Newsletter Vol. 2 # 70 – February 08, 2004

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

  • News and Announcements
  • New Lessons and Articles
  • Forum News
  • Sunday Songwriters Group / Sunday Composers
  • Thoughts and Feedback

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

And a belated happy birthday to Paul Hackett, Guitar Noise’s founder and Executive Producer, who celebrated his most recent one this week. When? How old? Undomesticated equines, as they say, couldn’t drag it out of me!

Once more I’d like to apologize to all who’ve written and not gotten a response as yet. As I mentioned last week, the “my Doom” virus has overrun my email box. Anything with “hello” or “hi” in the subject line has not gotten to me. Anything that didn’t have a suject line at all also has not gotten to me. Please do feel free to write me again if you haven’t already received a reply. I won’t freak out about getting the same email twice!

I’d also like to remind you that I’ve closed down my Compuserve account as of the end of January. So anything that anyone sent to my old address these past two weeks is irretrievably lost. Please send it again to “[email protected]” and, again, my apologies for the inconvenience.

It’s kind of a short week here at the Guitar Noise, but that doesn’t mean nothing’s new!

New Lessons And Articles

Your Song
Songs for Intermediates #14
by David Hodge

The classic Elton John song gets the Guitar Noise treatment. We’ve a terrific finger style arrangement for you, good enough to make you think you’re playing a piano! And, of course, I make sure to throw in enough interesting theory bits to remid you that it is, indeed, after all, a lesson! Play it for your sweetheart next Valentine’s Day!

Forum News

Trust me to totally botch up something! Las week I made a big deal about our latest forum page and then neglected to tell you what it was! Come check out the goings on at the “Guitar Maintenance and Repair” Forum, which you can find on the Guitar Noise forums.

Also, we’ve started another thread on the Guitar Noise Lessons page. Come and join in the discussion on the Easy Songs for Beginners Lesson on Paul Simon’s Bookends! It’s a great way to talk out your problems with others and to get the most out of your learning.

Sunday Songwriters Group / Sunday Composers

Week 15

This week I want you to emphasize your thought process behind writing song lyrics. So this week start with a storyboard. It only needs to be a couple of lines long, yet tells the story of the song. Next break that storyboard down into items for each verse and retain as much of the timeline as you can and put in some of the key imagery you will use. Follow that up with the actual verses and chorus.

But please post in order as above and leave a day or so between each part of the post to allow any comments to filter back and be incorporated in your final song. The song can be any style.

Good Writing

Bob

Thoughts & Feedback

Sometime last Sunday, we logged on the 3,000th member of our Forum Pages. That’s quite amazing to me, really.

This week, believe it or not, I was quite wrapped up in writing, recording and transcribing our latest Intermediates’ Lesson, Your Song. I don’t know whether or not people think the content here at Guitar Noise magically pops up online at specific intervals, but I can assure you, on my end at least, that this is not the case. Sometimes I imagine Paul sitting over in Beijing wondering what on earth is taking me so long to get this week’s material sent to him. Actually I don’t imagine that for very long because I know how busy he is! If I log in twenty hours on a lesson I don’t even want to think about how much time he spends just on keeping the site up and running!

Someone sent me a message (yesterday?) that congratulated me on writing a hundred and fifty articles and lessons. That’s also amazing to me. Where did that time go? I think of all the format changes, big and small, and marvel at the time Paul sinks into the website. Or the fact that Nick (“Mr Neutron of All Moderators”) still has a thousand more posts than we have forum members.

But it’s also our readers and moderators that log a lot of time here. I could spend ages extolling the generous personalities of folks I’ve met but never met – people who’ve chosen to give of their time to make Guitar Noise the place it is today. Time can be spent pounding out a lesson or a review (or in A-J’s case, a boatload of reviews!) as well as simply helping out with questions on the forum page.

So let me once again offer a thank you to all of you. I’ve gotten so many of them since moving over New Years, not to mention well wishes in general. I’d like to make certain you all know that I appreciate it and also appreciate all the effort that each of you puts in here at Guitar Noise. It’s a great community and I’m proud to be a small part of it.

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

And, as always,

Peace

David