Guitar Noise

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

• News and Announcements
• New Lessons and Articles
• Sunday Songwriters Sessions
• Reviews
• Thoughts and Feedback

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

It’s another one of those karma moments – issue #30 falling on 3/30. Of course, it would carry greater significance if this was volume #3. Or if it had occurred on February 30th… which would, granted, require a whole new outlook on things!

Things are a little rushed for time this week, so I’ll get right on with it!

New Lessons And Articles

Every now and then I feel the need to remind people we have a sister site, MusicCareers.net. It’s definitely good to highlight it since we’ve two new articles there this week! Here’s what’s new since our last newsletter:

The Shapes Of Things To Come
by Chris Juergensen

Chris Juergensen describes the current state of affairs in the music industry and shows us why the internet is one of the greatest tools for the aspiring musician and why now is a great time to be producing, marketing and selling your own music.

One Minute Of Fame
by Mab O’Connor

When you’re a working band, you never know whether your next call is going to be a gig or a message from your drummer telling you he’s decided to leave the band for a project involving a performance artist who imitates furniture. Fortunately for Mab O’Connor, it was ABC television…

If you have a question for us 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 the help pages.

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.

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.

And now that you all know what’s going on…

Sunday Songwriter’s Group Week 24

Well if this one isn’t obvious, I don’t know what is.

Take a story/song description from last week,

(everybody together now),

“but not one of your own”

(This also means you can’t take one of your own titles either!)

(Also don’t worry about writing the same one as someone else. It will happen, but that’s one of the interesting things to learn about!)

and write the verses. No chorus, just the verses flowing from beginning to end. Try to include the original color and feeling, but make sure you get your point across.

For all of you who weren’t able to participate last week, no worries, just jump right in this week. We have plenty of lyric ideas to go around.

Reviews

Two CD reviews from A-J this week!

Above And Beyond
A great instrumental album by Jeff Sherman of Glass.

4NYC
A combination live/studio album by Dream Theatre’s Jordan Rudess, which started as an outdoor benefit for families of the victims of the September 11 attack.

Thoughts and Feedback

I know this was promised ages ago, but life seems to have a way of making its own schedule sometimes. Anyway, I’m designating April as “Meet the Staff” month, and we’re going to kick it off this week despite the fact that it’s not April. Call me a rebel, although I’ve always preferred to think of myself more as a “middle of the road anarchist.”

As many of you know, Guitar Noise was founded by Paul Hackett back in, well, a date shrouded in mystery, as you’ll read. But, other that seeing his name pop up every now and then, what do you really know about him? Perhaps you’re aware that he lives in Beijing, China. All I know is that he’s certainly changed my life.

Paul was kind enough to answer a few questions for me for this newsletter:

1) When you started the Guitar Noise site, did you have any idea it would grow the way it has?

Honestly speaking, I can’t exactly remember when I started Guitar Noise. I know for sure it has been called Guitar Noise since 2000. Before that it was called The Online Guitar College and resided at http://www.eskimo.com/~ogre. Going back to the very beginning it was just a very minor website on my university account which has long since been closed. Originally I started making the website as a tool to help myself. At that time there didn’t seem to be any centralized collection of free guitar information to get your hands on. So rather than waiting for someone else to come up with one, I made my own. That was sometime around 1995. I had no vision or plan for it at the time and I am surprised that it is still growing today.

2) What do you feel separates Guitar Noise from other guitar sites on the internet?

I can’t really answer this question fairly. This may surprise people but I don’t like surfing the web. Other than email and using it as a tool to stay in touch with family and friends, almost all my time online is spent in relation to this site or other sites that I am making. Occasionally I visit news sites but I’m really only interested in the headlines and pictures. Separating the fiction from the fact is impossible to do with any sort of accuracy so I leave the stories alone.

But anyway, I have visited a lot of other guitar sites before. I think that the sense of community we have is something missing on many other sites. There are some places that even call themselves “guitar communities” but have no community feeling about them. Their idea of community is setting up a message board where people can register and post messages. Calling that a community requires you to stretch your imagination around the word. Guitar Noise is a lot more about giving and sharing music freely than making money from the Internet.

We may be a little behind other sites on some of the technical things like sound files and video lessons. That’s because we have to learn everything as we go. When someone approached me a few years ago suggesting the site would be much better with a message board I was in full agreement. Then I had to set out and learn how to make a message board. Every new step or development on the site represents something new I have learned.

3) I know that this is probably not easy to answer, but is there anything about the site that you are most proud of?

I suppose the fact that the site is still going gives me a sense of pride. I couldn’t have imagined the first day I sat down to learn html and made the first page that six or seven years later it would still be going. Now that more and more people are finding the site and getting into it really amazes me.

I am especially proud of the contributions other people have made and continue to make. There have been many times, especially over the past two years when I have said, “I’m busy. This is too much work for me. Can you help?” And the response has always been there. Now I have gotten to the point where I do more delegating work than actual work itself. And I tell you, the results of the work others are doing often surpasses my expectations. The energy and feeling that people put into the site is one of the things that make it really great.

