Guitar Noise

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #7 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Email Of The Moment
• News and Announcements
• A Word (Or Two) From Paul
• New Articles and Lessons
• Guitar Noise Staff Picks!
• Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
• Forum Findings
• Event Horizon
• Reviews
• International Songwriting Competition
• Off Site Sightings and Works In Progress
• Random Thoughts

Email Of The Moment

Thank you for your remarks for the victims of Katrina. I left my home on the West Bank of New Orleans in Algiers expecting to be gone a few days and return. I left most of my guitars in their cases stacked in the hall on the second floor of my house. I am happy to say that they are fine and I hope to return soon.

Unfortunately, my friend, David Farrel who owns Ultrasonic Recording Studio on Washington Street in N.O., was not so lucky. It looks like his place was completely flooded. If you go to his website you will find a list of the items that he lost. I plan to offer my “extra” guitars as loaners for those who “need” something to play. I am here in Georgia for now and miss the feel of my old Gibson.

My hope is that the “guitar/music community” will pull together to help the musicians who have lost their instruments to this flood.

Thanks again.

Dear David,

Thanks very much for putting a Katrina/Red Cross link on Guitar Noise. Those of us in the affected really appreciate the support and thoughts of others. Especially for those many thousands who are in dire need of help.

My family and home were relatively unaffected. But we did spend about two weeks at home, just North of Lake Pontchartrain, without electricity or phones. And, thanks to a huge pine tree that fell, we have a new eighty-foot bench in the back yard.

So what did my children and I do for two weeks with no TV, Internet, phones or video games?

We sat on our new bench and played guitar until our fingers hurt! I am still a novice, but many of your lessons sat on the bench with me as I relearned some forgotten lessons. I may have even taught a few things.

Anyway, I really just wanted to say thanks for helping (and thanks for keeping me company)…

Sometimes, particularly when you don’t think there’s much of anything that you can do to help, you’d be surprised in how much even the littlest things can do. We at Guitar Noise are happy to do what we can and we hope that, at best, we can encourage our readers to contribute what they can, be it money, time, food, clothing or other necessities. At worst, we hope we can at least provide awareness both to the needs and to the thankfulness of everyone involved. If you’d like to donate to the Red Cross on behalf of the people affected by Hurricane Katrina (and now Hurricane Rita as well), not to mention the wonderful work they do in practically every corner of the world, click HERE.

News And Announcements

October the first! Since we’ve switched over to a bimonthly newsletter, it seems that time flies by even quicker! Instead of me thinking “another week already?” it’s months!

Don’t forget that the ISC (International Songwriting Competition) is October 14th. For all the details, check down towards the end of the newsletter in the section labeled (appropriately enough) “International Songwriting Competition.” Our best wishes to all who enter!

And speaking of contests, it’s high time that we mentioned that Kachi Ukeje was the winner of our Amos Lee CD giveaway held in early August. Congratulations!

We’re also pleased to announce our latest CD giveaway. This month’s contest: Enter to WIN a copy of Sixty Six Steps, the second collaboration between famed guitarist Leo Kottke and Phish bassist Mike Gordon. Contest ends 10/22. GOOD LUCK!

For a review of this terrific album, check out the Reviews section further on in this newsletter.

Before we move on, I’d like to turn the newsletter over to Paul, who’s got a few announcements of his own:

A Word (Or Two) From Paul

We’ve made a few changes to our newsletter format and privacy policy that you should know about. Newsletter subscribers will now receive email from us three times a month. Delivered on the first and fifteenth of every month is the regular newsletter from David Hodge featuring guitar tips, your questions, new lessons, contests and more.

We will also send you special offers from time to time, at most once a month. These emails will only contain offers that we believe are helpful to your guitar playing. No software downloads or useless spam. These offers are carefully chosen by us and sent by us. We still never share your email address with anyone. Ever!

If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter or special offers, you can unsubscribe here at any time. Past issues of the newsletter are archived online.

We protect your privacy and encourage you to read our Privacy Statement. It has been updated in the past month.

New Articles And Lessons

A Prairie Wind Blows Through Nashville
by Karen Barry Schwarz

Earlier this year, Neil Young played two concerts at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium. The shows, mostly focusing on his upcoming album Prairie Wind, were filmed by Jonathon Demme, director of the Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense. Karen Barry Schwarz was fortunate enough to be at these shows and we are incredibly fortunate that she wanted to share that experience with us!

Key Signatures
by Paul Andrews

First time contributor Paul Andrews gives us a basic guide to key signatures, including how to recognize and (easily) memorize what you need to know about them.

Building A Latin Chord Melody - Part 2
by Peter Simms

Part two of Peter Simms’ lesson on Latin Chord melodies is here! So get your guitars, warm up your fingers and get ready to dig in for a bit of work and a lot of fun!

In The Bleak Midwinter
by Doug Sparling

Guitar Noise welcomes Doug Sparling to our pages, with the first of what will (hopefully) be a series on lessons on Celtic Music for Guitar. This lesson is on the beautiful hymn, In The Bleak Midwinter, arranged for the guitar in DADGAD tuning.

Guitar Noise Staff Picks!

Tim Bennett, who you might know as Guitar Noise Forum Moderator “Musenfreund,” kindly took some time to write me a note for this edition’s “Staff Picks.” From whom will we hear next month? Your guess is as good as mine! But for now, I turn the floor over to Tim:

The first weeks of September have been good to fans of the Stones and the Beatles and therefore to me — possibly the boards’ most vocal Beatles fan.

The Stones’ most recent effort, A Bigger Bang, is great stuff. It’s got that gutsy, bluesy vibe that hardcore Stones fans love to hear. The new material they had included on their last compilation CD, Forty Licks, was pretty routine. They were just going through the motions. On this new CD, they’ve found their groove again. I was especially surprised to see Jagger playing more instruments than he usually does — slide guitar and bass in addition to the guitar he often contributes on tracks. All in all, I’m glad they’re touring to promote this one. It should be a great show. I’m happy to recommend this CD to all of you.

The other CD that just hit my collection today is McCartney’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Rolling Stone named this one of McCartney’s best albums in recent years, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s a gem. An on his debut solo effort, McCartney, he plays most of the instruments on this one. And given the introspective mood of the disc, it’s fitting that he would play most of them. It emphasizes the intimate atmosphere of the songs. Critics have been comparing this one to McCartney, and I think they got it right. The music is innovative, seeking, and sparse in its instrumentation but rich in mood. You ought to give this one a spin too. This is McCartney playing some great mature music.

Well, at least those are my first impressions. I think you’ll find some exciting tunes on these two discs.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

For those of you who’ve come in late, Darrin Koltow of Maximum Musician has been kind enough to volunteer to regularly contribute to Guitar Noise News. This week Darrin gives us Part Four of Scales and Soloing:

We’ve been doing a lot of focusing on finding scales for playing over major chords. Please see archives of this newsletter on Guitar Noise for details.

Let’s work out some scales to play over dominant chords now. Let’s do a one-chord progression with G7:

||: G7 :||

Record several measures of rhythm, strumming the G7 chord into your Band in a Box software, or a simple tape recorder, or something similar. Power Tab - free software - is highly recommended.

Now play back the recording. What are going to play over that G7? If you’re playing it safe, you can start with an arpeggio rather than a scale. Play a G7 arpeggio such as the following:

|--10-7----------------|----------------------|------7-10----|
|-------8--------------|----------------------|----8---------|
|---------10-7---------|--------------------7-|-10-----------|
|--------------9-------|------------------9---|--------------|
|----------------10--8-|-------------8-10-----|--------------|
|----------------------|-10-7---7-10----------|--------------|

What you’re doing is just playing each chord tone of the G7 one note at a time. You’re not hearing anything that’s not in the chord. For a little variety and color play an A note with that arpeggio. Also, try E.

Let’s go back to scales and re-ask the original question: what scales will sound good over G7?

C major is a good candidate. Why? G7 is found in the C major scale (among other scales). In other words, every note in G7 can be found in the C major scale.

Yet, there’s a dissonance if you use C major over G7: the C note. Play the C over the G7 and listen. As mentioned in a previous tip, this note wants to resolve to B.

So you’ve found one scale with a dissonant note and now you say, “Well maybe there’s a scale that contains the notes in G7 but doesn’t have the dissonant C.” You learn a bit of theory and you come up with this scale: G pentatonic. We presented this in a previous tip, so we’re going to zip over to yet another scale: D melodic minor.

