Guitar Noise

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #75 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• New Lessons and Articles
• Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
• Podcast Postings
• GN Community Close Up
• Event Horizon
• Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to October. And welcome as well to the October 1, 2008 edition of Guitar Noise News, your twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise.

The past two years, it’s been an honor for me to participate in FODFest. “FOD” stands for “Friends of Danny” – Danny, being Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed in Pakistan back in 2002. Todd Mack, a local musician here in the Berkshires (he also owns and runs the Off The Beat ‘n’ Track Recording Studios in Sheffield, Massachusetts), played in a band with Daniel when the two of them lived in Atlanta. Since the death of his friend, Todd has been doing a series of free concerts.

The concert format is intricate and intriguing – part “song circle” with local singer/songwriters/musicians bringing original material to play, part “jam session” as the participants also serve as back-up band for each other, and then there’s the whole live concert aspect of it. These shows are nothing short of magical. Not only are they a fitting tribute to Daniel Pearl, they also serve as a testament on the power of music to bring people together.

Last year, Todd expanded the scope of FODFest, doing about two weeks worth of shows up and down the East Coast. This year, he’s going even further, as he writes in this email:

Greetings friends,

Below is the schedule for FODfest ‘08, the concert tour honoring the life & ideals of the late Wall St. Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and celebrating music as a community building forum. Final lineups for each show will be announced in a week or so. If you can help land / organize a show on either of the two TBA dates in California, please let me know or get in touch with Bruce Houghton at Skyline Music (bruce@skylineonnline.com). All shows on the tour are free and open to the public. Donations are gratefully accepted at the door. FODfest is a registered event of Daniel Pearl World Music Days (http://danielpearlmusicdays.org)

Please help us spread the word and forward this onto folks you know in the cities the tour will hit.

FODfest 2008 Tour Schedule:
10/10 – Mahaiwe Theater, Great Barrington, MA
10/11 – Narrows Arts Center, Fall River, MA
10/12 – Acoustic Cafe, Bridgeport, CT
10/13 – Sullivan Hall, NYC
10/14 – IOTA, Washington, DC
10/15 – The Grey Eagle, Asheville, NC
10/16 – The Handle Bar, Greenville, SC
10/17 – Local 506, Chapel Hill, NC
10/18 – Smith’s Olde Bar (Atlanta Room), Atlanta, GA
10/19 – The Basement, Nashville, TN
10/20 – Tractor Tavern, Seattle, WA
10/21 – White Eagle Pub, Portland, OR
10/22 – Axe and Fiddle, Cottage Grove, OR
10/23 – Somewhere in CA, TBA
10/24 – Starry Plough, Berkeley, CA
10/25 – Somewhere in CA, TBA
10/26 – Hotel Cafe, Los Angeles, CA

FODfest ‘08 Sponsors & Supporters:
Bergdorf Goodman – www.berdorfgoodman.com, Skyline Music – www.skylineonline.com, Off the Beat-n-Track – www.offthebeat-n-track.com, The Daniel Pearl Foundation – www.danielpearl.org, WKZE, Elaine Mack, Rachael Solem, anonymous, Shaula Yemini, Dan Hofmann – HIP Digital Video – hipdv@excite.com, Dutchess Sign, Elaine Lanyi, Michael Citrin, Jeff Diamond, Joe & Linda Gold, Bryan Gruley, Anne & Ernest Schnesel, Debbie Zecher, Joe Rose, John Van Vlack, Bob & Roberta Silman, Beansprout Productions, Will Curtiss, Helene & Mark Kaplan. Hevreh of Southern Berkshire, Robin & Michael Strauss, Pete Nugent, Nancsea Fischer, Glen Caroline, Arlyn & Owen Hoberman, Kim Angelis, Derek Nicoletto

See you out there,

todd
–
Todd Mack
FODfest
PO Box 1190
Sheffield, MA 01257
http://fodfest.org
http://myspace.com/fodfest
http://youtube.com/fodfest
413.229.9939

FODfest, Inc. is a Massachusetts non-profit corporation. Donations are gratefully accepted at http://fodfest.org/Donate.html

Check out some of the videos and songs from last year’s shows. Write to Todd if you want to help. And if a show is coming to a place near you, please come and see and have a good time. I’ll be playing at the FODFest opening night in Great Barrington at the Mahaiwe Theater, strictly in a “back-up” capacity. Hope to see you there.

