Guitar Noise

In the second installment of Tom’s series on reading notation, you’ll learn about ledger lines, repeat signs and other musical traffic signals, as well as delve into accidentals and key signatures. Plus you get an arrangement of Jingle Bells to get you going for the holidays!

At long last, Tom takes the mysteries out of chord substitution, giving you detailed and simple explanations that will make you wonder why you ever worried about it in the first place!

Even people who don’t read standard notation will tell you that it’s a good idea to learn to do so. And it’s easier to learn than people think. Tom’s latest piece is a great place to start to pick up this skill that will last you a lifetime.

Tom has a gift of being able to explain complicated material in a very uncomplicated manner. After guiding us through the maze of extended chords in his last article, he returns to explain altered chords and does so in such a simple way that I wish I’d had him explain it to me many, many years ago!

Getting to the stage of playing advanced chords doesn’t really require learning hundreds of new chord shapes – it only demands that you can relate new chords to old ones in a logical way. By the time you’ve finished reading Tom’s latest article, you’ll be able to form any chord extension that you want!

In this lesson, Tom unravels some of the mysteries of chord progressions. We’ll learn about cadences, the natural harmonic series, chord extensions, secondary dominants and much more.

Tom Serb explores three different ways that the guitarist can incorporate altered or exotic scales into his or her playing and gives us examples using both the Zangula and Rwanda scales. This article is a gift for those of you looking to expand your soloing vocabulary.

Tom, who goes by Noteboat on our forum pages, is already pretty well known and respected by our forum members or those who’ve bought and read his book on theory. He now contributes a terrific piece on how to practice keeping the beat. Staying in rhythm is probably one of the most important things a guitarist (or any musician) can do and Tom’s article will help you to get better at this.

Tom Serb, known as Noteboat in the forums sends us his first article. I think you’ll find this a fun and fascinating little romp through the history of the guitar.