Guitar Noise

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

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

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

It’s good to see all of you again!

It seemed to be forever, didn’t it? Clicking on the forum page time after time only to see that Beavis and Butthead were still there. I can’t tell you how much it felt like coming home to open up the Beginners’ Q & A Forum and finding a new post entitled “Barre Humbug!”

Paul tells me that there are still things being tinkered with in the system, so we thank you for your patience and for kindly taking your time to point out where any problems may lie.

Don’t forget that, in much of the world, today is “Mother’s Day.” Now before you start thinking, “oh, there he goes again…” consider this: None of us would be here, at Guitar Noise, had it not been for Paul’s mother. Without my dad’s mother, I would have been exposed to the music the way I was as a child (let alone probably not being born!). If you’re not on good terms with your own mother, then how about being happy that Carlos Santana had one?

Yes, it borders on the ludicrous, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.

Mothers have long been worshipped on this planet. Many, if not most, religions started out in worship of female deities. We think of motherhood not only as bringing life, but also as the ultimate act of creation. And creation is something that we as musicians and guitarists and human beings all care about.

So call your mom. Or anyone’s mother and say thank you. You should do that every day of the year and not just once.

Okay, we’re ready to move on now!

New Lessons And Articles

One of the unintended aftereffects of the whole server/forum page ordeal is that I’ve got a lot of lessons coming your way. Paul and I are still trying to catch a lot of bugs, though, so I ask for your patience as we get them online as quickly as our schedules will allow. Let’s kick off with Part 2 of Pete Simms’ stellar work on Chord Melodies and the very latest from A-J. Here’s the newest articles and lessons we’ve put up since last Sunday:

When Is It Time To Record?
by A-J Charron

Everyone is in a rush to make a CD. This should come as no surprise – the technology is getting more affordable all the time. But just because you can make a recording, should you? A-J Charron offers some interesting thoughts on this question.

Solo Guitar With Chord Melodies (I Got Rhythm Part 2)
by Pete Simms

Judging by the emails, you’ve all undoubtedly been working hard on Pete’s first lesson. And that’s not surprising since it is a lot of fun to play. Here’s Part 2 so that you can put together the complete song.

Guitar Tip

This week’s tip comes from our own Nick Torres. There’s been a lot of talk on the forum pages about online tuners and Nick has this great advice:

There are a lot of cool guitar applications you can find on the internet. Two of my favorites are AP Guitar tuner and The Alternate Tuning Chord and Scale finder.

AP Guitar tuner lets you click on any tuning and using your computer’s microphone tune each string to the correct note.

Alternate Tuning Chord and scale finder lets you input any tuning and find all the component notes of any chord. It also gives you the scale locations for alternate tunings. A must have.

Both are freeware.

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…

SSG Week 30

Ever wish you had a photographic memory?

Well stick around because this week we are going to create one.

Your assignment is to go grab one of your own old photo albums and leaf through it. Or if you are like me, go rummage through the bin that has all the old photos in it that you are supposed to put in albums sometime this decade.

When you find one that brings back strong feelings, memories, or mental images, stop.

Now that you’ve got that picture, describe it. Make a lyrical snapshot. Write a song version of the picture. Don’t try to write a story, just a lyrical description of that moment on film. Write what you see so we can see it.

Good luck and good writing!

Thoughts and Feedback

5 Questions with Darrin Koltow

Hands down, one of the friendliest and most helpful persons I’ve ever met (without meeting in person) has to be Darrin Koltow. Not to mention one of the hardest working! Besides all his efforts on his own site, Maximum Musician, writing various ebooks and teaching guitar, Darrin has been kind enough this past year to serve as Guitar Noise’s Copy Editor. If my lessons seem a little (or a lot) more coherent lately, that’s because of him.

But rather than to embarrass him by writing pages about his service to the guitar community, I managed to get a few moments of Darrin’s time this week for our “Meet the Staff” interview:

1) What’s the latest with Maximum Musician? Any new projects or ebooks in the works that people should know about?

The latest news with MaximumMusician.com is the ebook Blues Grooves for Beginners and beyond. I wrote a lot of music for this, and had a blast doing it. Besides that, I’ve been focusing on writing the Guitar Study newsletter, and just practicing.

2) Your ebook “Guitar Lessons On The Web” has gotten great reviews. What made you decide to write that book? How much work goes into researching something like that? Was there anything about the process in particular that surprised you? I mean did you find things on the web that surprised you?

I wrote the Guitar Lessons ebook because I thought there was a need for guitarists to know about all the great resources there are on the Internet for learning guitar. I was amazed at some of the stuff I was able to find and report on for the guide, such as the free MP3 slow-down software.

And there are other resources that I found pretty easily, and take for granted, but that other guitarists, who are maybe just getting on the web, might need to know. The awesome – and awesomely playable and practical – lessons for beginners and intermediates here at Guitar Noise, for example.

3) In addition to your own page, you make time not only to do copy editing for Guitar Noise but also to write articles for us. What originally brought you to the Guitar Noise site and do you have any favorite stories associated with it?

As for interesting stories about my involvement with Guitar Noise, I don’t think I have anything that’s really story material. Instead, I have an awesome respect and appreciation for the quality of info that the whole staff, especially Paul and you, gather and post. Let’s say you were somehow able to go back in time to visit an aspiring guitarist, who might only think of Giant Spiders from Mars if you were to mention to him the term World Wide Web. You bring along some printouts of web pages from the Guitar Noise site, I think you’d have a tough time convincing such a player that all the info on those pages was published without any monetary compensation whatsoever. Amazing.

What originally brought me to Guitar Noise was my search for sites that would post one of my first articles. It might have been the Most Important Skill article.

4) When you’re not doing all this work online, how do you like to spend your time? Any particular hobbies or interests?

My time not spent on web activities is pretty easy to account for: I spend it playing and practicing.

5) Because of your own work and research you definitely have a good grasp of what beginners need to get started on the guitar. If there were three things that you could tell everyone as he or she takes up the guitar, what would they be?

Okay: three things to recommend to beginning guitar players:

Number one: cultivate your desire. In other words, know *exactly* why you want to play, and intensify that feeling. You’ll need to do that to overcome the inertia of all the other influences in your life that prevent you from making the time to play.

Two: Learn *songs*, especially songs you love. Learn about scales and theory, but put the music itself first, in your mind and in your practice schedule. A big part of this suggestion is how to learn songs: it’s okay to learn a tune from notation. But before you use the notation, make a sincere effort to learn the tune by ear first. First the melody, and then other elements: chords and rhythm.

Three: Recognize that you can learn how music works even if your fingers can’t make the shapes and actions you want them to. How? Use instrument number one: your voice. And learn some elementary piano skills.

Let’s see, Paul, Ryan, Darrin, A-J, Dan and Laura… who’s left? Ah! To some of you it may seem as if Nick Torres has been around forever, but in truth he’s the “new guy” on the staff! Next week we’ll see what happens when you one day happen upon a web page and wind up never going home!

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

And, as always,

Peace

David