Newsletter Vol. 3 # 13 – January 01, 2006
Greetings,
Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #13 of Guitar Noise News!
In This Issue:
- News and Announcements
- New Articles and Lessons
- Guitar Noise Staff Picks!
- Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
- A Note For Nick
- Buried Treasure Of The Internet
- Forum Findings
- Emails? We Get Emails!
- Digging Through The Archives
- Reviews
- Random Thoughts
News And Announcements
A Happy New Year to one and all. It’s January 1, 2006 and it’s good to be back writing and piecing together this little thing we call “Guitar Noise News.”
A big round of “thank you” notes have to be passed out:
Thanks to Paul, who did a lot of shuffling and posting and editing and tons of other stuff for me, all the while dealing with the server crises and other things that would leave me totally befuddled.
A hearty thank you to Darrin for continuing to contribute to the newsletter, often in spite of me losing some of his articles and needing new copies!
Thanks to all of our contributing writers, not only for their articles and lessons, but also for the patience they needed in dealing with me. Everyone did a great job giving Guitar Noise some new and exciting lessons. A big tip of the hat to Doug Sparling for his timely holiday lessons.
And a big thank you to all of you who still have lessons, articles, reviews and more “in the queue.” I’ll be tending to all of them very soon.
Enough can’t be said about the various moderators of the Guitar Noise forum pages. These men and women usually give a lot more time than they admit to, and often do so on a daily basis. The Guitar Noise community probably owes these folks more than anyone for the friendly and supportive atmosphere that you can find here.
And a special thank you to all our readers and Forum members. Your support and patience has been a true gift to me this last year, and especially so in the past two months.
This will be a fairly short newsletter. We’re getting set for a very big year here at Guitar Noise and we’re looking forward to bringing you a lot of new lessons and articles as well as some fun surprises.
New Articles And Lessons
It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
by Doug Sparling
It may be after Christmas, but it’s never too late to sing a wish for world peace. Enjoy this lovely arrangement (and a wonderful bit of history) of a favorite American carol, courtesy of Doug Sparling.
Guitar Noise Staff Picks!
So, what (or who) is spinning in your CD player today? This past week I’ve been listening quite a lot to a wonderful two-CD set, a collection of songs from just about all of Robert Palmer’s musical career called Best Of Both Worlds. Besides the stuff you know (Addicted To Love, Doctor Doctor, etc.,), you find some of his work with Power Station – Some Like It Hot and a cover of T Rex’s Get It On (Bang A Gong) – a collaboration with UB40 (I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight) and some intense live performances of Johnny And Mary, Riptide and Looking For Clues.
If all you know about Robert Palmer is from MTV, do yourself a favor and give this set a listen. Better yet, just go get his older albums. Or any of his albums! Mr. Palmer was a treasure to the world of music and he is greatly missed.
Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
Without further adieu, let’s get right to Darrin’s offering for this newsletter:
Timing is a critical part of making music. Without notes playing in their proper time, you have one enormously bad glom of harmony.
But timing is also important in practicing music, in the discipline of making music. For one thing, a metronome will improve your ability to play in time. Always play with a metronome. We think we know a tune until we turn on the metro, and reality hits as we stumble.
Beyond that, use a timer to time each exercise you do: scales, tunes, whatever. Deadlines have a way of motivating. If you know you only have 15 minutes to work on learning a riff, you’ll use that time effectively. This is true because you know if you run over that 15 minutes, you’ll be cutting into time for scales or something else important.
And another type of time to keep: a record, or log, showing how many days you’ve spent a particular song, or playing something else. For example, if your goal is to transpose all twenty songs in your repertoire to one other key, keep track of how many days it takes you to do that, using hashmarks on a piece of paper that faces you when you practice.
Then, when you’ve completed all transpositions, you might want to do another set of transpositions in another key. Again, track how many days it takes. When you complete that second set, you have two numbers to give you a good indicator of how your transposition skills have improved.
Thanks for reading.
A Note For Nick
I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t know Nick Torres, our Chief Moderator and all around Mojo Master. It seems like ages ago when I first started noticing someone going by the name of “wandoctor” on the forum pages. We started communicating, “wandoctor” turned into this guy called Nick and before I knew it, I was picking him up at O’Hare Airport in Chicago one fine day in the summer of 2003 and bringing him to my home.
As with any good friendship, it’s hard for me to give you one example of how wonderful a person Nick is. I can tell stories, I can have other people testify to what a great person he is.
Mr. Torres, I’d just like to tell you how much I appreciated you stepping in and churning out the last two month’s worth of Guitar Noise News. Despite all the other things going on in your life, and that includes home, family, work, managing the forum pages and teaching guitar to your students, you selflessly gave me so much needed breathing room. I owe you big time, my friend.
Buried Treasure Of The Internet
From Guitar Noise Moderator Helgi Briem (and if you’re ever in Iceland, you should look him up!), comes this advice for all of you looking for bass guitar tutorial material:
I can also heartily recommend James ‘Wheat’ Martin’s free, online Bass Book.
It’s an excellent resource for the beginning through intermediate bass player. Check it out.
Forum Findings
Made any resolutions for the New Year? Check out what some of the Guitar Noise community is going to attempt in 2006.
Whatever your resolutions, I’d like to wish everyone the very best this upcoming year. May you find time to play and practice and to share music with family, friends and the world at large.
Emails / We Get Emails!
We get tons of emails and here’s another place where I truly need to thank people for both their kindness and patience. One of the things I am resolving is to try to get back to answering as many emails as I possibly can. So if you’ve sent me one and didn’t get a response, try again!
We’ll be seeing a lot of emails and getting some great tutorial tips from them in the upcoming months.
Digging Through The Archives
A lot of people got guitars or guitar-related gifts over the holidays. For those who might have received one of those mysterious items called “capos,” here are two (very) old articles that might help you out a bit: the first one’s called The Underappreciated Art of Using A Capo. And this one’s about transposing, which can involve the use of capos.
Reviews
We’ll be posting up quite a few new reviews in the upcoming weeks, including some CDs from Jimmy Caterine, one of our newest Guitar Noise reviewers.
Random Thoughts
Last year, Guitar Noise declared 2005 to be a year of “playing with others,” and I know that for many of you it turned out to be a great thing. If you’d like to share your experiences, please feel free to write me at [email protected] and I’ll pass them along to everyone.
Looking back at 2005, it seems that there were a lot of disasters and tragedies. This led to Paul’s creating a permanent “charitable causes” page at Guitar Noise, and I’m pleased to say that many folks have been great at trying to help out others. If you’ve a story you’d like to share about that as well, by all means, send it my way.
One more time, I’d like to thank each one of our readers and staff members for your contributions to the Guitar Noise community this past year. Speaking strictly for myself, I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings! I hope that you can feel the same way.
A Happy New Year to everyone.
Peace