Guitar Noise

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

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

News And Announcements

Actually, “Thoughts and Feedback!”

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

I hate to tell you, but I’m in one of my moods… It’s not a bad thing, really, but there are times when I tend to get very introspective and annoyingly sentimental and it can take me a while to get out of it. Usually writing helps…

Which means that you’re going to get an earful today! Yes, you’re in for a long newsletter so either go through the headings and find the parts you want to right now or simply sigh and come along for the ride. But it’s not necessarily going to be all my own words this time.

First, though, a couple of big announcements: Watch this space! A-J Charron has a new project in the works that we’ll launch next week (and that’s simply so I can take advantage of the fact that next week is his turn at the staff interview!). Also, we’ve some very interesting updates to the Forum pages. Check it out further down in the newsletter.

Alright, back to “business!” I recently saw Joan Baez in concert here in Chicago. Joan being Joan, she sang the song Finlandia in both English and Arabic. If you’ve never heard this song, I can at least give you the lyrics:

Finlandia

This is my song
Oh god of all the nations
A song of peace
For lands afar and mine

This is my home
The country where my heart is
Here are my hopes
My dreams my holy shrine

But other hearts
In other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams
As true and high as mine

My countries skies
Are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams
On clover leaf and pine

But other lands
Have sunlight too and clover
And skies are everywhere
As blue as mine

Oh hear my song
Oh god of all the nations
A song of peace
For their land and for mine

Hearing those words immediately brought others to mind. In another lifetime, I fancied myself an English literature student. And I still carry around me the words of Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888):

749. To Marguerite

YES: in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown.
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour;

O then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent!
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent.
Now round us spreads the watery plain-
O might our marges meet again!

Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?-
A God, a God their severance ruled;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

It never ceases to amaze me that, when you get down to it, human beings all over the world and from all over time are a lot more alike than we care to think. I know that actually bothers a lot of people. We grow up, especially in this part of the world, extolling the individual and our most of our lives are spent trying to promote and praise our differences. As funny as it sounds when you put it on paper, for whatever reason, being unique is not enough. Everyone is unique, for crying out loud! That means I have to be more unique! It’s a truly laughable concept, not to mention how it’s a total butchering of the use of the word!

Music, like most art, works because of how it brings people together. While no two people may share the exact same feelings or even reflect the same way on a shared experience, they can get close enough that any differences are seen for the petty things that most differences are.

People like to look at things like the current war in Iraq and say “in these times…” I don’t see much difference between now and any other time in human history (that is, recorded human history – let’s remember that people have been around for five million some odd years and didn’t seem to have as much trouble as we’ve had the last few thousand). Without being too maudlin about it, let me encourage you to celebrate your similarities and hold them dear. Don’t stop playing and sharing your music.

New Lessons And Articles

We’ve got Len Collin’s latest piece for you this week and the long awaited new installment of our Songs for Intermediates lessons. Here’s what’s gone online since we last chatted:

The Story Of K
by Len Collins

On occasion, the guitar teacher does double shift as a fairy godparent! Len recounts a wonderful story of one of his guitar students who learned to overcome being shy about playing.

America
Songs for Intermediates #10
by David Hodge

It’s a travelogue so, appropriately, we take you all over the place with this lesson! There’s something for everyone in this single guitar arrangement – walking bass lines, a mixture of strumming techniques and it’s a waltz! If nothing else, increase your vocabulary by learning the word “gabardine…”

MP3 UPDATE

Love The One You’re With

Combining some interesting rhythms with alternate chord voicings can take a simple three or four chord song and make it a memorable favorite. Here’s an easy song lesson where you can use start to learn this technique. Listen along with the MP3s for a chance to play it even better.

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 25

It’s time for the chorus, of chorus. Get it, “of chorus”? Oh, I crack me up.

We’ve had some great first lines, some real zingers like:

“I brought this loneliness down on myself”

“You’re pure like magic”

“I have no tale to tell”

“The darkness is fading as the light passes through”

“The priests are still preaching in this god forsaken place”

and

“The lying gets easier all the time”

Then we added in the “treatment” which is the idea or story behind the lyrics. Some fantastic and unexpected ideas – go take a look.

Next we added in the verses based on the treatment / storyline.

So pick a set of verses, and no, it can’t be your own set, and add in the chorus.

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

We’re also going to leave up last week’s storylines, so if you’d like to jump in and write verses, knock yourself out.

Good luck and good writing.

