Guitar Noise

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #106 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• Topic of the Month
• Guitar Noise Featured Artist
• New Lessons and Articles
• Coming Attractions
• Exploring Guitar with Darrin Koltow
• Emails? We Get Emails!
• Event Horizon
• Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello! I hope that New Year 2010 is starting out well for all of you!

Since it’s the middle of the month, I guess that means it’s time for the latest edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise (www.guitarnoise.com).

As more of the (seemingly endless) book deadlines are passing, I’m thinking that it’s long past time that we’ve had a Guitar Noise Seminar of some sort. So I’m thinking that it might be good to start scheduling maybe one or two for this spring, say possibly early May or early June.

Since a lot of our readers have been asking about it, I thought a good topic for this year’s seminars might be “playing with others in small groups.” That title definitely needs work! Anyway, the idea would be to have the people attending the seminar learn about how to arrange pieces for two guitars. We would take specific songs (brought by the participants) and explore how best to work up a second guitar part that would best befit the second player’s skills and abilities.

This would be held at my home in western Massachusetts (about two-and-a-half hours from New York City and two-and-a-half hours from Boston) and probably be on a Saturday, starting around nine-thirty in the morning and lasting until four-thirty and I will be providing lunch for all. If it’s possible (and if the participants are interested), I can try to arrange for a public performance at a local venue for that evening. I’m also still working out the cost, but I’m hoping to have it be around $125 for the day, and that would include lunch and beverages.

If this appeals to you, drop me an email and let me know. I’d prefer to keep the groups small, between five to eight people. If there is enough interest and we can work out when people would like to come, then it’s possible to hold them on several weekends so that we can accommodate as many folks as possible. And if there is enough interest we could also see about having them in the late summer and throughout the fall months.

Topic of the Month

As mentioned in our last newsletter, we’re starting out the New Year with a bit of a flashback – the Guitar Noise “topic of the month” for January 2010 is “Singing in the New Year” and that makes a lot of sense as so many people pick up the guitar in order to play and sing songs with others.

So if you go to the home page, you’ll find a link to many, many Guitar Noise articles, all dealing with the topic of singing and playing at the same time, not to mention just singing in general. And, as with most of our topics, there are articles from a number of folks who’ve contributed to our website over the past years. You should definitely find a few good tips to help you get your voice in shape.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

And Slash, who was known once upon a time as Saul Hudson, is our first “Guitar Noise Featured Artist” for 2010. Paul’s written a terrific bio about Slash (even though he totally omits all the special chords that are named after him) that you can find on our artist profiles page.

New Lessons And Articles

Guitar Plateaus – What To Do When You’re Stuck
by Jamie Andreas

If you’re traveling along the paths of learning guitar, you will eventually find yourself at a plateau in your learning. Longtime Guitar Noise Contributor, Jamie Andreas of Guitar Principles, explains why simply changing the way you look at being on a plateau, looking at it with the eye of a Guitar Master, can help you move forward in a short time.

Hello In There
Songs for Intermediates #29
by David Hodge

Here is a beautiful song from songwriter extraodinaire John Prine. This is another arrangement that most beginners can handle, plus we get into some discussion about choosing keys and chord voicings when creating arrangements. And you also get to hear how easy it is to turn this into a simple two-guitar arrangement.

Coming Attractions

We are constantly working on new lessons of all sorts here at Guitar Noise. Just to keep you updated as to what’s coming along in the pipeline, the following lessons are still on track for being posted up online in the next few months, although not necessarily in the order in which I’ve written them!

Easy Songs for Beginners: Sweet Home Alabama, Both Sides Now, Ziggy Stardust, Mister Bojangles, Peace Train, Just Like Heaven, Yellow

Songs for Intermediates: Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright, If I Had A Boat, Homeward Bound, Fire and Rain, Circle Game, I Want You Back

Plus we’re looking forward to having more of our “Chord Melody Song Arrangements,” which will deal with pop and rock songs, like Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” or old standards like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and maybe even a surf tune, such as the Ventures’ classic “Walk Don’t Run.”

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Tip for January 15 – Practicing Modes (Part 22)

Welcome back to our virtual coursework in the C phrygian sound, in our ongoing exploration of the musical modes. We’re “speaking” C phrygian with arpeggios this time, as we did last time. But, last time we used the C7+5 arp, and this time up it’s the C7b9.

Let’s play the music before we read about the music.

|-9---------------|-----------------|-------------6-9-|-8--
|---6-8-5---------|-----------------|---------5-8-----|----
|---------5-6-----|-----------------|-----6-5---------|----
|-------------8-5-|-----------------|-5-8-------------|----
|-----------------|-7---4-----4---7-|-----------------|----
|-----------------|---8---6-6---8---|-----------------|----

C7b9 has one extra note beyond the usual C, E, G, Bb configuration: Db. That note makes the C7 sound phrygian. In other words, it makes you think we’re going to F minor. How does this work?

The note Db is the sixth note in F harmonic minor, which is a super common minor scale your ears pick right up on. The C, E, G and Bb notes of C7 say “we’re going to F.” And the Db, which is not in the F major scale but in the F harmonic minor, says “Ah: F minor, not F major.”

