, January 11, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Finger picking freaks some beginning guitarists out. It can seem so complicated and involved and it’s easy to hear an accomplished player performing some finger style wizardry and think that you’ll never even begin to sound that good.

Fortunately, Andrew DuBrock’s latest guitar tutorial book, Easy Fingerpicking Guitar – A Beginner’s Guide to Essential Patterns & Techniques, does a thorough job of giving the beginning guitarist the necessary basics to start exploring all the possibilities of finger style guitar.

Each step of basic fingerpicking is presented in a simple sequence. You begin by getting your thumb to serve as your bass player, picking out the notes on the three low strings. Then Andrew gets you to add in your index finger and to have both the thumb and the index finger work in tandem. Once you are confident that you can use your thumb and index finger on various chords that involve playing different combinations, he then teaches you how to add in your middle finger (working solely with the thumb) and then the ring finger (again, just with the thumb to start with).

Next, Andrew guides you through is using various combinations of fingers in conjunction with the thumb. Before you know it you are employing all your fingers to create some simple (and beautiful!) finger picking. He also introduces you to alternating bass patterns and discusses how to adapt your finger picking patterns to bring out the tonal highlights of different chords.

You may consider Easy Fingerpicking Guitar a “prequel” to Andrew’s excellent book on Travis Picking. After going through Easy Fingerpicking Guitar you’ll be more than prepared to tackle on Travis picking or any of the many fingerstyle songs you’ve been hoping to play.

Peace

Andrew DuBrock – Easy Fingerpicking Guitar – A Beginner’s Guide to Essential Patterns & Techniques was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

This book serves as an excellent companion to Gustavo Assis-Brasil’s Hybrid Picking for Guitar,  which is probably one of the best tutorials you will ever find on the technique of hybrid picking.  As you may already know, hybrid picking is using a combination of both picks and fingers. The thumb and index finger hold the pick and usually play the lower strings (D, A and E) while the other fingers – middle finger, ring finger and pinky – pluck the higher strings. And, as I mentioned in my review of Gustavo’s earlier book, this is a technique used by many artists of many musical styles and genres, from  country to folk and ethnic genres (such as Celtic and African music) as well as blues and jazz.

This book starts out with an introduction to the basic essentials of hybrid picking and then goes through a few pages of basic  exercises to get you into the hybrid picking mindset. The early exercises are meant to ease you in – they are simple and methodically work you through various string combinations in order to warm up your hybrid picking skills. If you’ve not gone through the exercises of Hybrid Picking for Guitar you’ll still be able to handle these. But if you’re serious about learning hybrid picking, do yourself a favor and start with the earlier book!

This book is more about what you can do with hybrid picking than it is about the technique itself. Essentially it gives you close to a hundred pages of various styles of “lines and licks” that you might use for soloing and improvising. The lines are presented according to how they were created, through the use of triads or pentatonic scales or through the use of other modes or intervals. You’ll find melodic lines that emphasize jumping intervals more than an octave, lines that use intervallic sequences and motifs, and modern sounding atonal phrases. And each example is meticulously detailed as to how to play it with hybrid picking. Each pick stroke and each finger gets into the act to produce some beautiful and mesmerizing lead lines.

Even if you’re not into hybrid picking, this book has a lot of ideas for potential soloing material. Better still, Gustavo gives a little explanation with each example of where and how it might best be used. If you think your soloing skills could use a bit of a boost, you’ll find lots of potential help here.

The only drawback is that each example is done in eighth notes – there is no rhythmic variation to any of the lead lines. This is a minor quibble. Anyone who solos well has always got phrasing on his or her mind and the lack of phrasing in the examples allows you to come up with an almost infinite number of possible ways to play any single line.

As with Hybrid Picking for Guitar,  Gustavo put a lot of thought into producing Hybrid Picking Lines & Licks for Guitar. For more details, including how to order your own copy, go to Gustavo’s website.

Peace

Gustavo Assis-Brasil – Hybrid Picking Lines & Licks For Guitar for All Styles was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

To give you some ideas of the music out there (and to give you places to go if you’re in the general area), here is our weekly blog post where we do our best to catch you up on upcoming shows featuring members and friends of the Guitar Noise community, taking place all over the world. Or at least wherever and whenever people let us know they’re happening!

As you know, we at Guitar Noise believe that the true power, wonder and beauty of music comes when it gets shared with the world. So whenever you’re out playing, we’d really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

Every Wednesday, we’ll post here about the gigs we know are coming up in the following ten days or so. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to attend a show should they happen to be in your corner of the world!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Jazz guitarist Sheryl Bailey sits in with the Lea Delaria Quintet at Smoke, 2751 Broadway in New York City, New York.

