Newsletter Vol. 2 # 123 – May 08, 2005

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

• News and Announcements
• New Articles and Lessons
• Email of the Week
• Sunday Songwriter’s Group
• Reviews
• Thoughts and Feedback

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

This issue will unfortunately be very brief as I’m off to Chicago in a few hours. So let’s get right down to things:

New Articles And Lessons

Your Growth As A Guitarist – Vertical Or Horizontal?
by Jamie Andreas

This piece of Jamie’s, originally from 1999, has never been more timely. Being honest about your growth as a guitarist will help you to take the steps toward learning how to grow in the direction you desire to.

Email Of The Week

For the record, this isn’t an email. It was posted on the forum pages:

Hi Dave

Really enjoyed reading your beginner articles. So well explained. You must get inundated with questions but here’s mine:

My musical theory only goes to the following.

I know how to make chords in major and minor scales, etc, etc.

My tunes are usually written in A minor using the notes available in the harmonic and melodic scales. I have incorporated the stuff you said about chord progressions sounding stronger when it’s not going from minor to minor. I have written loads of basic songs using chord progressions that are based around i-iv-v and ii-v-i. I mean I tend to stick to Am, D, Dm, E, Em and G with the odd C and F thrown in for interest.

With my extremely basic knowledge, what is the best article on Guitar Noise that will enable me to understand music on a deeper level and try and make my songs more complex. I know that the best songs are usually the simple ones but I want my tracks to sound “deeper”.

Thank you in advance.

Seriously speaking, people should know better than to ask me what the “best” anything is, because I’m wary of superlatives.

In this case, there are a number of articles here at Guitar Noise, which could give you all sorts of ideas as how to go about making your songs more complex. Any of my guitar columns about chord progressions (Minor Progress seems very apt given your preferences for minor chords) would obviously help, but so would other articles that, at first glance, you might not even read.

For instance, there’s a very old piece of mine called All Down The Line, which deals with walking bass lines. Doesn’t sound very promising, does it? But how about if you were writing a song where you used a nice walking bass line involving your Em chord? You could start with Em, then go to Em/D# (XX1000), then to Em/D (XX0000), then to Em/C# (X42000), then to Em/C (C32000 – and yes, that’s the same as Cmaj7) and then you could finish with Em/B or B7 in order to cycle back to Em again. That would certainly make a few measures of plain old Em more complex.

Another old Guitar Column, Multiple Personality Disorder, deals with chord voicings up the neck, as does Moving On Up. Since you’ve got the open E, A and D strings at your disposal in the key of A minor, you can make a very simple progression such as Am, Dm and E7, sound much more interesting just by trying different voicings and/or using a few more embellished chords than you might normally do in first position. Try this:

Amadd9 (X07500)
Dm9 (XX0650)
E7 (076700)

And don’t even get me going on open and alternate tuning!

The point of all this is that answers and suggestions are literally everywhere! And not only here in the articles at Guitar Noise – listening to and analyzing music and (and you knew this was coming, right?) playing with other musicians are two of the best way to improve your writing skills. Whenever you hear a song you like, make it a point to learn what’s going on in it, chord and chord voicing-wise. Watch other people playing, even if it’s on video. Where on the neck are they making their chords?

One of the biggest stumbling blocks people run into, whether as guitarists or songwriters (or both), is that there is some big secret answer out there and that once you uncover it, everything will magically fall into place. There isn’t. Or rather, there is. It’s called paying attention to things and patiently working out ideas. In other words, it’s just life. No lie!

I hope this helps and I hope that one day I have the pleasure of hearing something you’ve written.

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 27

Okay we’ve focused on different aspects of our song writing over the last twenty-five weeks (I can’t believe we’re half way through this third year!), aspects such as inspiration, imagery, structure, rhyming schemes etc. But we all approach writing songs in different ways which become more complicated when we collaborate. Over the next two weeks we’re going to write some songs as if we were collaborating. The way to imagine this is to see yourself as the major songwriting partner but someone else, in this case me, is going to feed you ideas and streams of consciousness, lines to be included and possibly even subjects to write about. After that we’ll bounce ideas of each other. It’s up to you to then write a song retaining the SSG principles of song writing. I hope that makes sense for you.

Following on from last week’s topic, this week I want you to write a song but include the following lines (in any order):

Angels and demons
Hearts and minds
Poorest of the poor
Nation after nation

Let’s see where this takes us.

Good Writing

Bob

Reviews

Genesis – From Genesis To Revelation
CD Review by A-J Charron

Demon Music Group gives a true trip down memory lane with the re-release of the very first album ever recorded by Genesis, way back in 1968, when the band consisted of Peter Gabriel (lead vocals and flute), Mike Rutherford on bass and guitar, Tony Banks on keyboards, Anthony Phillips on guitars and drummer John Silver.

Guyatone Tuners
Product Review by A-J Charron

A-J gives us a review of not one, but two of Guyatone’s tuners – the PT-21 and the MT3 models.

Thoughts & Feedback

In the United States, and other places as well, I suspect, today is Mothers’ Day. Personally, I think about Mothers’ Day much in the same way I think about Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other occasions, be they holidays or holy days. And that’s this: why not make your mother feel special every day? It truly doesn’t take much effort, at least if your heart is in it in the first place. And you’ll be amazed at what a good mood it puts you in.

I hope you all have a grand week. Stay safe.

And, as always,

Peace

David