Forum Pages

Okay, this is new! And I’m sure that many of you will be very pleased that we’ve gotten around to it. I say “we’ve” but I should say “Paul.” He’s been busy this week and we have a whole new Forum section to thank him for. It’s called, appropriately enough, “Your Opinion”. In this new Forum area, we currently have three separate pages:

Reviews of Instructional Material – great to check out if a certain book / video / writer / teacher is what you want. Help the newbies in the Guitar Noise community be sharing your learning experiences!

Opinions and Polls – Acoustic or Electric? Left or right-handed? John, Paul, George or Ringo? A great way to exchange your thoughts on a number of ideas and issues.

Your Suggestions for Guitar Noise – Our very own “Suggestion box!” I’ll probably use this one myself!

I always look forward to hearing your opinions on various topics and now, thanks to Paul, you don’t even have to email me if you don’t want to! And you can also hear what other readers think about your suggestions.

Reviews

Zutique
Greg Sherman of Glass presents a solo album of acoustic piano.

Dark Forest Trail
Warren Appleby (a Guitar Noise reader!) offers up a wonderful self-made album of instrumental songs.

The Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Rock
A new reference book from the folks at Billboard Publishing.

Thoughts and Feedback

My first column for Guitar Noise went online on November 12, 1999. It would be easy to say “and the rest is history…” but the truth is that I think this particular phase of my life is going to continue for quite some time to come.

Last week, Paul was kind enough to answer five questions of mine to kick off our “Meet the Staff” month (which will probably last two months at this rate!). This week, Paul gets to return the favor and ask me five questions…

1) Why do you do it? I mean, why do you put so much of your time, effort and self into Guitar Noise?

Nothing like starting out with a tangled mess! I hope you don’t mind a bit of pseudo-philosophical rambling. I hope you also don’t mind me tying in the first part of the newsletter!

This may be hard to believe, but ages ago I, like everyone else I imagine, fully intended to change the world. Make it a better place. I had absolutely no idea how this was going to come about, but I did know that I would be leading everyone to a better place.

And I grew up, again like everyone else, I suppose. It’s hard to say exactly where or when or why, but my ideas as to what was truly important underwent a huge change. Leading a revolution and delivering everyone to the Promised Land has been done enough, don’t you think? And most Promised Lands have this tendency of being more of the same with different leaders currying favor for different favorites.

I’ve been very lucky in that music, in many aspects, has always been a big part of my life. Just to be able to play, even if it was in a little room by my lonesome, made me happy and that happiness turned into the focus I was looking for in other parts of my life. I learned how to balance all the aspects of my life so that I wasn’t detesting one part of it and then feeling guilty in the other.

So I was also lucky to be at the right place in my life (not to mention in front of a computer) when I read Paul’s notice for a writer three and a half years ago. If you’ve read any of my lessons, you know that my core belief is that playing and sharing music is an incredibly wonderful thing, especially so because it enriches all the parties involved.

And writing for Guitar Noise became, and continues to be, a joy to me. It’s hard enough to try to explain the concept of strumming with words, so I’m not certain I can even begin to tell you the feeling of connectedness that working on this site gives me. I think you’ve all heard me mention (over and over) that I’m not a great guitarist by any stretch of the imagination. That has never been a concern of mine. But being able to help others enjoy music by creating it themselves, that’s an amazing feeling. To be part of a team that helps that happen all over the world leaves me awestruck sometimes.

Asking why I put so much into the site is like asking me why I, or any musician, put so much into playing. It’s who I’ve become. And I’m very happy with whom I’ve become.

Just so you know – it’s not always a picnic! No relationship ever is, and what Guitar Noise and I have is definitely a relationship. But it is nice that, in an incredibly strange and ’roundabout way, I am able to help be part of something that makes the world a little better.

2) The song lessons are great. When are we going to see some more columns by you?

This is where I usually sigh and wish that somehow I didn’t require sleep or that somehow I managed to win one of those mysterious funding grants that seem destined for Public Television…

Believe it or not, I’ve been working on an “ideal” schedule, one where I can write at least one new column, along with a new Beginners and a new Intermediate lesson each month. I find it especially gratifying when I can get a column and the song lessons to mesh on a particular idea, as I did last year with Moving On Up, Love The One You’re With and Give A Little Bit. And I really miss writing columns. There are innumerable topics that I’d like to cover and more that I’d like to explore. But the truth of the matter is that time does not always permit for things to happen in an ideal way.

Of course, the obvious solution would be to take up one of our Forum members on his offer to put me up in a little cabin on his property and just write, write, write. As much as I find that an appealing idea at times, it’s not in the foreseeable future.

