Guitar Noise

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.

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.

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…

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!

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.

For many guitarists, playing and songwriting go hand in hand. Since both skills improve with practice, why not try practicing on both simultaneously?

We continue our study of walking bass lines, looking specifically at how the timing and distance become our guideposts, helping us to map out our journey from one target note to the next. Examples from many songs, including a little of Bob Dylan’s You Ain’t Going Nowhere and Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day will serve as demonstrations in our lesson.

Here’s an interesting twist - we’re going to use a walking bass line as a way to help us get faster and cleaner chord changes, specifically between the G and C chords. Sound implausible? Well, come along and join in the fun.

Walking bass lines are an easy way to spice up your playing and also learn a little about music in the process. In this lesson we’ll look at a very basic walking bass line, how to put it together and how to recognize when we can use it in other songs. Plus, to illustrate the point of the lesson, we get a teeny little bit of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb thrown in.

Just as there are all sorts of ways to make a living in music, there are more ways why people decide not to follow their dreams. More often than not, the simple task of being prepared to ask oneself questions (and to answer honestly) can get you living the life you dream about.

In celebration of his hot selling book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Bass Guitar, David has put together a couple of bass lessons exclusively for the readers of Guitar Noise. Learn how to play this classic Pink Floyd song. It’s as easy as counting to seven (and occasionally eight)!

Just the words augmented and diminished give us pause. Do we need a special degree or extra study to employ one of these chords? Not at all! Let’s examine these chords, how they’re formed and the functions they can serve. If you’re capable of counting to twelve, you’re capable of understanding and using these marvelous chords.

Let’s take some of the things we’ve discussed in past columns and see them put to good use. If you’d like, you can even learn how to play Lindsay Buckingham’s solo from the original recording of Landslide. But you’ve got to promise to learn something.

Here’s something especially for those of you who think that having small children gives you an excuse not to practice - you can play this arrangement of Brahms’ Lullaby at least several times each day! And we’ve turned it into a fairly decent lesson so that those of us without children can learn a few things as well.

In this column we show you how to put together any modal scale yourself. Also, we’ll explore a few of the practical applications when it comes to modes. And if you’re not careful, you may learn two easy songs - Green Day’s Warning and that old Desmond Dekker reggae classic, The Israelites.

Not everyone picks up the guitar to be a strummer! But song arrangements and chord melodies do not have to be the forte of just classical and jazz players. You, too, can learn to create song arrangements to play at your own level.

This lesson takes some of the myth and mystery out of playing a 12 string guitar. We even throw in an arrangement of a classic Allman Brothers song as a bonus.

Scales are much more than a run of notes. Learning how they work is useful for all sorts of things, including writing your own guitar riffs.

We’re going to take some chord shapes that you know already and start working on moveable chords. These chords sound cool and we’ve thrown in several examples.