Newsletter Vol. 3 # 92 – June 15, 2009

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #92 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

• Greetings, News and Announcements
• Guitar Noise Featured Artist
• Topic of the Month
• Coming Attractions
• Exploring Music with Darrin Koltow
• This Day (or Approximately) In (GN) History
• Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to a rather brief (at least for us) issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise. For those of you coming in late, today, June 15, is one of my many deadline dates involved in writing the upcoming “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Rock Guitar” book. So I’ve had to take some of the time I normally use for writing the newsletter and employ it for other ends.

This need for time has also cut into the lesson planned for this week. But it will be ready, probably around the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of the month. And there will also be at least one new Coldplay song lesson as well making its way online before June is out. Why Coldplay? Glad you asked!

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Since the start of 2009, Paul has been running a “Featured Artist” section each month. You can usually find a link to a bio, plus links to Guitar Noise song lessons of that particular artist’s work, on the home page, as well as most of the “main” pages of Guitar Noise.

Our Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of June is that pop / rock group, Coldplay. And if you’d like to go straight to our Featured Artist page, look no further than here.

As always, if you’ve suggestions of bands or musicians you’d like to see added as a Guitar Noise Featured Artist, please feel free to drop me a line with your ideas. I’m always willing to get more ideas!

Topic of the Month

Since we recently had two lessons involving both alternate tuing (the DADGAD arrangement of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “All I Can Do Is Write About It“) and open tuning (see the next section for more on the recent lesson on “Buckets of Rain” by Bob Dylan), it kind of made sense to highlight the many articles here at Guitar Noise on this particular subject. So the “Topic of the Month” for June is going to be Alternate and Open Tunings.

As usual, if you go to the top left hand corner of the Home Page, you’ll find links to some great articles here at Guitar Noise on that particular topic, including some wonderful song lessons featuring music from the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones and (surprise!), Guitar Noise’s Featured Artists, Coldplay.

And there will also be links to other articles, particularly the old Guitar Columns, which not only do a wonderful job of exploring the many aspects of alternate and open tunings, but also contain some “hidden gems,” such as a terrific arrangement of the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” played in open D tuning.

Alternate and open tunings are a great way to explore more of the potential of your guitar, so why not give it a try?

Coming Attractions

Coming up in the very near future, as mentioned in the first section of this issue, will be a lesson called “Subdivide and Conquer” one of the first of the long awaited sequels to “Sock Puppets.” In this lesson we’ll look at strumming in terms of sixteenth notes, as well as tied and dotted notes, and show how you can easily suss out a “down and up” pattern based on written music notation, even if you can’t read notes. As a bonus, we’ll use the verse and chorus patterns from the Jack Johnson’s song “Taylor” for our examples.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Tip for June 15 – Practicing Modes (Part 10)

Let’s talk a bit about the reasons for the chord choices in the last issue. Our goal was to put C Ionian chords to each note of the chromatic scale.

The first chord played, on string 1, fret 13, doesn’t sound anything like C Ionian, so did we fail in our goal? What *is* that chord we played? It’s a D m7b5, and it’s an excellent chord to play right before a true C Ionian chord. The reason is this: Dm7b5 shows up in the C melodic minor scale and is the ii in a ii-V-I minor, leading to C minor. If we were to play the full ii-V-I, we’d play Dm7b5, G7, then C minor.

C minor is obviously not a C Ionian chord, but hearing Dm7b5 makes you think a C minor chord is coming up. When a major chord (C major) shows up instead at fret 12, it gives your ear a sweet surprise.

Let’s move on to a more puzzling chord choice — the one on fret 11. That’s a C7#5#9 without the b7 (Bb). Where is *that* chord coming from, and does it really work with the C Ionian idea?

Our chord had to have Eb as the melody, which is pretty un-C Ionian, because C Ionian needs an E, not an Eb. But the basic C7 chord without any mods to it occurs in place of C Ionian in a lot of popular music — especially blues and rock. So I stretched this idea of C7-for-C major a bit further, to reach that Eb melody note, which a C7 chord is allowed to have.