But hopefully you’ll start seeing columns again, if not once a month, then at least every other month (man, writing that, I can’t believe I used to write them on a weekly basis!). Topics coming up very soon include basic song arrangement for the single guitar, more on leads – specifically where they come from, scales, chord shapes and the basic thoughts behind the CAGED system – and a look at augmented and diminished chords.

As always, I’ll be more than happy to add to this list! Send me your suggestions.

3) You’re in a position to meet lots of people online. Do you have any interesting stories to share of people you’ve met through Guitar Noise?

Where to start? I started getting emails the day after my first article went online and I promised myself I’d always answer each one personally. Well, because my computer at home is something closer to what one might associate with “the Flintstones” rather than “the Jetsons,” it didn’t always happen. I’ve lost some and fumbled others between my home and office computers. But I will say that I’ve probably answered 98% of the email I’ve gotten.

Some of the question/response routine turned into actual correspondence and some of our current crop of writers and staff I first met through a simple emailed question. Some people who wrote, it turned out, lived close enough to invite to the house for a jam night or two. Others have turned into people that I hope I get to meet one day should I happen to be lucky enough to be in their part of the world.

But three single events stand out most. First was a reader who wrote me last year (I think it was last year!) to say that he had written a song for his wife and wanted to thank me for helping him do so. Yes, I am a sentimental idiot on occasion, but that just floored me.

The second is a bit more of a group participation thing – last winter we ran a group of stories called “The Joy of Guitar/Music” and I was amazed at how many people were willing to share their experiences with us. It was very inspiring to me to read how some of our readers were using music in their lives.

And I hope this doesn’t embarrass Paul too much, but the third event was getting to meet our esteemed webmaster last August at the third Riverside Jam. Paul and a friend drove down from Canada to New Jersey to be with us for a single day (!) and it was great to get to spend some time with him. I wish it could have been a week (or two or three) longer!

4) When can we expect to see some David Hodge guitar method books and CDs? And what can we expect them to be like?

Okay, this could be one possible solution to getting more time to spend on the website! Believe it or not, a lot of tinkering around with the MP3s is helping me towards the goal of self-producing Guitar Noise “method” CDs. I am hoping to record our “Strumming 101″ CD this spring, test it out and re-edit it over the summer and then have it ready for the public by the fall. This is way behind my original schedule, but unfortunately it can’t be helped. That pesky time thing again!

Books are another matter… Oh, I’m getting a lot of support and advice from folks. Nick Torres, among others, has been exceptionally good about giving me “encouragement” (read “guilt trips,” “cajoling” and moments of true “inspiration”) and things are proceeding apace. The biggest hurdle here is that I am very much of the opinion that using real songs, as we do here at Guitar Noise, would be the best approach. However, publishers are seeing this as an unnecessary expense. This may be in discussion for a while.

Another angle I’m thinking about is having a “basic” text, which would cover the fundamentals and then supplement the text with “song workbooks.” The workbooks could be ten to twelve songs of various degrees of difficulty serving as a graduated lesson plan. Again, this will mean dealing with copyright, but it might be easier to negotiate a package deal than several individual songs.

As always, I’m more than interested in your ideas on this.

5) Do you have a favorite lesson on the site you’ve written that sometimes gets overlooked, or you’d like people to go back and reread?

Sometimes someone will write me about an old lesson and how it made a big difference to him/her and helped in some way. More often, someone will write and point out a mistake I made! There are a lot of them…

Well, the first thing I will do is go back and read it again myself. So, believe it or not, I read my own writing a lot more than I had ever planned on doing. Whenever I read something again I tend to get struck with the same two feelings over and over again. The first is, “Hey, there’s a lot of interesting stuff here!” Sometimes my writing is like my cooking – no one is more surprised by it than me! The second thought is “I really could have gotten into this in a lot more detail!” I guess this is why putting a lot of the old material into a book form may ultimately make it stronger. These answers all seem to be meshing together, don’t they?

Some of the columns on practicing and inspiration, such as Common Sensei and A Question of Balance, I think I’d have a hard time doing a better job of writing. I’m also pretty happy with some of the ones that try to describe the creative process behind writing a song, like Alternative Writing Styles, Group Therapy, or the piece on my song Waiting for Nancy. And I’m also amazed at pieces like Turning Notes Into Stone, which manage to explain something as seemingly complicated as transposition in a way that I think most people can get it. Even people without much musical background.

I think that as I go through the old columns and articles with an eye towards adding MP3 files, I’m going to get more of an appreciation for some of them. Or do a lot of rewriting!

Next week we’ll get to chat with A-J Charron. Now that should be interesting!

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

And, as always,

Peace

David