And there’s the Thursday night song circle-style open mic at The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Sheryl Bailey plays at Bella Luna, 584 Columbus Avenue in New York City, New York along with Jack Wilkins.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Parlor, located at 734 Warren Street in Hudson, New York has its weekly open mic from 7 until 9. It’s a very friendly atmosphere where people can play their own songs or play along with others. Singer / songwriter, Marilyn Miller hosts and all ages are welcome.

And longtime Guitar Noise members Dan and Laura Lasley’s new band, Back to the Well, will be kicking off the Winter Battle of the Bands at The Note, 142 East Market Street, West Chester, Pennsylvania. Music is scheduled to kick off at 8 PM but it’s a good idea to get there a little early!

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Doesn’t Madder has a 8:30 PM show at George’s on the Lake, 101 Catawba Avenue in Rhodhiss, North Carolina. Music goes on until midnight.

Here in the Berkshires, you’ll find Trice Atchison singing some classic jazz and blues standards at the Brick House Pub, located at 425 Park Street in Housatonic, Massachusetts. She’ll be backed by Richard Evans on piano, Roger Suters on bass and the incomparable Don Mikkelssen on trombone. Music starts at 7:30 p.m.

Please feel free to email about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. As mentioned, we’ll be posting the latest schedule every Wednesday. We’d love to include you in our listing.

Also feel free to add upcoming dates in the “Comments” section of this thread. That way we’ll be able to add your next performance to our future updates.

We wish you the best with your shows as well as a great time at any show you can attend. Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends in person at long last!

Peace

Events Horizon – Wednesday, January 4, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #18 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• Guitar Noise Featured Artist
• Topic of the Month
• New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
• Great Advice from Great Teachers
• Events Horizon
• Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

In case you’ve not been told, it is now 2012. Which means I can say hello and welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News,  your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. I hope that, so far at least, your New Year is a good one.

I’ve spent the last week of 2011 with a broken computer, so needless to say I’m in the middle of doing a lot of catching up on things. The plan is to write the newsletter as if everything is going smoothly and according to plan and then to panic and rush about and get as many other things done as possible! So if some of the lessons I mention are not yet up online, please be patient! They will get there as soon as possible. My resolution of not making my life more stressful will obviously have to wait until next year!

First on the to-do list is bringing the latest  song lesson back to the pages of Guitar Noise. And what better way to bring in the New Year than by revisiting the very first of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, namely “Horse With No Name?” This classic song will be joining  “Hey There Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page. Each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text.  Again (and always),  we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And although it’s not a lesson or an article, I’d also like to repeat a bit from our last newsletter concerning the  “Sparks of Life” program at New York Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New You. They are looking for volunteer musicians to spread the joy of music to their patients in their various pediatric, physical rehabilitation, geriatric and oncology units. They are very flexible in terms of scheduling and more than willing to work with you to help them brighten the days of their patients. It can be a once-in-a-while gig or a regular ongoing one depending on your schedule.

Any musician, guitarist or otherwise, is more than welcome. You should have a variety of music to play as you’ll be dealing with people from all ages and background. Obviously you’ll also want to have good communication and people skills.

If you live in the Brooklyn area and are willing to help by sharing your talent, please give Amand Nable a call at (718)780-5397, extension 105, or email her at abn9006@nyp.org.

Here’s hoping we can get some of our New York Guitar Noise community members hooked up with Amanda’s program and bring some music to people truly in need of it throughout 2012 and beyond. This is the sort of New Year’s Resolution you might find beneficial to yourself and to many, many others as well.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

The plan is to have Eddie Van Halen be the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of January and Paul’s whipping up a bio of this celebrated guitarist and you’ll be able to read all about  him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

On top of everything else, we’re doing some revamping of our Guitar Noise Topic Pages. For over fifteen years now we’ve been a premiere guitar tutorial website and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of beginner guitarists have found help and advice to start them on their musical adventures. We’re going to be putting the best of all our beginner lessons together in one place. So whether you are totally starting from scratch or whether you’re just looking to get some beginner advice for a particular topic like finger picking or basic theory, you’ll now find them all in one easy step.  Stop by the Guitar Noise home page and  click on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Keeping A Guitar in Open Tuning
by David Hodge

Is it okay to leave a guitar in open tuning? Or should it be retuned to standard tuning when you’re not playing it? The answer is fairly straightforward.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 3
by Tom Serb

Believe it or not, scales are your friend. There is no reason scales should scare or confuse guitar players and with Tom’s help we’re going prove that. Part 3 covers various Hexatonic Scales.

The Left Way
by David Hodge

There is a right way to play guitar, but is there a left way? Regardless of how you play, a regular guitar book will work with a left-handed guitar.