I am also proud to say the site has changed my life in ways that are difficult to explain. I had to start deleting the daily messages of congratulations and thanks that I receive. Thousands of people have written to us and I used to keep all these messages for posterity because they all make me feel good. But there just got to be too many. Some of the emails are so touching that they leave a lump in my throat, and there are others that are funny enough to make me laugh out loud. I especially appreciate the letters from people who are much older than me and are just starting guitar as something new. They really reinforce the notion that there is no real pressure to do things by a certain age. Most of our concerns about being too old to begin something new comes from within ourselves, not from outside. Hearing from this great group of people using the site has changed my perspective on many things.

It is something to be proud of. It has given me enough fuel for the rest of my life. Regardless of what you are working on I don’t think inspiration is nearly as valuable as motivation.

4) When you’re not working on the site or at your regular job, what kind of things are you involved with?

This year is a special and important year for me. Thanks to my success on Guitar Noise and all the friends I’ve made along the way I am finally beginning to do what I am meant to do in life. Currently I am working as a director on my first feature film. I studied film and literature in university and after graduation started looking to make my own path. For the past five years I have been studying independently, traveling, learning, teaching, writing and appreciating all kinds of things in life. Now I have reached the point where I am ready to pick up the camera and start directing fulltime. I’ve worked on other films before, but doing my own is especially exciting. It will be my film – something I can take from the very beginning right through to the end. Right now I am dealing with the script, actors, locations and other production aspects on a daily basis.

In a way it distracts me from Guitar Noise. Though I don’t see how it will ever be possible to divorce myself from the site completely. My work on Guitar Noise is a very large part of who I am. Much of my motivation is a result of my work here. Guitar Noise has helped me see what I need to do in life, and in some ways shown me how to get there.

On top of that, as if I wasn’t busy enough already, I opened my own online bookstore in March. I am usually on the lookout for ways to combine my personal interests with a way to make money. I don’t have what some people refer to as a “real job.” I don’t enjoy doing things I don’t really like just to make a living. So I set up this website called Book Dynasty that lets me share some of my interests in language and culture and still make some bread, or rice. This is always a problem for me: how can I live to work rather than work to live? Hopefully a little success with Book Dynasty and my upcoming film will change all that.

I may as well take this opportunity to plug my work outside Guitar Noise here. I have a personal website at: http://www.paulhackett.ca/

5) Are there any future plans about the site that you’d like to hint about right now?

I’d like to get rid of even more advertising in the future. Banner ads are kind of stupid. For all they are worth they really only amount to a bit of pocket money each month. When I think back to 1998-1999 when things were booming it seemed like a good way to make money. Now, all the banners seem irrelevant to me. I sometimes follow the trend of a few other sites I like. One of my favorite sites recently re-designed everything and got rid of the banners completely. On the home page they have no banner ads, but have a few other carefully placed ads around the page such as text links or small graphics. When you read their articles, instead of having a banner they have a paid text link at the top of each page. I have been thinking about doing something similar. You’d never get any annoying, flashing, irrelevant or you’ve-already-won-click-here type banners again, just a link to a different website that ideally offers or sells something to musicians or songwriters. I think going in that direction will only improve the site.

For a couple years now the idea has been tossed around of making a pay per view kind of deal with Guitar Noise. We’ve never settled on what exactly, but without ditching all the free content we may eventually come up with some way of adding a subscriber service to Guitar Noise. You pay a subscription fee for one year and you get even more than what is on the regular site. What that entails hasn’t been decided. In fact, nothing has been decided yet. This may be something we get around to in 2004, or not. There is some reluctance for people to pay for stuff when there is still a lot of free stuff out there. We’ve been more than generous with our help in the past. And now it is clear, to me at least, that if we had 3 or 4 people working full time on this site we could make something absolutely incredible. We just need to work on some ways to pay those people for their work.

In the more foreseeable future I would like to build a team of volunteers to work on the site. In the past most of our writers and contributors have been people with strong interest and support for the site. Today we have no shortage of new writers and new content. If you subscribe to the newsletter you already know how much is going on every week. To keep growing we need to improve the site in other areas. I’d like to get more volunteers working on other less visible but no less important aspects of the site. For example, we don’t have a full time marketing person but if we had several marketing volunteers working on different projects and reporting back to one person, we could accomplish just as much. There are many things we could be doing right now but are not because we don’t have the right helpers in place. So I’d like to start building a team of volunteers that will be something like a street team. I don’t only want marketers though. We could also use more computer people, programmers, designers, musicians, writers – just about anything you can think of. To have a large group of volunteers even working a few hours a week each could help build the community immensely. I hope to lay some of the groundwork for this enterprise before long.

I decided to introduce our current “staff” members in order of seniority. So guess what? Next week you’ll get me. But to play it fair, I won’t ask myself the questions! Paul gets to turn the tables on me next Sunday.

In the meantime, I hope that all of you have a wonderful week. Stay safe.

And, as always,

Peace

David