Okay, now let’s take a quick look at what else is new at Guitar Noise since we’ve last chatted:

New Lessons and Articles

Todd Mack Interview
by David Hodge

With FODFest starting up in ten days, I thought this would be a great time to check in on Todd Mack, a Berkshire based recording artist and producer, and find out what’s going on with this year’s festival honoring the life of Daniel Pearl. Plus we get to hear about some of the other music Todd’s working on.

“FOD” for Thought
by David Hodge

You never know who you’re going to meet in life. And, given the way things are these days, you also never know who you’re not going to meet yet still get to know and appreciate. Joining FODFest the past two years has hammered home, to me at least, the point that every life can make a difference in this world.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Harmonizing a melody

Putting chords to a melody is one of the most rewarding aspects of making music, no matter what instrument you play. Even if you can’t play chords on your guitar, you still can play “broken” chords — arpeggios. Playing arpeggios can also help singers hear the chord changes they’re singing over.

Here’s an online resource that simplifies the process of harmonizing a melody.

This page gives you a clear procedure for putting chords to a melody. The author is Ken Rumery, who is Professor of Music, Theory and Composition at Northern Arizona University.

I’ve outlined the page here for your musical digestion.

How to choose chords for a melody:

Plan the overall feel of the tune. This includes simplifying the melody. I would say look for the chord tones used. Look also for melodic and rhythmic patterns. Listen for the key center or centers in the piece.

Sketch out the chords based on the results of the planning step. Use simple, diatonic chords, and simple progressions. This involves moving up by fourths, generally. Design a rhythm that complements the melodic rhythm.

Test the chords using your favorite chordal instrument. Choose a piano or guitar for this, or whatever you can get your hands on. I would also add that you can *imagine* what the chords would sound like *if* you had a chordal instrument nearby. In other words, if you don’t have access to a chordal instrument right now, use your head and good old-fashioned gut feeling to play the chords you’ve created.

Even better than this is singing the arpeggios of the chords you’ve chosen. Or, sing the melody and hear, in your inner ear, the root of the chord you’ve chosen. Then, switch sides and sing the chord root while your mind’s ear plays the melody. This is composing, and it may not be easy at first, but it’s incredibly engaging and rewarding, and you can do it *anywhere*.

Polish the chosen set of chords. When you do get access to a guitar, piano or computer with music software, flesh out the piece and make it flow.

Add variety, including using chord substitutions, harmonic sequences, and other patterns suggested in the melody.

The author emphasizes K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Sam) here, and he provides a wonderfully simple summary of what effects each type of chord movement produces. To summarize that summary, move up a fourth to emphasize tonality, move by thirds to add color, move by seconds to give momentum to the melody.

Thanks for reading.

Darrin Koltow

Copyright Copyright 2008 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.

Podcast Postings

Hello to all!

In Guitar Noise Podcast #18, now up online, we’ll wrap up our work with the traditional song, “Streets of Laredo,” one that some of you may recognize from Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings IV.” We’ll pick up where we left off and then take a little side journey into modulations, which are basically temporary shifts of key, In this particular song, this means using a D major scale to create a walking bass line even though we’re in the key of G.

We’ll also take a quick look at using a “walking chord pattern” in place of a walking bass line. We’ve seen this specific pattern before in our Guitar Noise song lessons on “Imagine” and “Babylon,” so it shouldn’t be too hard for you to pick up on. And it sounds terrific.

As always, I’ll be walking you step by step through the lesson. And, as always, please let us know what you think.

As has been mentioned numerous times before, our first series of Guitar Noise Podcasts has been covering various techniques on strumming – moving step by step from the very basics to alternate bass picking, to adding hammer-ons and pull-offs to spice up simple patterns to crosspicking and partial chord playing to incorporating other playing techniques, such as palm muting and choking, to bring even more excitement to our strumming. I try to do my best to walk you through things step by step, just as we do in the many song lessons at Guitar Noise. I hope that you find them as educational (and as fun!) as our online lessons here at our website.

Paul and I try to post a new Guitar Noise Podcast every other Monday, so look for the next one this Monday, October13, 2008.

And, in case you’re interested, you can find all our Guitar Noise Podcasts (the current one as well as the first thitreen) up online at the Guitar Noise Blog. Or you can also click on the Podcast Link located at the top of any page on Guitar Noise. As always, feel free to give us your feedback. You can post your thoughts here, at the Blog, or even PM or write me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

You don’t need an iPod or iTunes to listen to the lessons. Below the play button is a link that says “Download.” Right-click and “Save as”. You can listen to it on your computer or transfer it to any music player you have.

If you are an iTunes user check this out: From the “Advanced” menu click “Subscribe to Podcast.” Paste the following link http://feeds.feedburner.com/GuitarNoisePodcast into the box and click “OK”. iTunes should automatically download the latest podcast when it’s published.

GN Community Close Up

As I mentioned in the September 1, 2008 newsletter, this particular idea has taken way, way to long a time to take shape. But we are getting there! And maybe, with some more time and effort (and a lot of good old fashioned luck), it will become a semi-regular feature here at Guitar Noise News.

The premise is that we at Guitar Noise are an international community, made up of members of all sorts of guitarists, from absolute beginners to hobbyists to professionals and teachers. Besides being guitarists, we’re also all sorts of people. And I’d like to give you all a chance to get to know each other a little better. So I’m hoping that at least one a month, we’ll be able to present a short Q & A with a selected member of the Guitar Noise community.

Anyone who’s visited the Guitar Noise Forum as certainly run into Arjen at one point or another. Although he’s changed his names a few times over the years (currently he’s posting as “Ignar Hillstrom”), Arjen has been both a pillar of the Guitar Noise community as well as an inspiration for many of us with his prolific songwriting and recordings. Let me turn things over to our “Q & A” format:

GN: Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself to our readers?

ARJEN: I’m Arjen, a twenty-three-year old student in the city of Groningen, the most northern city in the Netherlands. I joined GN July 23rd 2003, which was the day I started my musical journey. There were acoustic guitars lying around in the house and I figured I’d learn to play. I was just browsing Google looking for lessons when I found Guitar Noise. Hit the jackpot with that one.

GN: Can you give us a bit of your musical history?

ARJEN: About five years ago I picked up an acoustic guitar, and some weeks after that I bought a used electric guitar, a no-brand stratocaster clone. I took some private lessons but that didn’t work out for me. About a year after that I got myself a digital piano and started taking piano lessons. I’ve always had an interest in technology and computers so working with synths and learning digital production techniques seemed a logical next step to me. I’ve played in a few bands as guitarist and bassist, did a few gigs, but it never really was what I was looking for. These days I work solo and do some one-off collaborating with people all over the world. I used the time gained by not being in a band for picking up the violin. That’s about it I guess.

GN: One knows from reading through the Guitar Noise Forum pages, especially the “Hear Here” page, that you are an incredibly prolific writer. Where do you get all the inspiration from? And how do you find time to do all the recording you do?

ARJEN: Ha ha! Thank you. In the beginning I was spending a lot of time thinking deeply, looking for that perfect theme or subject. But it seems that if shut off my brain for a bit the ideas will come much easier. The first ideas that come to mind when I’m thinking about lyrics or ideas are usually the ones most important to me I guess. In that sense I take a lot of inspiration from those bands between pop and experimental music. The Beatles and the psychedelica of early Pink Floyd are two bands whose mentality of ‘let’s try it and we’ll see what happens’ really appeals to me. Radiohead is a more direct source of inspiration, practically every song of theirs since “Kid A” gives me ten new ideas every time I listen to them.

As for recording my songs, I guess I’m spending less time on it then people think. By having all instruments connected with my computer at all time there’s practically no dividing line between noodling, composing and recording. Usually I start writing a song around 11PM and I’ll have recorded and mixed the first version around 3AM. I’ll then spend the next weeks adding details whenever I think of them and before you know it’s done. As soon as you’ve learned the basics of recording the whole process is must less of a hassle then people often think it is.

GN: Of course, the big news is your new CD project. For those of us who may not follow the Guitar Noise Forum pages, can you run us through how all this came about and what the new disc will be like?

ARJEN: The whole story in a nutshell: during the winter, last year, I started working on what would be my eleventh ‘album’ called “Inside Outsider.” Those who have been listening to my music for a while can tell you that a lot of my work has been pretty ‘directionless’ for a lack of a better word so I decided that this new album should be different. In the early summer I finished a demo-version of the album, which is usually the stage where I stop working on it, and decided I wanted to bring it to the next level. Describing the sound or style of the album is pretty hard because the musical variety is rather large, ranging from thick electronic soundscapes to large orchestral compositions with everything from Pink Floydian rock and piano-based ‘altpop’ in between. If it means anything to you my sound has been described as electronic sample-based poprock. Sounds a bit forced to me but maybe it gives you an idea. There’ll be some skectches on http://www.myspace.com/sleutelbosmusic for those into sneak-peaking.

Despite the wide variety of musical styles the general atmosphere is pretty gloomy, claustrophobic and depressive. At its core the album is a concept-album, telling the story of it’s nameless main character through a series of flashbacks but I’ve tried my best to make the ‘flow’ of the story understandable even to those who cannot follow the lyrics. Having composed strictly instrumental music in the first two years I believe that the music of a song should express the emotion every bit as much as the lyrics do.

