Guitar Noise

Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.

In This Issue

• News and Announcements
• New Lessons and Articles
• Worth a Look
• Email of the Week
• Sunday Songwriters Group / Sunday Composers
• Forum News / Thoughts and Feedback

News And Announcements

Greetings!

Welcome to Guitar Noise News!

Sometimes even the best of plans can go a bit askew. Little did I realize that, two weeks ago when I sent Paul my newsletter for April 18th, that we’d be in the middle of a huge change of venue. Oh, unless you’ve visit the forum pages, things may look much the same to you, but we’ve moved! I’ll let Paul fill you all in on it in a moment.

In the meantime, though, let’s attend to the here and now. Or perhaps the up and coming…

A week from the day after tomorrow, the “World’s Largest Guitar Lesson” will be held. That’s May 11th at Middleton Hall at the Milton Keynes Shopping Centre. 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!

This week, in addition to simply getting up and running again, we’ve got articles from two new writers to Guitar Noise. We’ll get to that and more right after…

New Lessons And Articles

Basic Music Theory
by Bruce Fleming

Bruce was kind enough to write out this concise article, which spells out some of the basics of chord theory. He was even kinder to include all sorts of handy charts and diagrams that should help out any beginner wanting to tackle this subject.

Top Ten Tips: Recording A Home Demo
by Keane Li

Here are ten thoughtful steps to making your home demos sound more professional. Besides being a Guitar Noise reader, Keane Li is also the songwriter/guitarist for the band Festizio. He is also the winner of the 2003 Online Rock Festival’s “Original Song” award. Visit: www.festizio.net for more information.

Worth A Look

Don’t forget that, in addition to Bruce’s new article, we’ve many pieces on music theory and also how it relates specifically to the guitar. If you’re a beginner, you might want to take a look at Theory Without Tears or The Musical Genome Project. Moving On Up and Scaling The Heights might be more your speed if you’re looking to start getting going on soloing and improvisation. Be sure to visit our theory page for articles that cover a wide variety of topics and levels of experience.

Email Of The Week

In the “good news/bad news” department, when Paul changed servers, one of the things that also went down was my “guitarnoise.com” account. The good news is that all the problems it seemed to have before in terms of my accessing it at my new home seem, knock on wood, to have completely disappeared. Now sooner was I up and running than I had emails from readers in France, Germany and Morocco! Hello!

But the bad news is that anything that had been there prior to April 26th is now gone. So, once again and hopefully for the last time, please feel free to write me again should you have not gotten a response to a recent email sent my way.

And, as always, thanks for your patience.

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 27

This week I want you to take any one of the verses, which was written last week, and add more verses to tell the story of the song, as you perceive it. Don’t bother writing choruses just yet. As last week don’t use your own verse use somebody else’s.

Remember the Sunday Songwriting rules whilst doing these – let’s face it they should be etched into your memory anyway.

Have fun and good writing.

Bob

Forum News / Thoughts & Feedback

As mentioned earlier, we moved the Forum pages to a different server. This was a monumental task that kept Paul and Nick busy for all of last weekend (Friday night through Monday) and most of this past week. Since Nick hasn’t returned any of my phone calls or emails, I’m assuming that either he’s still tinkering with things, ironing out the millions of little bugs or he’s mad at me for ever suggesting, one day long, that he “get more involved” in the Guitar Noise site!

Perhaps the biggest snag was that, somewhere along the way, we “lost” quite a number of forum members and also their posts. Fortunately Paul has a way for these folks to have access of their old material and will also restore their number of posts, should anyone be of the nature where that sort of thing truly matters to him. Or her.

Avatars, again to which some people have incredible attachments, were also disabled and I think that Nick is close to getting that issue dealt with.

So, in a nutshell, it’s safe to say that the changing of the forum didn’t go quite as smoothly as one would have hoped. Things rarely do, at least in my experiences with life.

But don’t interpret that as a negative statement. To the contrary! I know full well that most of my so-called “problems” are, more often than I’ll ever care to admit, merely things that have momentarily inconvenienced me. And, naturally, my first reaction is to take it personally and then make a big deal about I – how unfair it is, how much work I’m now going to have to do to correct it, etc. I’m very normal, human if you will, when it comes to these things.

But, thankfully, I don’t stay in that place very long. I have to confess that when Paul told me he was switching, I simply assumed that everything would start from square one and I was more than content with that.

And, I note with a smile of pleasure, that others don’t seem stay in a negative place for long either! One Forum Member who goes by the unlikely name of “Scratchmonkey” took it upon himself, bless him, to create a “medal” that those who were lost can proudly display with their “new” membership. No lie. You can get info on that here.

So if you happen to see someone on the forum pages sporting one of these things, you’ll know what’s going on!

Don’t forget that starting in May, we’ll be running a series of articles on the subject of competition and music. Check out last week’s newsletter for more on this and if you find 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. Judging on what I’ve gotten so far, I think this is going to be a very interesting month!

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

And, as always,

Peace

David