Believe it or not, you can use melodic minor scales in at least 4 different ways to play over dominant chords. We’ll start to go over those approaches next time.

Thanks for reading.

For those of you who might like to know more about Darrin, let me direct you to his website, Maximum Musician and also to his page here at Guitar Noise.

And once again, let me thank Mr. Koltow for his continued presence on the Internet. Darrin helped inspire many to contribute their knowledge online and I know that many of the readers of Guitar Noise appreciate his efforts.

Forum Findings

Shortly after our last newsletter came out, we got our 10,000th registered member to the Guitar Noise Forum. Since then, there’s been over a hundred more! So before we find ourselves counting down to Member #20,000, I’d like to extend a welcome to “sgrag” and all the other folks who have recently registered as Guitar Noise Forum Members. I hope that you enjoy the community.

If you haven’t been at the Forum Pages for a while, you might be surprised to find a new one titled, “Singing.” As Nick wrote for the page’s intro:

Think you can’t sing? Think again. Can you hum or sing the pitches as you tune your guitar? Can you sing along with your car radio? You can? Great! Now we know you can sing. It’s good to get that out of the way. Come on in and wail away.

You can find the fledgling Singing Forum right here.

As always, I look forward to seeing you all on the boards.

Event Horizon

Supporting Guitar Noise and the Guitar Noise community is not always about money or time. 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’d 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 July (that is, after the fifteenth), then let me know by the tenth or the twelfth.

If you’ve already got a show in November, let me know, too! It’s never too early to plan for things!

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

Reviews

Reviews go up almost all the time here at Guitar Noise. But we also know that what we post is, pardon the cliché, the very tip of the iceberg. If you’d like to pass along a review of an album, concert, DVD (tutorial, concert or otherwise), book or even a guitar or guitar/music product, feel free to drop me a line and try to put “proposed review” in the subject.

For those of you who are always thinking about “giving back to the community,” this is certainly a fine way to do so.

In the meantime, here are the latest reviews to be posted on our site:

Leo Kottke & Mike Gordon: Sixty Six Steps
CD Review by David Hodge

A second collaboration of the venerable guitarist Kottke and Phish bassist Gordon finds the pair in fine form, This is a tribute to Caribbean music, but also a fine example of how great musicians expand a genre. A delight from start to finish.

International Songwriting Competition

Here’s the latest from the folks at the International Songwriting Competition. Remember to please send your questions (not to mention your songs!) to them and not to me! Hurry, you only have six weeks left to enter your songs in the International Songwriting Competition, one of the largest songwriting competitions in the world. Entrants compete for over $100,000 in cash and prizes, including an Overall Grand Prize package of $10,000 (US) in cash and $20,000 in merchandise.

Songwriters, bands, and solo artists of all levels are encouraged to enter. If you are looking to gain exposure in the music industry, ISC offers you the opportunity to have your music heard by leading recording artists and esteemed industry professionals. This gives you the chance to have unprecedented access to some of the most influential decision makers in the music industry.

You may enter as many songs as you want in different categories, or as many songs as you want in the same category. ISC categories include: Pop/Top 40; Rock; Country; AAA/Roots/Americana; Folk/Singer-Songwriter; Instrumental; Dance/Electronica; R&B/Hip-Hop; Gospel/Christian; Blues; Jazz; World Music; Children’s Music; Performance; Lyrics Only; and Teen (18 yrs. old or younger)