We may look at substitutes for the C7 arpeggio in the next issue.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright 2010 Darrin Koltow

In case you’ve never visited Maximum Musician, hurry on over to Darrin’s website. You can also read his past contributions to Guitar Noise here. And you can also read some of Darrin’s past Guitar Noise News posts over at the Guitar Noise Blog.

Emails? We Get Emails!

Dear David,

I have decided to test out just how true your words of welcome are regarding inquiries. Perhaps to your chagrin. Nonetheless, I am a beginning guitarist and though guitarnoise.com and, more particularly, your instructional articles on beginner songs and the like have helped me immensely, the Internet isn’t always available to me. And you know, sometimes the computer just starts to hurt my eyes after a while.

So I was in the market for a book (or other literature) that would provide me with easy/intermediate guitar tabs, as well as some sort of basic instruction or tips for successfully learning the song. Any recommendations? If this information is covered somewhere on guitarnoise.com, I apologize — I haven’t gotten a chance to fully peruse all the website has to offer just yet.

Much appreciated,

Hi

Thank you for writing. And my thanks as well for your kind words concerning my lessons at Guitar Noise. I’m glad that they are being of help to you.

I don’t spend a lot of time on the Internet simply because my teaching and writing schedules don’t give me all that much free time. So I have not made an extensive look around at all the thousands (and tens of thousands) of guitar sites there are out there. And not to brag, but in the little that I have looked, I have yet to find any other books (or websites) that provide the same depth and level of instructional material as we do at Guitar Noise. Part of that is because the publishing industry (both book and music) make doing so fairly prohibitive with their copyright practices. A small book of, say, six to ten detailed lessons tends to cost them more to produce than just printing up the tablature and saying “here it is! Now just play it!”

Be that as it may, Paul Hackett (the gentleman who created Guitar Noise) and I are looking into how we at Guitar Noise might possibly be able to produce and publish our own series of lesson books. Unfortunately, my own teaching and writing schedule have sidelined this project for a while (I am currently writing / recording two titles for Alpha / Penguin Books – “The Complete Idiot’s Guitar to Playing Rock Guitar” and the entirely new “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar”) so we may not be able to get to it until this summer. But we will keep everyone updated either through our free newsletter (Guitar Noise News) or on the “News” section of the Forum pages.

In the absence of books and materials that are as detailed, I can recommend many of Mark Hanson’s books, such “Paul Simon Transcribed.” In addition to the tablature / transcriptions, he does give a page or so of instructions that help with each particular song. If you were to use that and to use some Guitar Noise lessons for more detail (even though they aren’t the same songs they all use similar techniques) you should do fairly well with them.

And feel free to write anytime. As I mentioned, I may not always be able to reply this quickly (or in this much detail), but I do try to.

My best wishes to you, your family and friends for a wonderful 2010.

Looking forward to chatting with you again.

Peace

Event Horizon

Just as it’s important to support each other when it comes to CDs, it’s also important (probably more so) to support live music. Sometimes it’s about being there. Literally. As musicians, it’s always good to support each other simply by being at a gig if it’s at all possible.

One thing we at Guitar Noise would really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!

So please feel free to write me if you’ve got some gigs coming up. Remember that Guitar Noise News is sent out on the first and fifteenth of each month. Usually I will have it ready to be sent out a few days ahead of time, so plan accordingly. For instance, if you’ve got something coming up in the last two weeks of January (that is, after the fifteenth), then let me know by the tenth or the twelfth. If you’ve already got a show in August, 2010, let me know, too! It’s never too early to plan for things!

Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming holiday shows!

Send your gig dates to me at dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put “gig alert” in the subject header.

Random Thoughts

Last Saturday, I took a needed break from things and visited a new dining establishment in Great Barrington, Massachusetts called the Gypsy Joynt, on Route 7. Terrific food and a great open mic hosted by Jordan Weller. He and his family have recently relocated from North Carolina and opened the place up. Jordan is a great guitarist and songwriter and I’m expecting I’ll be hearing a lot about him now on our local music scene here in the Berkshires.

He and his family obviously are very much into both good music and good food and it’s terrific that another local place is providing a showcase for local music. It’s always a risk for anyone running a business to try to promote other aspects of life, and even though restaurants and music would seem to go together like, well, restaurants and music, simply having local musicians come in and play doesn’t necessarily pay the rent.

You’ve no doubt read similar sentiments from me but it bears repeating, and the first part of a new year seems an apt time to do so. If you’re a musician who wants there to be places to perform, you should do what you can to patronize these businesses. If you’re playing at an open mic, you obviously should buy something while you’re there. At the very least you should add to the tip jar of the wait staff. That’s only polite.

Likewise if you’re playing at a restaurant, you should also do your best to keep your space of impact to a minimum. Don’t make it hard for other customers to move about and remember that they are to enjoy themselves as well. The more you can draw your audience into a performance, the more likely they are to enjoy the show and (hopefully) to come again and bring others. That’s common sense.

Because we all spend so much time with our computers, it’s easy to forget about the little nuances of human contact that truly mean a lot. So do try to get out and support your local music scene, regardless of how small or how extensive it may be. You never know when you might be listening to someone who will one day be performing on the national or even International scene.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often.

And, as always…

Peace