GN: How do you feel working with a “real” producer has changed your outlook as a musician? writer? arranger? even as a producer? What new skills are you going to be bringing to your next project?

ARJEN: I think the biggest change is also the hardest one to put to words. During the production process we tore all the songs apart to the bare basic tracks and that makes you look at your song on different levels of detail. Most of my songs ‘grow’ on their own almost and when you then deconstruct them you’ll realise that small changes can have a huge effect on the final sound in a way you can’t predict when the song has yet to ‘grow’. As for my next project, I’ve got no definite idea yet. I’ve got a number of different little ideas in my head but I’ll have to see how my current project goes first.

GN: What advice do you have for those who are a little shy about getting into writing, arranging and recording?

ARJEN: Writing your own songs and recording them has a few advantages. To start with there’s no better way to combine whatever you just learned. There’s no more enjoyable way to learn a new chord by writing your own progression around it nor is there a better way to really understand a scale then by writing a melody with it. Besides, music is about expression and what better way to express yourself then playing your own songs you wrote yourself!

Recording your own music is a great way to keep track of your progress. Learning to play an instrument can at times be terribly unrewarding when it seems like you’re stuck no matter how hard you practice. Nothing is more motivating then comparing a fresh recording and comparing them with an older one. For me learning the basics of recording really opened my eyes to how ’sound’ works and how you can use that in your compositions. In short, writing and recording your music is fun, you learn a lot, not nearly as hard as people make it out to be and just plain rewarding. It may seem daunting at first but there’s really no real reason not to do it!

GN: Finally, you and I have been discussing putting together a Guitar Noise contest to both celebrate and promote your new CD. How’s that going to work?

ARJEN: Those who check the Guitar Noise forums know that there’s a lot of songwriting talent floating around and the past year more and more people have started writing their own material. I thought it’d be a fun idea to have a little composition/songwriting ‘contest’. Each song will be reviewed and the writer(s) of the ‘best’ one (best being as subjective as can possible be!) will get a free copy of my album. But the key thing is, of course, participation, not ‘winning’. I hope this could be a little extra incentive for those who’ve been thinking about writing their own material to actually take that step and do it.

And there you have it! Keep an eye out of the forum pages over the next few months as we iron out the details for this contest. And be sure to drop in on the latest of Arjen’s work on the pages of “Hear Here” at the Guitar Noise Forum.

See you next month with a new interview!

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 August, 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.

In addition to FODFest, which you just read about in our opening section, I’d like to mention a show coming up this Saturday, October 4. I’m going to be lucky enough to play with a lot of friends (and fellow Guitar Noise folk) at Dewey Memorial Hall, right off Route 7 in Sheffield, Massachusetts (right off the village green, next door to the Post Office). So join me, Karen Berger, Nick Torres, Kathy (”katreich”) Reichert, John (”the Celt”) Roche, Greg (”gnease”) Nease, Helena (”lakiehelena”) Bouchez and many others, for a night of friendship and fun. Hope to see you there!

Random Thoughts

Day before yesterday, we got the following post on the Guitar Noise Forums:

Hello all,

None of you remember me, surely, but I remember this board. I used to post here regularly about 4 years ago. I was about 14 then, although I don’t remember my old posting name.

I am writing this because I am now 18 and currently pursuing a degree in classical guitar and music composition at a major U.S. conservatory, and recognize that this would not have been possible without the contributions from many different people who helped me along the way. Family, friends, teachers, and… this forum.

This site contained the only guitar instructional material outside of a private lesson that I ever thought was helpful. Also, the people on the forums were very nice to me and also very encouraging. You have all had a role in my development as a player, and I therefore wish to thank every one of you for your help and guidance.

Although guitar will always be a big part of my life, you inspired me to make it my professional pursuit as well. Thank you and good luck!

With sincerest gratitude,
Kyle

As many of our Forum members have since commented, this was an exceptionally nice (and classy) thing to do. Paul and I get emails every day from people who have discovered Guitar Noise and want to thank us for having this incredible website.

But, and I know most of you have heard me go on about this before so please forgive me, Guitar Noise is a lot more than just a website. We are a community. Everyone gets to learn from the experience and support of all our members and it’s this spirit that makes a big difference in people’s lives.

So I’d like to join Kyle in his thanks to the Guitar Noise community. And I’d also like to thank him for taking the time to update us on his progress and to also wish him the best in his studies. Here’s to hoping that I’ll one day be sitting at one of his concerts.

Until our next newsletter, play well. Play often. Stay safe.

And, as always…

Peace