2005 Judges include: Monte Lipman (President, Universal Records); Tom Waits; Loretta Lynn; Sonny Rollins; Macy Gray; Joss Stone; MercyMe; Amy Ray (Indigo Girls); Darryl McDaniels (RUN D.M.C.); LeAnn Rimes; Isaac Brock (Modest Mouse); Jeff Stinco (Simple Plan); Steve Vai; John Scofield; BeBe Winans; Peter Hook (New Order); Benji Madden (Good Charlotte); Charlie Musselwhite; The Donnas; Keith Wozencroft (President, Capitol Music UK); Cameron Strang (President, New West Records); Dan Storper (President of Putumayo World Music); Michael McDonald (President, ATO Records); Alexandra Patsavas (Owner, The Chop Shop Music Supervision - credits include The OC, Grey’s Anatomy, Without A Trace, Carnivale, Rescue Me); Glen Barros (CEO/President, Concord Records); Darrale Jones (VP A&R Urban, Atlantic Records); Chris Parr (VP Music Programming & Talent Relations, CMT); Barbara Sedun (VP Creative, EMI Music Publishing Canada); Bruce Iglauer (Founder/President of Alligator Records); Tara Griggs-Magee (Executive VP of Gospel/Urban Music, Sony Records); Leib Ostrow (CEO of Music For Little People), Thomas Brooman (Co- Founder/Artistic Director, WOMAD); Cory Robbins (Founder/President, Robbins Entertainment); Emily Wittmann (Vice-President, Nick Records - Nickelodeon/BMG); Danny Epstein (Music Director, Sesame Street/Sesame Workshop); and Patrick Moxey (President, Ultra Records/You Records/Sequence Records/Escondid Music/Empire Mgmt.)

September 2005 Updates:

ASCAP Comes Aboard As Sponsor For ISC 2005

ASCAP is a membership association of over 200,000 U.S. composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers of every kind of music. Through agreements with affiliated international societies, ASCAP also represents hundreds of thousands of music creators worldwide. ASCAP is the only U.S. performing rights organization created and controlled by composers, songwriters and music publishers, with a Board of Directors elected by and from the membership. For more info on ASCAP, please visit www.ascap.com

ISC 2004 Performance Category Winning Song On Faith Hill’s New Album Fireflies

“Paris” by songwriters Troy Verges, Blair Daily and Gordie Sampson is now on Faith Hill’s latest album. Check out the ISC winners’ version of the song here.

“…I was haunted by the melody and some of the images — like tearing up the Mona Lisa and laying the pieces at your feet. I couldn’t get the song out of my head and I knew I had to put it on the album.” - Faith Hill

ISC 2003 Rock Category Winner Tara Slone on CBS TV’s Rock Star: INXS

If you haven’t seen it already, you still have time to catch the reality show “Rock Star: INXS,” hosted by Brooke Burke and Dave Navarro (CBS). It started out with 15 performers competing for the prize of lead singer for the world-famous rock band INXS. Each week one performer gets eliminated, based on a combination of public voting and INXS input. Tara Slone (ex-Joydrop vocalist) made it to week #4, when the band said good-bye to her. Congrats to Tara for being selected out of thousands of performers to be on the show!

2005 Sponsors: Disc Makers, Epiphone, ASCAP, Berklee College Of Music, L.R. Baggs, Alphabet Arm Design, FYE, Fishman Tranducers, Planetary Group, ADK Microphones, Moog Music, Hear Technologies, Music Registry, Mediaguide, ArtistMonitor, Sam Ash Music Stores, Sibelius, Onlinegigs.com, Musicians Atlas and Sonicbids.

For more information on past ISC winners or to enter the 2005 competition, please visit www.songwritingcompetition.com

Off Site Sightings And Works In Progress

You can find Guitar Noise folks at other places besides Guitar Noise! I’ll try to keep you updated about the things that I and other staff members are working on in this section.

The November 2005 issue of Acoustic Guitar Magazine should hit the newsstands sometime this week. Acoustic Rocker Monte Montgomery will grace the cover and in their section called “The Basics,” you’ll find a lesson from me on “Crosspicking Pop Songs,” complete with a cross-picking arrangement of the Counting Crow’s’ song Rain King. I hope that you’ll find the lesson worth your while.

Speaking of crosspicking, AG has picked up my lesson on sustained notes, which will hopefully turn up in their January issue (in stores in December). Included in this lesson will be a short set of examples to help you play the crosspicking part of Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life). There will be a transcription of this song to accompany the lesson.

I’ve been very fortunate that Play Guitar! Magazine, a “sister” publication of Acoustic Guitar, has been very interested in publishing my lessons. I am trying to work it so that the lessons I write for them deal with aspects of the song transcriptions they feature in any given issue. The “Fall 2005″ issue (currently on sale) contains my lesson titled “Chord Control,” which features nine simple rhythm fills that any beginner can use to spice up his or her open chord strumming. Coming up in the “Winter 2005″ issue (hopefully on sale sometime in October or November) will be an article on basic alternating bass patterns. And I am in the process of writing a piece for their “Spring 2006″ issue (where does the time go?) about coming up with “second guitar parts,” focusing mainly on the use of arpeggios and different chord voicing as a way to play guitar with other guitarists. This last lesson will include examples that can be used in the songs Sounds of Silence and Wake Me Up When September Ends, both of which will be transcribed for this issue.

