Guitar Noise

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

• News and Announcements
• New Articles and Lessons
• Email of The Week
• Hot Off The Press (Releases)
• Sunday Songwriter’s Group
• Reviews
• Thoughts and Feedback

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

In case you missed last week’s announcement, then you’ll want to know that, owing to popular demand, there will be a Guitar Noise Neil Young Song Seminar this spring. Late spring, actually, because we’ll have it on Saturday, June 4. We’ll include some of the songs from last year’s seminar for those of you first-timers, but also expand our Neil Young catalogue.

And, if you didn’t already know, these are held at my home in South Egremont, Massachusetts, which is in the southwestern corner of the state. I’m a little over an hour from either Albany, NY or Hartford, CT and about two-and-a-half hours from New York City. Seminars cost $100 per person and this includes lunch as well as tutorial materials.

If you’ve any questions, or if you’d like to sign up for this latest Neil Young Seminar (or any of our other ones, for that matter), feel free to write me at dhodgeguitar@aol.com and be sure to use “Seminar” in the subject line.

I’d like to thank all the people who’ve written in this week with tips about making time to practice and play. There are some great ideas here and I’ll be printing these up in an article a little later in the month. In the meantime, please feel free to send in some more! For those of you who might have missed last week’s newsletter, the idea is that if you have managed to come up with a “system,” a way to find or make the time to practice or play on a regular basis, we’d like to share these ideas with others who truly seem to find it difficult to find or make time to play. If you can, make a little extra time this week and drop me a line at dhodgeguitar@aol.com and let’s help some folks find the time in their lives that could be spent playing!

And don’t forget that we’re still going to be posting numerous articles about “Playing With Others.” So if you’d like to share your thoughts and experiences on this subject,
please send those to me as well. Same address: dhodgeguitar@aol.com, and try to include “Playing With Others” in the subject line.

The big news this week is that is you pick up the May issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine (the cover story, appropriately enough, is “Terrific Twelve-Strings Reviewed”), which should be at your favorite newsstand, bookstore or music store sometime in the next week, you’ll see a very familiar face on page 78. No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you! That’s me with a lesson called “Alternate Tunings Made Easy” that will teach you how to go about finding open position chords in EADF#BE tuning. As a bonus, you also get a song lesson on Handsome Molly, a traditional piece that’s been covered by more people than I can possibly list. Some of you might know this song by its first line, “I wish I was in London…”

And there’s more! At Acoustic Guitar Magazine’s website, www.acousticguitar.com, you’ll find the audio for this lesson so that you can hear the examples and play along if you’d like. (I may be jumping the gun on this because, as of when I’m writing this newsletter, their website hasn’t had its monthly update. Be patient if you visit and the May lesson material isn’t yet up. It will be soon!)

I am hoping that this will be the first of many lessons I get to write for String Letter Publishing, which also publishes Play Guitar! Magazine and many books as well. So if you enjoy the lesson, please drop the editors a line and let them know that you liked it (and why!).

And again, I’d like to thank all the readers of Guitar Noise. After all, it’s you who have made this site so popular and who have brought my name to the outside world. I truly appreciate being able to contribute even more to the music community at large and the guitar community in particular.

And speaking of contributions, let’s see what’s gone up online here at Guitar Noise since we last chatted:

New Articles And Lessons

Listening To Learn
by David Wagle

Listening to music is one of the easiest ways to learn about your guitar – and one of the easiest things to forget about! Guitar Noise is pleased to introduce the first of a series of articles from David Wagle, which are here to help you expand your listening library in the hopes of becoming better guitarists and musicians. We start out with a list of “Top Ten Great Guitarists Who Never Make Top Ten Lists But Should!”

Email Of The Week

Yes, I ran this email last week! But I think it’s well worth a repeat here in the newsletter.

NEW WEBSITE HELPS MUSICIANS TRACK DOWN STOLEN GUITARS!

WWW.STOLENGUITARREGISTRY.COM

TUCSON, AZ, 3/20/05??? Web programmer Bryan Hance has just launched a free website to help victims of guitar theft recover their stolen instruments:

www.stolengutiarregistry.com

The theft of personal property is a terrible setback for anyone – but for guitarists, the loss of an instrument is a particularly devastating blow. Most guitarists develop an intense bond with their guitars, viewing the instruments as an irreplaceable part of their unique sound. Unfortunately, thousands of professional and amateur guitarists lose instruments to theft every year.

“When you look at the number of guitars being stolen every year, it is just amazing,” says Hance. “They are too easy to steal, too easy to resell, and until now there was no easy way to run a quick check to see if a guitar is stolen.”

Hance predicts www.stolenguitarregistry.com will help re-unite many distraught guitarists with their stolen instruments. Here is how it works: guitar theft victims enter information about their stolen guitars into a database, including guitar model, make, year, color, description, serial number, and can also include photos of the guitar and offer a reward for the instruments’ recovery – free of charge.

Music-store employees, guitar resellers, pawn shop owners, private buyers, online auction shoppers, and even law enforcement can run a guitar’s serial number to find out if it has been reported stolen. www.stolenguitarregistry.com also automatically emails guitar owners if someone runs a search on their stolen guitar’s serial number.

Hance says his site aims to connect ‘the two sides’ of the stolen guitar problem:

“On one side you’ve got an amazingly vigilant guitar community – many of whom are victims of theft themselves – who are constantly on the lookout for each other’s stolen gear. On the other side are guitar resellers, most of which are honest, but who lack an easy way to check a guitar’s serial number. All you have to do is connect the two sides, which is what www.stolenguitarregistry.com is all about, and you’re going to start recovering people’s guitars.”

Hot Off The Press (Releases)

‘Hellfire’ The Debut Single From Demeter Out March 28th 2005

Demeter take their name from the Greek myth of Demeter: the lover of Zeus and mother of Persephone, who was fabled to have cursed the World with winter.

The band’s debut single, ‘Hellfire’ echoes the epic anger of the Demeter legend

‘Hellfire’ is a deeply charged experience of grinding guitar riffs, dark electronic phrases and aggressively provocative and empowering vocals.

Fearless, seductive and challenging – Demeter are the result of Seattle-born singer Anna Mercedes and London born electronic music innovator Andy Chatterley’s creative collaborations.

Written and produced by Demeter, ‘Hellfire’ is a complete and indulgent journey through their own opinions and emotions. “The thing which united us was our real need to make something different from what was going on around us. We were so fed up with the current music scene and the culture of audio force feeding.”

Their combination of creativity, frustration and musical adventure, results in a rich and inspiring collection of songs described by Alternative London magazine as ‘genius art-nouveau rock’. “To begin with it was just about us working together in the studio really just making music for ourselves” Anna adds. “We made the music for the pleasure and for the experience.” The results are compulsive, enigmatic and distinctly fresh.

Demeter were formed twelve months ago, and are currently completing their self-titled debut album that will be released in July. Finnish guitarist Tony Haimi and Spanish drummer Juan Toni and bassist Puter complete the Demeter
line-up.

Musically the band take their mainstream influences from culturally shape-shifting bands such as David Bowie, Kate Bush, The Cure, King Crimson, Depeche Mode, and Blondie.

Demeter are at their very best when experienced live, and recently performed select London shows at Union Chapel, Hoxton Hall, Underworld and the ICA. Stimulated by the likes of Heironymous Bosch, from renaissance to go-go, they employ fashion, multi-media visual effects, projections and lighting to compliment their psychedelic and adventurous sounds, reinstating their original and very special flare for creative excitement like no other.

Sunday Songwriters Group

The Sunday Songwriters Group is a Guitar Noise exclusive. Conceived by Ryan Spencer and Nick Torres, the idea is to give songwriters a weekly exercise in order to help develop their lyric-writing skills.

Now in our third year (!), Bob continues to put us all through our paces, giving us weekly assignments to help everyone sharpen their abilities.

It’s open to everyone. Got an itch to write? Jump on in! Even if you don’t write, you should feel free to critique. After all, you probably have experience listening to songs, no?

For more info, visit the SSG FAQ.

Year Three, Week 22

It’s All Elemental (part 1)

It’s still all in the imagery, but now we’ve got a little twist. In the first year of the SSG, we had a week where we used the four “basic elements,” as they were called – Earth, Air, Fire and Water. In SSG Year 3, we’re going to give each element its own week!

So, continuing with the imagery theme this week, our song should contain imagery based around water – for example; rivers, waves, oceans etc.

Good writing

Bob

Reviews

Glenn Hughes – Soul Mover
CD Review by A-J Charron

A quality album, one of the best things to come from a guy who’s definitely been around the music business quite a while. While there are elements from different stages of Hughes’ career (Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, the Hughes Turner Project and various solo pieces), this album has a flavor all its own.

Steve Unruh – Song To The Sky
CD Review by A-J Charron

A self-produced album, one guy playing all the instruments, and it gets one of my rare 5 star ratings! An amazing disc from start to finish, by an exceptionally talented artist.

Thoughts & Feedback

Spring. That’s what I forgot to mention last week… That might be understandable as, while I was putting the finishing touches on our last issue of Guitar Noise News, six more inches of snow got dumped in my yard.

Be that as it may, a number of springs ago, I gadded about Italy, stopping for a while in Florence and Venice, among other places. Florence, as I’m sure many of you know, is home to an incredible wealth of painting, sculpture and other works of art. And when I wasn’t in a museum myself, I often found myself simply watching many of the art students who would seemingly be everywhere, making copies of the many masterpieces that you could see inside the museums and galleries. This sort of thing takes place every day in museums and schools all across the world.

And if you think about it, it also occurs in all sorts of other disciplines, particularly music. The student busy copying the lines of a DaVinci sketch in a museum is not that far removed from the guitarist trying to nail down the opening solo in Wish You Were Here. If you read an interview of a guitarist who’s been deemed a “master” of his or her craft, chances are very likely that he or she will discuss how some other guitarist was a great influence. There will be the period of trying to copy every riff, tone and nuance that defined the playing style of his or her idol.

This emulation is how most of us either got started or started getting serious about the guitar. What will (hopefully) ultimately happen is that we will also start developing our own little nuances and tics, which will become a personal and unique style. And it’s fairly obvious that the more influences you have, the more elements you will have to create your style with.

And this is why listening to music, all kinds of music, is so important. You never know when some artist or genre is just going to click with you and become something that you want to incorporate into your style. Just as I’ve told you on many occasions that you never turn down an opportunity to play, you also don’t want to turn down the opportunity to listen.

But just as we discussed last week about how there never seems to be time enough to practice or play, there also seems to be so many different artists and so much music out there that it’s impossible to imagine being able to ever hear everything. One of the things that makes the Internet so wonderful is that you have much greater access to music, all different kinds of music, than ever before. But it also makes you realize that no matter how much music you listen to, it is a minute fraction of all that’s out there.

When David Wegler approached me about doing the article that went online this past week, I didn’t have to think twice about it. In fact, we’ll be creating a “Listening Library” page at Guitar Noise in the very near future for more articles of this nature.

It’s important to not think of these articles as you might think of things like “Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Guitarists” or some other silly thing that, while they certainly generate no end of discussion, are still basically marketing ploys. All we want to do is give you more ideas, more sources of inspiration for your playing and writing and arranging. This is not about “so and so is over (under) rated” as it is about “here is an artist you might want to listen to for this or that reason.” And “this or that reason” is, more than likely, “because you might hear something you’ll like” or “because you might learn something.”

And that, after all, is what Guitar Noise is supposed to be about. And don’t forget to let me know what you think of the idea about having a page like this, where we’ll devote articles to specific artists as well as particular genres and styles of music. Drop me a line at dhodgeguitar@aol.com and I’ll be happy to chat with you about it. Maybe I’ll even ask you to write about your favorite guitarist.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a grand week. Stay safe.

David