Newsletter Vol. 1 # 21 – August 01, 2001

Dear Guitar Player,

Welcome to Guitar Noise News, the weekly update for Guitar Noise. This newsletter will keep you up to date with the latest news and developments on our site, including all our new lessons, advice, and links added within the past week. Subscribers to this newsletter are warmly invited to be active in our growing guitar community.

The email has really been flooding in this week. I logged on one day and had 48 messages from complete strangers. The first one came from Spain, but others soon followed from the U.S.A., Russia and all over. All of these unexpected messages turned out to packed with the SirCam virus. Before the end of the second day I had received no less than a hundred copies of the same message. Since then I have been keeping busy deleting all the messages along with the usual unwanted junk mail.

How to Buy Equipment – July Topic of the Month

With this newsletter we can finally wrap up July’s theme “How to Buy Equipment.” If you are not the least bit interested in buying something this will probably come as a relief to you. But if you have been reading all the articles in this series you may now be itching to buy your next guitar. July’s topic was our first monthly theme. It has been more successful than I expected. I was planning on having only 3 or 4 articles on the subject. In the end we managed to write and dig up ten articles on the topic. So if you are ever looking for information about buying a guitar in the future I refer you now to our Buying Equipment page. If you can find another site that has more information about buying equipment than us I will happily link to it.

Last week we added two more articles on buying equipment.

Looking And Listening
The Other Side Column # 7
by Lee Budar-Danoff (27 Jul 2001)
When selecting a guitar, the most obvious advice will be to select one with the sound you like best. But on walking into the mega guitar store, you are confronted with hundreds of guitars, and sound is not the thing that makes you take one off the rack to try. You are not a shallow person for selecting something based on looks, although hopefully it will not limit your final choice of guitar.

Where To Find Great Prices
by A-J Charron (25 Jul 2001)
“The pawn shop is a musician’s best friend.” I’ve heard that phrase many times before. The worst part of it is, it’s true. Many musicians end up pawning old instruments and old equipment there. They get out of the game or they simply change their instruments or equipment for something newer. This is where you can profit from their losses.

The following articles were also added last month:

What To Look For In An Acoustic Guitar Acoustic Guitar Lesson # 7
by A-J Charron (22 Jul 2001)
When you are looking to buy an instrument which will last you most of your life you should take the time to make sure you’re buying something good and something that you will enjoy in the long run. Don’t get taken in by salespeople who don’t know what they’re talking about. This article will educate you about the different parts of the acoustic guitar, what they are made of, and most importantly what you should look for when choosing which guitar to take home.

Some Musings On Online Instrument Buying (or “Sittin’ On The Dock Of ‘eBay”)
by David Hodge (15 Jul 2001)
In this article I’d like to do is offer up some observations and advice to those of you who are thinking about getting your next guitar online. Even for someone such as myself, who much prefers dealing with a real person, the lure of the Internet is a siren’s call. And I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to someone who is thinking about getting his or her first guitar. Please remember that these are my own opinions based upon my own experiences and those of the people who have been kind enough to share their experiences with me. There will always be better stories and there will be worse ones.

How To Buy A Bass Guitar
by Dan Lasley (08 Jul 2001)
This column will review some of the numerous things that go into the design of a bass guitar. Some matter more than others, and different people have different tastes. Hopefully, when you are done, you’ll have an idea of what to look for the next time you’re in the mood for a new bass. Please note that this is geared toward the novice bassist. If you are an experienced bassist recording your third studio album, you will undoubtedly have your own opinions on these matters.

Shopping
by Laura Lasley (01 Jul 2001)
I find that shopping for a guitar is much like shopping for anything else. The available information can be overwhelming, especially on the internet. There are a million web sites about every kind of guitar and every style. I have a few simple shopping rules that I like to follow which apply to clothing, TV’s, cameras, cars, houses and yes, guitars and guitar accessories.

Here are some of our older articles that deal with buying equipment:

Indie Music Reviews

Cairo – A Time Of Legends
When one refers to a time of legends, one usually refers to the Middle Ages or the Greek Antiquity. It takes audacity to refer to our own time as a time of legends. Yet this is what Cairo accomplish. And they accomplish it beautifully! The music is beautiful and takes us on a journey. Right from the start, where the first track, “Underground“, immediately starts with lyrics rather than a long instrumental which is often the case with this sort of album. Later on, as the instrumental does happen, a nice keyboard riff promises more to come. And it does. The music keeps moving in many surprising directions.

Flower Kings – Space Revolver
This a very interesting album. The Flower Kings, although a Prog-rock band, marry many styles of music to make the whole thing, to say the least, quite original. They are one of the few Prog-rock bands that make a decent living. Considering the kind of music they play, they could easily make the move to a major label. They’d be quite successful too. Lots of talent here.

Recommended Reading

Music Reading for Guitar : The Complete Method by David Oakes
This book is an incredible tool for the guitarist that can play but not read. There are tons of exercises and explanations that are all really helpful, and then before you know it, you can competently sightread. I love this book. It rocks. I’d tried tons of “learn to read” books but they’re all written for other instruments, or they’re written for people that haven’t played the instrument before, which bites for people who can play but can’t read. Buy it if you can’t read music but have played guitar for a while (14 years in my case). Keep on rockin’. – Reader Comments

Email of the Week

The subject of this week’s Email of the Week is Celtic Chords and Scales. If you have questions about chords or scales the best person to ask around here is David Hodge.

I am lead guitarist in my own rock band. We have come to the point where we wish to start writing our own music but we do not have enough knowledge (we are all 14 years old) to produce decent Celtic style songs. When I say ‘celtic’ I mean stuff inspired by Tolkien and other fantasy writers. I think celtic chords, scales etc.. fit the fantasy style very well. We have already made one song based upon Ringwraiths (from Lord Of The Rings) which is already showing that we have more musical range than the average Rock band of Today. All of us are very good musicians, our bassist is a grade 8 flourtist and we are all above grade 5 on our instruments. So when it comes to conventional music like modern rock – we have no problem in making up songs. However, none of us have been trained in Celtic chords or scales and I was wondering if you could point us in the right direction by telling us some chords or chord changes that Celtic music uses. Scales would also help a lot (for guitar solos). Even my guitar teacher doesn’t know much about this one.

Response:

Thanks for writing! One of the common misconceptions about Celtic music (not to mention all sorts of other genres) is that it contains different chords and/or scales than other music. Now while Celtic music may have a lot of “character traits” for lack of a better term, it still uses the chords and scales with which you are already familiar.

Most traditional music, including Celtic, was old long before the guitar even came around. Hence a lot of the flavor of Celtic guitar style comes from trying to get your guitar to mimic the nuances of the older instruments associated with the Celtic traditions – which would mean a lot of harps, fiddles and pipes. Having a lot of open, ringing strings creates both the sound of the harp and the drone of the pipes. This is why a lot of guitarists who specialize in Celtic music prefer either drop D or DADGAD tuning (which you can find out about in my column On The Tuning Awry), it gives a lot of opportunities for open drones in fifths. Say you’re playing a solo in the key of D. You can use your lower three strings as a drone and play a melodic lead on your high strings at the same time.

A further way to imitate the pipes is to use a lot of “trilling” effects – such as hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you listen to Celtic music (and listening to any traditional music is the best way to come up with ideas) there is a lilting quality to it. Melodies flit about in a very ornate style. You cannot add too many trills. Another cool technique is to use vibrato on various notes. Not typical guitar vibrato (where you slide your finger back and forth along the string) but rather hard vibrato where you move your finger PERPENDICULAR to the string. This will cause your melodies to occasionally go slightly sharp or flat, but this again gives the impression of the instruments not being perfect. Well placed bends can also do this.

I hope that this helps a bit. You might be interested to know that our “topic of the month” for August at Guitar Noise will be “musical genres” and we’ll definitely be doing an article on Celtic music.

Thanks again for you email and I look forward to hearing how things are going with you.

If you are looking for more information on different tunings check out our Guitar Tuning Page. Also don’t forget to stop by throughout August for all our different articles on “musical genres.”

Peace,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer