Guitar Noise

This an intermediate level lesson for those of you who use only a guitar pick and would rather not work on finger-style playing, but would still like to play a complete song arrangement on your instrument. So here is the classic jazz standard, “Autumn Leaves,” from Peter to you.

While it’s vital to use a chord progression to help you decide on a scale, knowing the style or feel of both a song and a scale is just as important. This lesson focuses on the minor pentatonic scale and why it is used so much for blues (and other genres) in major keys.

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

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

Welcome to the first of a new series of articles entitled Into the Blue, which will explore the style, sound and key players within the Blues genre. This series will be pitched at an intermediate level and will build on techniques and practices that many players will be well aware of. But, of course, we’ll still start off slowly, making sure we leave nothing to chance.

Putting together solos is not easy for a lot of people, and the conventional teaching (”just use your scales”) doesn’t always make sense when you’re just starting out. In this, the first of a series of articles, we take a listen to the differences in tonal color between the major scale and the major pentatonic.

Guitar Noise welcomes the long-awaited return of Peter Simms to our pages! Peter’s been very busy with performing and teaching this past year but wanted us to know he’s still thinking of the Guitar Noise readers. So much, in fact, that he wrote this song (and the accompanying lesson) just for us!

Having made himself a terrific fretless neck, Mitch sets himself the task of finishing his budget bass guitar with the classic coral pink finish. It’s truly astounding to see the results of his project. What a beautiful bass guitar!

Just when you thought we were done with walking bass lines, along comes another song where they play an important musical role! Plus, we’ll take a look at getting started on barre chords (and also look at making substitutions for them to cut us some slack!) and learn a cool little guitar riff.

If you’ve read Part 1 of this tutorial, you’re probably amazed at how easy basic finger style guitar can be. Now, by simply changing one small thing that we learned last time out, even beginners will be able to find themselves playing a little Dust in the Wind…

There’s a little bit of everything in this lesson, from easy arpeggios and strumming to some basic Travis style finger picking patterns. As always, David picks the song apart into small pieces that even many beginners can get with some concerted practice. Have fun learning this Harry Chapin classic!

Finger style guitar is easier than you think! In this lesson we’ll start with the very basics and get you going on some very cool (and very simple) finger picking patterns. Plus, we’ll toss in Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind as an incentive to help you practice more!

This is more of a mini-lesson, taking a song you know with fairly easy chords and coming up with an arrangement that will work for the single guitar. And with a simple strumming pattern and the strategic use of a capo, even beginners can have some fun with it.

This is another Easy Songs lesson that is geared to the close to absolute beginner. We’ll take basic chords that we already can play, add a very simple strumming / picking pattern and before you can say lunatic you’ll be playing a very cool song.

This is a tutorial on improvising over the ii V I chord progression. Jazz players may immediately recognize this type of progression, but it occurs in all kinds of music. Getting to recognize it so that you can be ready to solo is just the starting point.

It’s been ages it seems since we’ve had an intermediate song lesson. It also seems like it’s been ages since we’ve done something with an alternate tuning. And when was the last time we did a Neil Young song? And don’t let the intermediate label put you off - even beginners (with some practice, of course!) can make this song sound sweet…

Mitch has most graciously taken the time to give us a fairly detailed account of one of his latest DIY projects - a Johnson manufactured bass guitar! Follow as he transforms this $80 eBay bass into an instrument worthy of gigging.

Guitar Noise welcomes first-time contributor, Ysrafel, who brings us an article about the various aches and pains you might suffer as a guitarist, their possible causes and things you can do to relieve the pain as well as prevention tips.

We’ll be spending a lot of 2008 looking at song arrangements, so it’s best to start off with a discussion on strumming patterns and the trap that you can get into by letting a strumming (or picking) pattern be your major concern.

Here’s another Easy Song for Beginners’ Lesson, using our continued study of walking bass lines to help us create an arrangement where the bass line also helps us move the song along by shadowing the melody. Once the basics are in place, you can make the rest of the arrangement as simple or as complicated as you’d like.