O Little Town Of Bethlehem
by David Hodge

For this lesson on “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” we show how using two notes of a chord can create a beautiful chord melody arrangement.

Consider…
by David Hodge

It’s quite surprising how many people opt to learn guitar by only using videos and when you think about it logically, you’ll come up with a lot of questions that the videos rarely answer. If you’re serious about learning to play guitar, you’ll want to use as many different sources as you can find. And take in every bit of information you can..

The Top Guitar Noise Posts of 2011
by Paul Hackett

As 2011 comes to a close, we at Guitar Noise are taking a look back at our most popular lessons to find out what interested you, our readers..

How Do I Transpose A Particular Song?
by David Hodge

Another question about capos and transposing songs. How do you know which fret to put the capo on if you’re playing along with another guitar? And what if that other guitar has a capo on a different fret? David gives you some good advice on how to figure it all out!

Horse With No Name
by David Hodge

Our very first “Easy Song for Beginners” lesson returns to the pages of Guitar Noise. You’ll learn the very basics of the song and then get a chance to tinker with the rhythm and the strumming.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re incredibly lucky to have a good number of great guitar teachers as members of the the Guitar Noise community. We’re even luckier to be able to have them contribute to Guitar Noise News on a regular basis!

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 5

Minor scales

Just as we have major and minor chords, we’ve got major and minor scales.  Minor chords and scales have one thing in common – they’ve got a flatted third (when compared to the same major chord or scale).  But there’s also one big difference worth noting: there’s only one kind of major scale.  That’s what makes it so valuable to music theory as a yardstick for measuring other scales and chords – there is never any confusion about what the notes will be for any given application.  On the other hand, there are LOTS of different minor scales!

There’s also one area where major and minor scales overlap: the ‘relative’ major and minor scales can be constructed using the SAME notes.  This concept is called “modality” (as in “modes”), and it can be one of the most confusing aspects of music theory for guitarists.  So before we get into the various types of minor scales, we’re going to take a brief detour back to the pentatonic scale and apply the concept of modality.

Our first position minor pentatonic scale looked like this (in A):

| 5 |   |   | 8 |
| 5 |   |   | 8 |
| 5 |   | 7 |
| 5 |   | 7 |
| 5 |   | 7 |
| 5 |   |   | 8 |

The notes in the scale are A (the root), C (the b3 – because an A major scale’s third is C#), D (the 4th), E (the 5th), and G (the b7, because A major contains G#).  But if we look at the letter names, A-C-D-E-G, we can see that they’re also all part of the C major scale.

These notes can be arranged C-D-E-G-A to create the C major pentatonic scale.  Comparing it to the major scale, we find the formula 1-2-3-5-6.  And here we’ve got a big clue for why this scale is so useful… the major scale notes that are missing are 4 and 7.  I’m going to digress even more here and show you why the pentatonic is the most widely used scale for beginners.

When notes interact with each other, as in simultaneous melodies or notes played against a chord progression, the result is harmony.  And although the word ‘harmony’ implies agreement, that’s not always true in music.  Some sounds agree very well, and we call those “consonant” sounds.  Other notes played in tandem sound more like two cats tied up in a bag; we call those “dissonant” sounds.

What one listener considers pleasing won’t be universal.  That might explain why some folks prefer listening to the Carpenters, while others put on Korn when they want to relax.  So when we classify sounds as consonant or dissonant, we’re really talking about what the average listener perceives.  To complicate things a bit, what the average listener considers consonant or dissonant has changed over time.  Given today’s ears, we can classify intervals (two pitches sounded at the same time) into these broad groups:

Consonant              Mostly consonant         Mostly dissonant          Dissonant
Unison/octave (C-C)    minor 3rd (C-Eb)         Major 2nd (C-D)           minor 2nd (C-Db)
Perfect 4th (C-F)      Major 3rd (C-E)          minor 6th (C-Ab)          tritone (C-F#/Gb)
Perfect 5th (C-G)      Major 6th (C-A)          minor 7th (C-Bb)          Major 7th (C-B)

These are broad categories, and the “mostly” ones will depend on context – a minor 6th may sound just fine in one sequence (especially in a minor key), and not so good in another.  These are the grey areas of music.  But the consonant ones will always sound consonant, and the dissonant ones will always disagree.

Music, like cooking, can be improved when you add a little spice.  Just like cooking, too much spice makes something unfit for human consumption.  Dissonance is the spice of music – you want some, but not too much.  Let’s look at the major scale notes played against each other – upper case “M” is major, lower case “m” is minor.  I’ve also marked the usually dissonant intervals with an asterisk, and the always dissonant intervals with two:

Using the major scale, 20 of the 49 possibilities create some dissonance.  If you’re playing random notes you’ve got about a 40% chance of adding some spice through dissonance. Also notice that two asterisks only appear when one or both of the notes is F or B.  Let’s knock out these notes and see what happens:

Now only 8 of the 25 possible combinations results in dissonance – a 13% chance of adding spice.  And not one of the notes results in a combination that will always be dissonant.

A dissonance in music needs to be ‘resolved’ to feel fulfilled.  A beginning improviser, whose command of the instrument (and his or her ears) isn’t fully developed is playing more or less at random.  If you have a 40% chance of playing a dissonance, you have a 60% chance of resolving it by accident – maybe not in the best method, but at least following it by a consonance.  And 40% x 40% = 16% of the time what you’re playing won’t be immediately resolved.

If we use the pentatonic scale, 87% of our notes are already consonant.  The 13% that aren’t will be followed (again, at random) by notes that resolve 87% of the time.  13% x 13% = less than a 2% chance that you’ll be dragging out the dissonance.  The pentatonic scale is practically built for poke & pray soloing – 98.3% of the time you’ll sound like you know what you’re doing, even if it’s completely random.  And you will never face a harsh dissonance of a tritone or minor 2nd!  Add just a little bit of experience and the success ratio quickly becomes 100%.  You may not sound like the greatest soloist – because you’re not taking the biggest chances – but you’ll sound like a competent improviser.

All this is great in theory… but let’s start putting it under your fingers.  Put on a backing track in a MAJOR key, and put your fingers into minor pentatonic position 1 three frets below your key note – if your backing track is in B, you’ll be playing in G# minor.  Go ahead and solo, but end your solo on the SECOND note of the minor pentatonic scale – the B note on the 6th string (7th or 19th fret), the 3rd string (4th or 16th fret), or the 1st string (7th or 19th fret).  You’ll find that no notes were difficult to work with, and the end result sounded anywhere from a little bland to really good.

Ok, I’m done with that digression, although we’ll return to the concept of modality in a later section.  But it wasn’t completely a digression, because we’re about to apply it.

We’ll start by looking at the most basic minor scale, the natural (or “pure”) minor.  This is the scale that uses exactly the same notes as the major scale.  The natural minor scale is created by starting from the 6th degree (or note) of the major scale – if you’re working in C major, the relative natural minor will be C major notes starting from A: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A.  You can use the SAME fingerings we reviewed for the major scale, but you’ll be treating a different note as the tonic, or ‘home base’.

Because the notes are the same as the major scale, the fingerings are also the same.  All we do is make a different note the focal point of the melody, and we’ve shifted from the major to the relative natural minor scale.

One quick note about the focal point – it’s incredibly difficult to set ‘rules’ that determine which tone will be the tonic.  Some folks will tell you it’s the last note of a melody (often true, but not always), the note used most frequently (sometimes true, but usually not), or the first note (rarely true unless the soloist is a beginner).  But a melody will always feel like it has come to a resting point when the tonic is reached… so determining the tonic is sort of like defining pornography: you know it when you see/hear it.

Get a backing track in A minor, and use one of the C major fingerings over it… but focus your attention on the A notes.  If you’re using the fifth position fingering, it’ll look like this:

5-(7)-(8)
5-6-8
5-7
5-7-9
5-7-8
5-7-8

When you solo over the progression, you might notice a couple of notes are harder to work with.  In particular, the G note (4th string 5th fret or 2nd string 8th fret) may clash with the dominant chord.  Understanding why that happens requires another brief detour into harmony.

Earlier I explored the harmony created by two notes of the major scale sounded simultaneously.  Those two sounds create intervals.  If we add a THIRD sound to the mix, we get a chord.

There are several different systems of harmony out there, but most music makes use of “tertian” harmony, building chords in thirds.  The simplest chords contain only three notes, and they’re called “triads”.  What that means is that whatever note we start with in chord construction, the chord will consist of every other note – if you start from C, you’ll skip over D and use E (the third note of the C scale).  Skipping over F gets you to G, and the combination C-E-G creates a C major chord.

Different chords have different formulas; the major chord works out to 1-3-5 against the major scale.  A minor chord uses the b3 – C minor is C-Eb-G.  There are two other common triads, the diminished (1-b3-b5) and the augmented (1-3-#5).

We don’t typically use random chords in constructing a progression.  Instead, we use chords that belong to the same key.  That means if we’re in C major, we’ll usually use only chords that have notes from the C major scale.  Building chords in thirds using only C major scale tones gives us the following:

C-E-G (C major, 1-3-5)
D-F-A (D minor, because a D major scale has F# in it, so F is a b3; we always use the major scale of the chord root to figure out the chord’s formula)
E-G-B (E minor, since E major has G#)
F-A-C (F major)
G-B-D (G major)
A-C-E (A minor, because A major has C#)
B-D-F (B diminished, because a B major scale has both D# and F#)

These chords will sound perfectly acceptable together, and many simple songs are made from various combinations.  But we do want a little spice in our music, so we sometimes harmonize chords in four notes.  Without getting into chord theory too much, a chord that has the seventh note of it’s root scale is a “maj7” (major 7th) chord; a chord that has the b7 of its major scale is a “7th” (or “dominant 7th) chord.  We can combine these terms – a minor chord with a b7 is a m7 chord; a minor chord with the natural 7th will be a m/maj7 – that’s kind of rare, because it’s pretty dissonant, but the labeling of chords is consistent.

Harmonizing the C major scale in four parts gives us these additional chords:

C-E-G-B (Cmaj7)
D-F-A-C (Dm7)
E-G-B-D (Em7)
F-A-C-E (Fmaj7)
G-B-D-F (G7)
A-C-E-G (Am7)
B-D-F-A (Bm7b5)

With these additional chords, there are three that have a “tension” – they sound like they have to move somewhere.  These chords are the B diminished, the G7, and the Bm7b5.

Most music makes use of tension/release: building excitement, then letting the listener back down.  One of the most common ways to do that is through a V7-I cadence, moving from G7 to C.

Since the notes of the natural minor scale are exactly the same as that of the major scale, we end up with exactly the same chords – except they’ll appear on different scale degrees.  If we use a G7 to build tension in the key of C, we can get a satisfying C-F-G7-C chord progression, or I-IV-V7-I.  Applying exactly the same logic to the A natural minor scale, we’d get a progression of Am-Dm-Em7-Am.

There’s nothing wrong with that progression, but it lacks the excitement of the dominant 7th chord.  So hundreds of years ago, composers began altering the minor scale – they wanted an E7 chord to create tension that resolves to Am.

Since a dominant 7th chord is 1-3-5-b7 against the major scale, E7 will be E-G#-B-D.  Raising the G note to G# creates the desired harmony, so replacing G with G# in an A natural minor creates a scale called the A harmonic minor.

Using the A natural minor fingering above as our base, we can get the A harmonic minor fingering below:

5-(7)-(8)
5-6-9
5-7
6-7-9
5-7-8
5-7-8

Just as we did with the major scale, we can find alternate fingerings for the notes you have to stretch for.  This scale becomes a lot more finger-friendly if we shift to fourth position when we get to the third string:

4-5-(7)
5-6
4-5-7
6-7
5-7-8
5-7-8

There was one big problem with this scale: singers hated it.  The harmonic minor scale uses an augmented second interval between the 6th and 7th notes (from F-G# in Am), and that’s a difficult interval to sing accurately.  Singers prefer to use half steps – one fret on the guitar – or whole steps (two frets).

One solution is to raise the 6th note of the minor scale.  That creates a whole step between the 6th and 7th notes, and the distance from the 5th note to the 6th changes from a half step to a whole step… still very singable.  Our A minor scale would now be A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#-A, or 1-2-b3-4-5-6-7.

This scale wasn’t used very much, because it’s so close to the major scale.  In fact, it’s the major scale with only one note changed – so if the melody spends much time away from the third note, it starts to sound major.  Composers quickly discarded it (in favor of the scale we’ll look at in a moment) – but this scale did find a resurgence in jazz, where it’s called the “jazz minor” or the “bebop minor”.  Folks from Berklee call it the “real melodic minor”, but folks from Berklee often have their own names for things!

Using fifth and fourth positions again, this minor scale can be fingered like this – the shift is now on the 4th string:

4-5-(7)
4-5-7
4-5-7
4-6-7
5-7
5-7-8

The solution classical music composers found to the problem of both creating the desired harmony and keeping the singers happy was unusual: they created a hybrid scale.  This is one area where pedagogy (how things are taught) differs a bit from actual practice; here’s the pedagogy part:

Going up, the scale raises the 6th and 7th notes, creating the right harmony and keeping the singers happy.  But going down, it will be the same as the natural minor scale, giving a minor sound to melodies that don’t touch on the flatted third for a while.  In a minor, it will look like this:

A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#-A-G-F-E-D-C-B-A
 (going up)        (going down)

Because the direction of the melody determines which pitches will be used for the 6th and 7th notes, this is called the melodic minor scale.  You’ve already got the fingerings – it’s the jazz minor going up, and the natural minor going down.

In practice this scale doesn’t always work the way it’s taught.  Composers and improvisers can use the natural minor part going up and the jazz minor part down – they simply try to avoid that hard to sing interval.  In either direction, melodies will sometimes use all the notes, treating the one from the ‘wrong’ direction as a passing tone.  As we’ll see, minor scales are incredibly flexible.

There are still more minor scales to come: I’ll cover the Dorian and Phrygian in the next section about modes, and a few others like the Gypsy minor in the final part, exotic scales.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy  at their website, http://mwmusicacademy.com/, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

One thing we at Guitar Noise would really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from today through January 7.

As always, you should feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig information (dates, venues, locations and times) to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. Remember that we’ll be posting these every Wednesday so plan accordingly!

And who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!That’s how Nick got to meet Lars when the Flea Market Band (all the way from Norway) played in Washington DC.

Random Thoughts

Looking back over 2011 I find myself remembering all sorts of musical moments that I had the good fortune to be a part of. Personally, I’m not one who worries about recordings or videos. I’m simply there to enjoy the music and to be in the moment. But it’s fortunate that, from time to time, some of my friend come up with some tangible memento of a song or two. About a month ago, I got to play with Nick Torres, Greg Nease, Jeff Brownstein, Helena Bouchez, John Mazzeo, Glen Polson and Karen Berger at a show in Pennington, New Jersey and Nick managed to make a passable recording of our cover of “Everybody’s Talking” which I present for your enjoyment. Appropriately, everybody is talking!

I hope that 2012 gives each of you the opportunity to make and share your music with your family, friends and the rest of the world.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 18 – January 1, 2012 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Really and truly, you can learn to play a song in less time than it takes to talk about doing it. But the problem comes with trying to figure out what you have actually learned and whether or not you will be able to apply that knowledge down the road. In my mind, simply copying something rarely teaches anyone anything. Oh, there will always be exceptions, the geniuses who will take the time to figure things out for themselves, but most of us tend toward the lazy. Better to start in learning the “whys” along with the “hows” than to try to piece it all together later.

Liner Notes: America

A Horse With No Name by America is a classic folk-rock song written by Dewey Bunnell. This song bears some resemblance to Neil Young’s folky acoustic rock. Ironically, back in 1972 “A Horse With No Name” is the song that replaced Neil’s “Heart of Gold” as the number one single in America.

Spice up your strumming and learn the solo from the original recording in Part 2 – Adding Some Personal Touches.

If you enjoyed this lesson you will also like learning some of the other songs from our Easy Songs for Beginners Lessons.

This lesson, our very first Guitar Noise “Easy Songs for Beginners” lesson is meant to help you do both – learn a song and learn about the music that goes into it so you can actually play it and use what you learn in other songs you play. After we pick up the basics of the song, then we’ll have some fun “really playing” it by adding some strumming variations (including a very basic bass part) and in the lesson, Adding Some Personal Touches, we’ll also add some rhythm riffs (fills) and some leads (ranging from easy to intermediate). You didn’t think I was going to let you get away and not learn something, did you? It should (hopefully) be harmless…

The Absolute Basic Model

Say you’ve never played the guitar before? Well, step right up here and I’ll make you a guitar god for only $49.99 or my name ain’t…

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It gets really crazy sometimes, doesn’t it? Well, in order to proceed, I am going to (gasp) assume that you’ve held a guitar before and that you are somewhat familiar with the terminology. If not, then you need to start out with our Absolute Beginners Chords lesson. Just get to the E minor chord (it’s the first one) and you’ll be all set. No lie!

Because this lesson’s song is Horse With No Name, written by Dewey Bunnell of the group, America. The entire song consists of two chords, one of which (E minor)  you know and the other we can argue about almost forever:

The E minor chord is, as you’ve discovered, one of the simplest to learn, but how on earth did Mr. Bunnell come up with the second chord? Well, I certainly wasn’t there when he did it, but I think it’s a pretty fair guess that it was either the result of a mistake or just exploring the fretboard. Either way, I’m sure he looked up and said to himself, “Hey, this sounds pretty cool!”

Both chords are easy enough to do. An Em requires you to use the second fret on both the fourth and fifth (D and A) strings while the Dadd6add9 simply has you move your two fingers to the next outer strings, the third and sixth (or G and low E). It’s not a hard change and it requires little thinking. Use whatever finger is on the second fret of the A string (it will probably be the index or middle) to play the second fret of the low E. Likewise, simply shift whatever finger is on the second fret of the D string to the second fret of the G. It’s kind of like doing jumping jacks with your fingers!

(And yes, we’re going to discuss this “Dadd6add9″ later. If you can’t wait, just skip down to the section entitled, “What is that chord really?”)

The rhythm of the song is in 4 / 4 time (four beats per measure) and the chords change each and every measure. For starters, do a simple downstroke, either on all four beats or, if you’d like a little variation, on the first, second and fourth beats. Remember that this song is moderately paced – it’s not really fast and not really slow. When you’re first learning a song, go as slow as you have to in order to make comfortable chord changes while keeping the overall beat smooth and steady. This is where a metronome can come in very handy.

Here’s a cheat sheet of how verses and chorus should shape up:

Nothing to it, right? Okay, let’s move on, then…

Tinkering

Usually the first thing a beginner needs to work on is chord recognition and formation. You need to know the chords you want to play and how to finger them on the fretboard. Your next concern will be about being able to change from one chord to the next smoothly and cleanly. With this particular song, both of those concerns become almost minimal and, because of that, you can work instead on your strumming.

You might think I’m a bit nuts about this, but I really can’t stress enough how important it is to work on your rhythm. Not only the fundamental task of keeping a steady beat, but also creating patterns that make the song better, more fun to play and interesting to hear.

But hey, it’s just hitting the strings, so how hard can it be?

Well, not hard at all if you’re aware of it from the start. This is the suggested rhythm I gave you.

An symbol indicates an upstroke and a denotes a downstroke.

Now this will work but it’s hardly interesting except as a tool for helping us to keep time. A rhythm that would be closer to the original would involve working on our upstroke (coming up the strings, toward your head). It would also involve working on the beats in between the beats. The length of a note can be divided almost infinitely, but we’re going to just work with eighth notes for now. So instead of us counting, “1, 2, 3, 4,” we would want to count, “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and…” The four beats per measure have not speeded up in the slightest. You will probably think that they have, though, if you’re not familiar with this. Don’t worry. It’s not that hard to catch on.

So here is an alternative strumming pattern, complete with the appropriate chords:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, start out very slowly if this is new to you. As slowly as you need to in order to count out each beat and to get each stroke in its proper place. You’ll be surprised how easily it will come to you, even if you’ve never tried an upstroke before.

Filling In The Bottom (and sides!)

Once you’re feeling up to speed we can tinker a bit more and add a bass part. Granted, it will not be the most exciting bass line in the world, but if you’re a beginner, it should impress you with how easy it is to add a lot more texture to your playing with such a simple technique.

Here’s how we’ll do it. Whenever we hit the first beat of any given measure, we will strike only the sixth string (which will be the lowest tone on either chord). Just that string and nothing more. When you add in the chords (upstrokes and downstrokes), it should be something like the following example. With this Finale software notation, I indicated downstrokes with “D” and upstrokes with “U” just to make things a little easier:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Using this pattern as a starting point, you can then start to really have fun. One thing I like to do is to play an upstroke on the second beat of the E minor as close to the bridge (as far from the neck as the strings allow) as possible and let it ring through the remaining three beats of the measure, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can also pick out individual strings instead of strumming. In the following example, the three highest strings are all picked as upstrokes on the last beat and a half of the measure:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Once you have a couple of patterns that you like and can do without thinking, you’ll find yourself playing “mix and match,” throwing “E minor pattern 1″ with “Dadd6add9 pattern 4″ and what have you. It can become a lot of fun as well as a challenge to see what you can come up with next.

You see, even the simplest of songs can provide you with a lot of interesting opportunities if you are willing to put the time and effort into finding what can be done with it. Or you can simply learn the chords and then move on to your next song. As always, the choice is yours.

What Is That Chord Really?

Okay, let’s look at that second chord. If we examine the notes on each string, this is what we would find:

Last time out (Building Additions and Suspensions) we learned that we could, if we so desired, call this chord by a lot of different names. Who wants to start? Bm7 (add 4)? D6 (add 9)? Hey, how about E9 (sus4)? Those are all viable answers, given the notes of the chord.

We also touched on the fact that the context of the chord (how it is used in a progression) can be vital in helping to determine which chord name we will give it. An important factor in determining the context is the voicing of the chord, meaning not only which notes of a chord we use but where we play them on the guitar. Let’s take another look at both of our chords in this song:

Okay, first let’s establish the key of the song. Now we could do this the easy way: “Gee, David, it starts with an E minor chord and it ends with an E minor chord. Why don’t we just say it’s in E minor?” And I could live with this approach. But take a listen to both chords. Another reason for coming up with the same answer is simply by hearing how much more at ease the Em chord makes us feel. In contrast, the Dadd6add9 sounds unsettled, like it’s got to be going somewhere. Play the chords in reverse order and the Dadd6add9 still doesn’t sound like a resting point, like “home.” It’s just begging for a resolution.