Another chord choice for this melody note would have been the following:

|-11-----|
|--8-----|
|--9-----|
|-10-----|
|--------|
|--------|

That’s a C minorMajor7, which is actually closer to our target C-E-G, the plain C Ionian chord. (You’ll find C minor major7 in the E harmonic minor scale.)

If you’re thinking I’m pulling these chords out of nowhere, play the chords from last issue again, and get your ear more acquainted with the sounds.

Also very helpful is harmonizing the following scales: major, melodic minor, and harmonic minor. If you know the chords for each of the degrees for those scales, and use those chords somewhere in your practice, you’ll start to see and hear how they can be used to substitute for other chords — especially in those situations like ours: pairing a seemingly out-of-character melody note, Eb, with good ‘ol C major.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright 2009 Darrin Koltow

This Day (or Approximately) in (Guitar Noise) History

Although it seems like ages ago, it was just around this time last year that we premiered the first of what has turned out to be a very popular series here at Guitar Noise, our lessons called “Turning Scales into Solos.”

While these lessons have been shorter in length than many of our other song lessons and guitar columns, they have been full of information on how to go about that seemingly impossible task of creating a solo. Plus, each lesson not only has MP3 files demonstrating the ideas covered in that particular article, they all include a “play along” backing track that allows you to create your own solo based on what you hopefully learned.

We’re currently up to Part 8 in this series, but if you’re interested in seeing where it all began, here are the first two, originally posted in the last half of June, 2008:

• Choosing Colors
• One Note at a Time

Event Horizon

I cannot tell you how thrill I was to hear that GN Forum member Tom McLaughlin (who you might know as “Tommy Guns” on the Forum pages) and his band U-Godda-Wanna is going to be playing at Taste of Chicago late this month. For those of you who don’t know, Taste of Chicago is a huge, free outdoor festival held in Chicago’s Grant Part, right next to Lake Michigan. It is a wonderful event and Tom and his band are going to be right in the heart of things as the opening act on the “Taste Stage.” This all takes place Sunday, June 28 at noon. If you’re anywhere in the area, you should treat yourself to a great show in a beautiful setting. Not to mention a lot of really great food.

And my apologies to Tom for not getting his last gig mentioned in our last newsletter (totally my fault), but you can read about how it all went right here.

If the Taste of Chicago show is even half as good, it’s going to be a real rocking time. And be sure to tell Tom “hi” from his friends at Guitar Noise.

Random Thoughts

I don’t normally do this sort of thing in the Guitar Noise Newsletters, but sometimes one just makes an exception. Last Friday, June 12, was the fifty-second birthday of GN Moderator Vic Lewis. A happy belated birthday wish from me, good sir! Not to mention a thank you for inspiring a bit of song writing this past week.

If you’ve ever visited our Forum here at Guitar Noise, then you have to have run into Vic at some point. He’s currently running the Sunday Songwriters Group (and doing an absolutely excellent job of it, by the way!) and still manages to make time to visit virtually all the other forum pages to offer help and encouragement to those asking for advice.

We have, literally, dozens of unsung heroes here at Guitar Noise, each of whom have taken countless hours to contribute to this website and to assist the community in whatever way they can. Without even looking at the Forum page, I can list folks like Noteboat, Twisted Lefty, Dan T., Fretsource, Gnease, Arjen (who’s going by Ignar Hilstrom), RParker, TR Guitar, Jason Brann. Or I can think of the relative newcomers like Chris C and Joe Hempel and Cat. And then we also can’t forget all the moderators, too, from Wes Inman to Elektrablue.

And yes, there are hundreds of other people I should be listing here. That’s the point! Guitar Noise exists through everyone who participates. And as much as you thank Paul for being our ever gracious host, don’t forget to thank and treasure each other as well.

Until our next newsletter, stay safe. Play well and play often.

And, as always…

Peace