Random Thoughts

Last time out I was in a bit of my classic “pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-psychological mode,” which is usually a good indication that I’ve not been sleeping well. To quote myself, I mentioned that, for the longest time I resisted “making a living” at music, mostly because I wanted to keep my love of teaching, playing and writing separate from the “making a living.” Strange as it may seem, I wanted to keep “living” and “making a living” two distinct parts of my life. And that, when it came down to things, was because of fear. And not fear of failure.

I may be alone in thinking this, but I think that the fear of success is far more common than the fear of failure. Like it or not, we live in a world where we routinely look at our lives in terms of “failures” and “successes.” Pluses and minuses. Things simply can’t “be,” they have to be “something” and that something is usually good or bad.

If you try something and don’t “succeed,” in other words, don’t accomplish what you set out to do, then you have failed. But is that truly the case? My friends will tell you that one of my favorite things to quote is an old Peter Cook line, “I have learned from my mistakes and I can repeat each one exactly!” All laughing aside, often times when we don’t accomplish what we set out to do, we do accomplish something. To think otherwise is to have such a small mind that you think that getting a silver medal at the Olympics is “losing.” For that matter, considering all that it takes to get there in the first place, how can anyone who participates in the Olympics at any level, regardless of medals or placement or whatever, be considered a “loser?”

The answer to that comes from ourselves. Whether or not we realize it, we constantly make judgments on our lives and the lives of others based on things we decide are “good” or “bad.” By nature, perhaps, we are competitive beings and it’s hard to not think about life in these terms. And I’m not about to say that we can think otherwise.

But we do have to be aware of what we’re doing. At one point in my life, I realized that the one thing that was keeping me from being happy was my belief that I needed something to be happy about, a “success,” if you will. The trouble is, having that success meant doing everything I could to keep it so that it would constantly make me happy. That seemed a lot of work. And you all know how I feel about work…

Seriously, though, succeeding at something invariably brings about more anxieties and concerns than you might have had if you had failed. In failure, there are, pardon the cliché, lessons to be learned, things that will be done better (smarter, neater, etc.,) the next time. And it’s that there will always (or almost always) be “a next time,” this takes away a lot of the stigma of failure and, conversely, adds to the dread of success.

If you write a song, who doesn’t tinker with it after it’s “done?” Even long after it’s done! Does that mean the song was a “failure” the first time out? Hardly. All it means is that life is going on, and things are growing and changing, as is there natural way of being.

But for many people, success means stagnation or worse, perpetual motion to maintain being in the same place, like with Alice and the Queen in Through The Looking Glass. Even worse still is that, and for some reason this seems more the case with “art-y” people, success is laden with all sorts of bad connotations of its own. If you don’t believe me, use the words “sell-out” when describing a band or artist. Could there not possibly be a loonier phrase? But one can’t deny that we only apply that to “successes,” mostly to point out that even successes are, in fact, failures.

The easiest way to get around both the fear of failure and the fear of success is, obviously, to do your best to do something for the sake of doing it. And to bargain in good faith that whatever happens, you will be able to deal with it. Perhaps nowhere is this more important than in little things like playing (or learning to play) the guitar. It’s close to impossible to not try to compare yourself to others. Fortunately, there will always be those both “better” and “worse,” so in the long run such speculation and comparison tends to be little more than an amusing distraction.

But if I can honestly look at my playing and say, “I’d like to be able to do this,” then I can start to take the necessary steps toward achieving that particular goal. And if I don’t reach it, hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some other skills along the way!

Measuring your life in terms of “successes” and “failures” may be important for some of you. I can understand that. But I’d like to ask all of you to try to see your lives as being beyond that, as being more than that. Or, at worst, to ask that you not live in fear of either success or failure. To paraphrase one of the characters from Joss Whedon’s Firefly, “You can’t be so afraid of losing something that you’re not even going to bother to try to have it.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to see about catching up on that sleep before writing the next newsletter…

Until we see you again on October 15, stay safe and play well.

And, as always,

Peace

David