Now, having just played the song to death, one thing that I can tell you is that I like the F# in the bass. It fits well, much better than having a D or E or even an A serving as the root. This, more than anything else, is what makes me decide that F# is going to be the root note on which to build my chord. So if I build a stack of thirds on top of my F# and fill in the notes I have from the chord (using a “-” to indicate a missing note), this is what I get:

You can see that the fifth (C#) and the ninth (G#) are not among the six notes in the chord. Instead, we get a second A. So we can call it F#m13 if we want to stay reasonably simple. Or F#m7 (no 5)(add 4)(add 6) if we want to be absolutely looney about it. But there is a lot to be said for simplicity when trying to write something out. As I mentioned earlier, people can (and do) argue about this sort of thing for ages.

But it does bring up an interesting thought – if you’ve got a chord that has seven notes what do you do? After all, you can only get six notes out of your guitar at a time, which one goes?

Traditionally, the fifth would be the note left out  but, believe it or not, there are instances when the root is the “missing” note (and we’ll be examining chords like this in other Guitar Noise song lessons). But the real determining factor is what notes you are able to finger (or not finger) on your fretboard. For instance, if you strum your guitar (standard tuning) without putting any fingers on the fretboard at all you would have an A11. The notes, from low to high, would be E (fifth), A (root), D (eleventh), G (seventh), B (ninth) and E (fifth again). Here the third (C#) is the missing note. You could always add this by playing it on the 1st (or 6th) string but it sounds perfectly fine as it is. Generally a good rule of thumb with 9th, 11th, and 13th chords is to really try to include the seventh along with the root in order to give it some sense of identity.

Is any of this really that important? Like any knowledge, it all depends on what you want to do with it, and that’s what next week’s topic is all about. You’ll see that by giving our second chord an identity of Dadd6add9, we are helping to determine the modal centers of our harmonies. This is ultimately where our fills and leads will come from. And no, it’s nowhere near as complicated as it sounds!

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or topics you’d like to see covered in future columns. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next week…

Peace

More in this series

Spice up your strumming and learn the solo from the original recording in Part 2 – Adding Some Personal Touches.

A Horse With No Name – The Simplest Song was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

I’ve just read your articles about using a capo and transposing songs into different keys. However, I’m struggling with this particular song: http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/o/oasis/dont_look_back_in_anger_acoustic_crd.htm

He’s playing with capo on the 4th fret, but I’m wondering what chords the other guitarist (Gem ;) is playing. I know that he plays the guitar with capo on the 2nd fret. How do I transpose this song?

There are a couple of ways of figuring out the chords the second guitarist is using. You could either figure out what key the song is in (meaning the chords you’d play without a capo) and work from there or work from the chords you have (for the guitar with the capo on the fourth fret) and figure out how they relate to a guitar with a capo on the second fret.

Whichever way we go, you first want to take a look at the song with the chords you have, namely with the guitar having a capo on the fourth fret. Just listing out the intro and first verse we’ve got this (and I’m simply listing the chords as they appear in each line of the song):

Capo on 4th fret

Intro
G  Cadd9  G  Cadd9

Verse 1
G  G/F#  Em7
G/B  Cadd9
G/F#  G  Em7  G/F#
G  G/F#  Em7
G/B  Cadd9
G/F#  G  Em7  G/F#

It’s pretty safe to assume this song in in the key of G. But with the capo on the second fret, you’ve raised the G two whole steps (four half steps and every fret is a half step) up. So therefore when you play G with the capo on the fourth fret, you’re playing in the key of B.

Now let’s take a moment and imagine if we were playing G on the second fret. Why? Because the difference between a guitar with a capo on the second fret and a guitar with a capo on the fourth fret is two frets, right? So if the guitar with the capo on the second fret was playing without a capo, the guitar with the capo on the fourth fret would have to play with the capo on the second fret in order to be playing the same. as the second guitar. And if you play a G with a capo on the second fret, you’re playing an A because A is one whole step (two half steps) higher than G.

And now let’s assume that the guitar with the capo on the second fret is playing in A. That would make perfect sense because when you play an A with a capo on the second fret it’s B because B is one whole step (two half steps) higher than A. So that totally jives with what we know about the song. The “real” key is B. If we have a capo on the fourth fret we should play in G and if we have a capo on the second fret we should play in A.

Now we look at the chords that we have and raise them all one whole step to put them in the key of A. It would look like this:

Capo on 2nd fret
Intro
A Dadd9 A Dadd9

Verse 1
A  A/G#  F#m7
A/C#  Dadd9
A/G#  A  F#m7  A/G#
A  A/G#  F#m7
A/C#  Dadd9
A/G#  A  F#m7  A/G#

I hope this helps. It’s really just a matter of writing it down and thinking it through.

If you’ve got any questions, we at Guitar Noise are always happy to answer them. Just send any of your questions to David at dhodgeguitar@aol.com. He (or another Guitar Noise contributor) may not answer immediately but he will definitely answer!

How Do I Transpose a Particular Song? was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise