Guitar Noise

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #76 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• Coming Attractions
• Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
• Podcast Postings
• Random Thoughts

Greetings News And Announcements

Hello and welcome as well to the October 15, 2008 edition of Guitar Noise News, your twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise.

This past Friday, as I mentioned in our last newsletter, it was my privilege to be a member of the “house band” for FODfest. “FOD” stands for “Friends of Danny” – Danny, being Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed in Pakistan back in 2002.

In case you didn’t read about it last time, FODfest is in full swing and chances are that some of you might find it in your very own neighbourhood!

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 – 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 – is intriguing and entertaining and, if this past Friday’s show was any indication, they’re also going to be a lot of fun this year.

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. Let me again post Todd’s email concerning FODfest 2008:

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.

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

I’ll be writing a bit more about the opening night in our “Random Thoughts” segment. But for now, let’s get going with the rest of the newsletter:

Coming Attractions:

Needless to say, FODfest, along with two other shows I played within an eight day span of time, has kept things pretty busy. Which means that things have piled up on my desk, not to mention in all the “in boxes” I own! So let me fill you in on some articles that will be out during the last half of October here at Guitar Noise:

HOW TO PRACTICE GUITAR WITH A LIMITED AMOUNT OF TIME
by Tom Hess

All of us have lives that can, and often do, limit the amount of time we can spend practicing our instruments. Tom Hess gives us guidelines designed to help us all get the most effective use of the spare time we manage to find for practice.

COLOR ME BLUE
Turning Scales into Solos – Part 5
by David Hodge

It only takes a single note to change the minor pentatonic scale into the “blues scale.” And what a world of difference that one note can make! As in the previous lessons in this series, we’ll provide you with MP3 sound files in order to help you create your own solos.

GETTING PAST “UP AND DOWN”
Part 2 – Trickier Timings
by David Hodge

In the second installment of this series on strumming, we’ll look at rhythms that are slightly more complicated and involved than simple quarter notes, eighth notes and sixteenth notes. In addition to dotted notes and triplets, we’ll also take a look as “swing rhythms.”

MAN IN THE MOON
Easy Songs for Beginners #36
by David Hodge

I had the honor of playing this twice at different shows with Nick, Kathy, Greg and others in the past ten days. It’s a beautiful song that beginners can play easily and it doesn’t take all that much to add some very nice touches to it for a solo arrangement.

EXPLORING MUSIC WITH DARRIN KOLTOW

Good Habits

Here’s a habit that doesn’t relate directly to playing guitar, but can have a great impact on your practice and playing: Keep a journal.

It was hard for to me find people to hear me gripe about not being able to change chords fast enough, or the tough time I had transcribing a Joe Pass solo. But we don’t need to vent to another person. Vent to paper. You could use a computer document, but paper is better. It’s “realer,” harder, and you can press too hard onto the page to show just how frustrated you are. It’s bloodletting, and it helps.

Thanks for reading.

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!

Our nineteenth Guitar Noise Podcast, just up online a few days now, gives us an introduction to some very important strumming techniques – anticipation, dynamics, and (believe it or not) using rests as part of a strumming pattern.

We begin with an explanation of anticipation and how using it easily fits in with all that we’ve learned about strumming so far. Then we add rests and dynamics to a basic pattern to make it sound a lot less generic and a lot more like “real music.”

Finally, we follow a very simple exercise of emphasizing the upstrokes when we play to make our use of anticipation more natural and, hopefully, get you through all the problem points.

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 on Monday, October 20, 2008.

And, in case you’re interested, you can find all our Guitar Noise Podcasts (the current one as well as the first eighteen) 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.

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

The opening show of FODfest turned out to be a lot of fun. More than twenty musicians shared the stage at one point or another, not counting the Hunger Mountain Boys (a great trio of old-time music) and the Berkshire Bateria, who opened up the second act.

I got to sit between two talented young boys – Willie Watkins on drums and Sam Weiser, who is the 2008-2009 recipient of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Violin and who played a spirited rendition of the jazz standard, St. Thomas.

One of the very cool things about FODfest is the fact that there are usually people of all ages playing. Eleven year olds share the stage with folks in their sixties. Huge samba drum bands get together with folkies.

In an age, or perhaps it’s better to say in a society, where we tend to measure cool by how small a box we can put ourselves into, whether it be a genre of music (alt-emo-death-nu-metal-pop-punk) or a lifestyle, it’s easier for most people to use music as a means of excluding others from their lives. I don’t listen to what you listen to because I don’t like it and that’s that. Right?

But this illusion of exclusion is a lonely trap. Advertisers and songwriters use it all the time, telling us we can be unique by buying the same things as everyone else or by singing about how “no one can ever understand what it’s like to be me.” Clever, no? And it’s certainly not new. There’s just a lot more of it now, owing mostly to the fact that there’s a lot more people.

Think of the bands that you enjoy seeing perform live. Odds are that the band members not only look like they’re having the time of their lives, they’re looking at each other, too! Not just listening for clues or getting signals for when the solo starts or the song ends, but enjoying the act of making music and sharing it. When the performer or band is caught up in the magic of creation, the audience gets caught up in the joy and also gets included in the wonder of it all. That’s very cool.

If there was anything in the world I could wish for, it would be for the chance, at some point in my life, to sit and play music with everyone at Guitar Noise. Obviously not all at once! I’m not sure there’s any venue big enough for everyone! Maybe I should make it a quest. Just set out one day and get as far as I can spending every evening playing with some new folks. Would that be wild?

In the meantime, though, do your best to find others to play with and to share your music with. It will make you a better musician. It will also make you a better person.

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

And, as always…

Peace