Guitar Noise

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

• News and Announcements
• A Word (or Two) From Paul
• New Lessons and Articles
• Worth a Look
• Email of the Week
• Sunday Songwriters Group / Sunday Composers
• Thoughts and Feedback

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

Still keeping tabs, no pun intended, on Len Collins’ “World’s Largest Guitar Lesson” being held mere weeks from now on May 11th. This will be at Middleton Hall at the Milton Keynes Shopping Centre and, as we’ve mentioned on numerous occasions here at Guitar Noise News, there’ll be all sorts of prizes including some very nice guitars! All the proceeds are going to Diabetes UK, so if you have the chance to attend, why not take part in something wonderful like this?

All you need do is an acoustic guitar and to register (free).

We’re also counting down to our Guitar Noise Seminar in Toronto! That will be on the last Friday and Saturday of May; that’s the 28th and 29th. It’s going to be a grand time!

Here on the home front, we’ve got a great new Intermediates’ lesson for you. Also, be certain to read the “Thoughts and Feedback” section to learn of a fun “project” taking place in May that in which you might want to participate. Check out all that and more right after…

A Word (Or Two) From Paul

There’s some good news this week for anybody who is considering buying an item or two from our site store.

First of all, the T-shirts you’ve been demanding and clamoring for are now available in various sizes, styles and colors. Wearing one these shirts shows your support for GuitarNoise.com and lets the world know you play guitar.

To make things easy on you the store has been redesignedsomewhat. I was quick to learn when we opened the store that it was a lot more work than I was ready for. You’ve all been accustomed to a certain level of excellence when it comes to the lessons, forums and other areas of Guitar Noise. I wouldn’t expect you to accept anything less from the store.

Beginning this week the store now has several new features to make shopping even easier. Now you will be able to track and change your orders online. We have teamed up with Cafe Press to bring you high quality products with great customer service and a satisfaction guarantee. Even better still, you can now place orders by phone using Cafe Press’ toll free phone number.

Of course, shopping through the site is till safe and secure,not to mention convenient. Now you have even more choices.

As mentioned on the site, we plan to be adding something new to the store every month. So if you see a shirt you like but it’s not your favorite color, let us know and we could see about making one for you.

There are plenty of other new features and benefits to our store, but I’ll let you discover them for yourself at the Guitar Noise store.

New Lessons And Articles

Julia
Songs for Intermediates #16
by David Hodge

Here’s a wonderful arrangement of this beautiful and haunting song from the pen of John Lennon. While we won’t be using the straight-from-the-record Travis picking style, we will more than make up for it by using many aspects of chord melody playing to make this both easier and challenging at the same time.

Worth A Look

Don’t ask me why but the very first part of Julia, with its use of the G and E notes on the first string over several chord changes, put me in mind of an old article that I co-wrote with a wonderful young reader of ours from Budapest. It’s called Sustained Tones: An Animated Discussion and it features musical example from Oasis, a group definitely influenced by the Beatles.

This is an important aspect of music to be aware of whether you’re a player or a writer. And it’s an easy thing to use to get better at creating arrangements.

Email Of The Week

This week we’ve another question on augmented chords, specifically using them as substitutions in chord progressions:

Was just reading an article and had a question…. Are you able to just place a Caug where a C should be? IE: if you are in the key of G and you want to throw some spice in the progression could you use Caug (won’t that raised 5th (G#) be a sour note)

I know how to make the chords and what make up the dom and aug because it all comes from the major scale. What I don’t understand is where do they fit in as far as chord tonalities within the key.

Thanks for writing and I’ll try to answer your question as best as I possibly can. It isn’t by any means a complete answer, though!

You just can’t use a Caug chord as a substitute for ANY C chord. Or any augmented chord for its “normal” major. What will determine the usage will be what else in the chord progression as far as which chords are before and after the chord in question.

In your example, being in the key of G you certainly could go from G to Caug instead of C, but only if the chord after Caug warrants doing so. If the next chord in the progression was Am, C6, D or even Dm or F, it would certainly sound okay. A little “unorthodox’ to the ears perhaps, but okay.

But another thing you must take into account is the melody line. Often, and again to use your example, when you’re in the G the G note itself could be in the melody line while you’re playing a C chord. Playing Caug, with its G#, would sound very harsh.

As I mentioned in the article “Augmented Diminished Dementia,” it’s important to listen to the “leading tones,” the half steps that help lead one chord to another. This is your best guide to deciding when you can or should use an augmented chord as a substitution.

I hope this helps.

Sunday Songwriters Group / Sunday Composers

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 second year (!), Nick and Bob are continuing 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.

The Sunday Composers page is the newly created musical extension of the Sunday Songwriters Group. On this forum page the emphasis is on music writing rather than lyrics. Join us for exercises and discussion on the other half of “lyrics and music”.

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

Sunday Songwriters Group – the Second Year!

Week 25

After a week of catching up, I’m sure Bob’s coming up with something fun to get us all grabbing for our notepads this week.

And as Bob himself would say, “Good writing!”

Thoughts & Feedback

One of the things that intrigues, amuses and annoys me no end is how people seem to love to make competitions out of everything. It’s not enough to play the guitar or to like a certain group or genre of music, but one also has to know that his or her playing (group, preferred genre, brand of guitar, style of picking, and on and on and on…) is, for whatever reason, somehow “better” than another’s. I call it the “good better best syndrome,” that is, when I’m being charitable

And being a person prone to over-thinking, I’ve decided to invite all the Guitar Noise writers and readers to participate in, essential, a “panel discussion” on the topic of competitiveness and specifically how it relates to music and the guitar in particular.

Starting in May, we’ll be running a series of articles on this subject. And I’d love to get your views concerning this fascinating topic. If you’d like to write up something, whether a few sentences, a few paragraphs or a few pages, please feel free to do so and to send it along to me at dhodgeguitar@aol.com and be sure to put “May topic” in the subject header. I think this will be a quite interesting read.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a grand week. Stay safe.

And, as always,

Peace

David