Guitar Noise

Hello Guitar Players,

Welcome to the September 1, 2002 issue of Guitar Noise News.

This is our back to school issue. You’ll know why I call it that when you see how much new stuff we have for you to learn this week.

This weekend is Labor Day weekend in North America and all around the world students will soon be returning to school if they haven’t already. You could say summer is basically over.

Starting this week you may notice some changes on the Guitar Noise Website. New this week is an improvement in the navigation system. It should be easier to get around the site now if you are looking for a specific lesson or topic. Later this Fall we will be adding and changing a few other things on our site. Keep you eyes peeled for new improvements in the coming weeks.

In this newsletter:

• New Guitar Lessons
• Recommended Reading
• CD Reviews
• New Links
• Email of the Week

Why not help a fellow musician? You can do them a favor by forwarding them this newsletter.

New Guitar Lessons

I wasn’t kidding when I said we have a lot of stuff this week. Here are four new lessons that are being published today.

Hey Hey My My
By David Hodge (01 Sep 2002)
You may not know it, but Neil Young is a true hero to the fledgling guitarist. His songs are relatively easy enough to learn quickly and still complicated enough to give you things to work on in order to hone your guitar skills. And, as bonuses, they appeal to both the electric and acoustic guitarist.

An English Lesson
By Ryan Spencer (01 Sep 2002)
Today I will try to help those interested in expanding their songs more poetically by taking a trip back to high school (Oh no!). In this article I will be going over poetic terminology and relating how it can be incorporated into songwriting. Let us start off with the big daddy of poetic concepts.

Blues Triad Mastery
By Darrin Koltow (01 Sep 2002)
I created BTM because I wanted to learn triads in a way that was fun for both fingers and ears. I wanted something Bluesey. I wanted to play *music* and not a monotonous lesson as boring as cardboard. I couldn’t find a lesson like this, so I wrote one.

Teachers Lounge: You Treat A Thing The Way You Define It
By Jamie Andreas (01 Sep 2002)
How do I define “teaching the guitar”? If you were to ask that question, you may get some kind of flowery description, but if you really want to know how your teacher defines it, then look at how he or she treats it, what they actually DO as a teacher.

Worth another Look

In each newsletter I search through the Website trying to rediscover some older lessons that are worth mentioning again. This week I want to go back and take a look at some stuff we have about submitting demos:

Recording Part 1: Why Do It?
By A-J Charron (Originally published: May 2000)
Now that you have written some songs what do you do with them? The next step is the Demo. This week A-J explains how to go about making a demo, what to do with it, who to send it to and how to present it. Don’t find out the hard way what could go wrong. Get it right the first time.

For everyone interested in demos, how to record them and what to do with them check out our other pages on them including Recording Part 2: Building a Digital Studio and Sending Out Demos. Also check out the email of the week below and the MusicCareers.net Website for more.

Recommended Reading

Confessions of a Record Producer: How to Survive the Scams and Shams of the Music Business
By Moses Avalon
IF YOU PLAN TO WORK IN THE INDUSTRY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK. It describes royalties to artist and how you may not see them. Scams pulled on bands.Items that should be in your contracts. How record companies rip you off. Examples on how songs are stolen. How producers hide money for themselves. Independent labels, Majors and Distribution both Major and Indie. Moses Avalon takes you from the first steps through the entire music industry process and tells you how much money you will theoretically have at the end. This book is the one you should buy before all others.

Visit the complete Books page at Guitar Noise.

CD Reviews

Robert Berry – The Wheel of Time
This latest effort from Robert Berry (who played with Steve Howe in GTR, and Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer in 3) is truly a departure from his usual style.

Silent Force – Infatuator
DC cooper’s band Silent Force delivers a powerful melodic metal performance on this album. A very tight, well-directed band that performs highly original works of Metal.

We like to give non-mainstream artists a bit of help. If you send us a promo copy and press kit for one of your albums, we will review it here and add a link to your site. To send us your work check out our Instructions for Music Submission.

Visit the complete reviews page at Guitar Noise.

New and Notable Links

Here is a sample of some of the new links added this week:

• Guitar Secrets – Guitar Secrets offering free online guitar lessons. We also offer an instructional CD ROM, A Visual Learning Experience, Lead Guitar Made Easy.

Here is a selection of worthy sites from our fine affiliates:

• Guitar Secrets Revealed
  GuitarAlliance.com is a comprehensive training program in the best and most effective popular guitar techniques, styles, fundamentals and progressive topics. Whether you’re interested in blues, rock or pop, you will find the most useful information on the Web right here.

GuitarNoise.com has links to over a thousand different Websites with special content for guitarists and musicians. If you haven’t linked to GuitarNoise.com already please take a moment to do so now.

Email of the Week

This Email was sent to us by “a friend in the business”

Stumbled across Guitar Noise and your response regarding how to get demos heard.

You are correct that there is no sure fire way, and there is a reason that you might try to explain to the young’uns in the music business.

In our industry, over the years we have developed a series of filters or hurdles which aspiring musicians are expected to surmount as they prove to the world they are in fact……good. Okay, maybe just marketable. Without these filters, we would be inundated with even more crap music than we already are. Just because some guy got up one day and touched a guitar does not make him marketable, or even mediocre. In other words, harsh as it may seem, he is not worthy of the world’s attention. You simply have to have a means of testing before putting anything on the market. That’s just good business.

Now the Big 5 are very important for one big reason. Ask yourself who in their right minds would loan a musician a dime based on his job being…. a musician. Well that’s exactly that the majors do. They invest in unproven, speculative acts in the hopes that the act will go big time. 9 out of 10 times, it tanks. That leaves the one star act to generate the revenues to keep the whole thing running, and to recoup the losses of the other 9. THAT’S why the record companies are perceived as greedy. Imagine if, like as with a student loan, you actually had to pay back all that money when your career didn’t actually happen. ….I didn’t think you would like that idea. Consider it one of the few gifts in life.

I will admit that the Big 5 do have some less than savory habits in doing business, at least by normal standards, but we musicians ain’t exactly normal are we?

If you could work in the corp. side of the industry, and I mean in NYC, for say, 20 years, you would catch on to the fact that there is a HUGE team of professionals who try to make an act viable. The losses are beyond comprehension when a big artist screws up his career by fiddling when he should have been singing and dancing. Entire departments close suddenly. That’s people out of work, and all because some star believed his own hype.

So its a complex issue, to get your demo heard. The easiest way is to be really good, get a following in your region to prove it, and build a fan site on the net for sure, and with an independent hit meter at least to prove some activity.

A few do nots:

Do not release any of your work as anything more than 30 second clips.

Do not cop the attitude that you are good, you are not, until the contracts are signed and you have a check…cashed.

And the biggest one…

Do not believe your own hype! You are only human. Get a grip!

Once you get your “act together” and can prove it, the industry will actually find you in the most interesting ways. You can help that process by being professional. Do a press kit with a proper demo. (No, not long versions of all your songs or else it will end up in the trash for sure) Pictures must be pro and be exciting! Bios on members of the band should be short but interesting from a listener’s perspective, not your own. Oh yeah, real important. BE REALLY GOOD AT YOUR CRAFT AND BE READY TO GO WITH YOUR ACT.

A dear friend of mine who was Pres of a major once said to me, “The industry doesn’t sell talented musicians, it sells entertainment.” Remember that…

For all of that to happen, get a good personal manager, entertainment lawyer, business agent, oops…. there we are back in the filter stage again. Yeah, you really do have to spend money on yourself. If you don’t have the faith in you, how the heck do you expect anyone else to.

Anyway, that’s reality. Who am I to say all this with such apparent authority? Lets just say I’m one in the business who cares.

Please feel free to publish this, and my Email address. I welcome any serious career minded people to pump my brain (such as it is). There are changes going down in the industry that could make music “bigger than Elvis” for lots of people who would never have gotten a shot.

Hopefully this sort of news will help those of you that are sending out demos and not getting much response. Recently, one of the most popular search terms on the MusicCareers.net Website have concerned demos. For that reason we will be adding more resources on demos soon.

We love receiving your Email here at Guitar Noise and always take the time to read it. If you have a question please remember that many questions have been asked in different ways, and the answer may already appear somewhere on Guitar Noise. If you have a question please check out the help pages.

Finally, if you have any guitar playing friends who might benefit from this newsletter please remember to forward it to them.

All the best,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer