Newsletter Vol. 3 # 97 – September 1, 2009

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #97 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

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

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello to all and welcome to the September 1, 2009 issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise. I hope that this newsletter finds everyone well and in good spirits.

For a change, there’s a lot of news to tell you. Right off the bat, I got an email from Tom Hess with the schedule for his free guitar clinics that will be taking place all over the Eastern and “Near West” US in September. If you happen to be in (or in driving distance of) Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, New York or Pennsylvania, then you definitely want to check this out:

September 14, 2009 Guitar Center – Algonquin, Illinois, 7 pm
September 15, 2009 Guitar Center – Grand Rapids, Michigan, 6 pm
September 16, 2009 Guitar Center – Toledo, Ohio, 6 pm
September 17, 2009 Guitar Center – Cleveland, Ohio, 7 pm
September 18, 2009 House of Guitars – Rochester, New York, 7 pm
September 19, 2009 McNeil Music – Vestal, New York, 6:30 pm
September 20, 2009 To be announced
September 21, 2009 To be announced
September 22, 2009 To be announced
September 23, 2009 Guitar Center – Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 6 pm
September 24, 2009 Guitar Center – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 7 pm
September 25, 2009 Sam Ash Music – Columbus, Ohio, 6 pm
September 26, 2009 Guitar Center – Cincinnati, Ohio, 7 pm
September 27, 2009 Guitar Center – Indianapolis, Indiana, 3 pm

Tom is a great guy, not to mention an excellent guitarist and teacher, and if this year’s clinics are as good as last year (and you can get Tom “Noteboat” Serb’s take on last year’s clinic, you’re bound to learn a lot and also have a good time.

In addition to Tom, Guitar Noise contributor Mike Philippov will be there, as well as Zack Uidl, Nick Layton, Randy Johnson and Paul Kleff.

For details and FREE guitar lesson videos from the previous clinic tour, check out Tom Hess Music Corporation.

And be sure to tell Tom “hello” from me!

We at Guitar Noise would also like to congratulate the aforementioned Tom Serb on the first anniversary of the opening of his school, the Midwest Music Academy in Plainfield, Illinois. They’re closing in on having more than two hundred students and that’s very exciting news! Feel free to drop Tom a line of good wishes for the upcoming school year at this thread.

And speaking of teachers, Guitar Noise Moderator Alan Green is hitting the teaching circuit big time starting this month, working with the Essex Music Services in England. Check out our interview with Alan in the “New Articles and Lessons” section and be sure to send him an email of congratulations and encouragement as well.

Topic of the Month

And with all these announcements concerning guitar teachers, not to mention the new lessons we have about them (and from them), it only seems appropriate to make our Topic of the Month of September be about “Teaching. ” As always, on our Guitar Noise Home page you’ll find links to the many articles here at Guitar Noise that discuss teaching and the various things that go along with it. And you should also be sure to look up the articles, both here and on our sister website, Music Careers, written by some great teachers who are also GN contributors, such as Darrin Koltow, Tom Hess, Tom Serb, Alan Green, Nick Torres and many more.

And feel free to post an email to me if there’s a particular topic you’d like to see given “Topic of the Month” status at some point in the future.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Because it’s the first of the month we’ve got a new Guitar Noise Featured Artist. During the month of September, we’ll be putting a spotlight on the Beatles, as well as on all the various Beatles’ song lessons available here at Guitar Noise. Click on over to our artist profiles page for more reading and lesson links.

New Lessons and Articles

Alan Green Interview
by David Hodge

All of us at Guitar Noise want to congratulate Alan as he starts off teaching guitar and music pretty close to full time! Get to know one of our Guitar Noise Moderators a little better – you might see him on television one day!

“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” – Performance Notes For The Bridge
by Jamie Andreas

In the final installment of her video lessons on the Guitar Noise arrangement of George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” guitar teacher extraordinaire Jamie Andreas takes you step by step through the bridge section of the song with very clear and detailed instruction. I learned quite a bit from Jamie’s videos and I hope you do, too!

Need Help Starting A Successful Career In Music?
by Tom Hess

Tom details four very important steps that anyone seriously thinking about starting a career in the music business as a performing artist truly needs to think about and develop. If you take Tom’s advice to heart, you’ll giving yourself a big step forward.

Seven Nation Army
Easy Songs for Beginners #41
by David Hodge

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about how to turn a song into a single guitar arrangement and the first part of the answer is that you have to learn the song! In this lesson we break down this White Stripes’ song into its component parts – bass, rhythm and lead (learning them on the electric guitar) – so that we can later create a single acoustic guitar arrangement of this song.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Tip for August 1 – Practicing Modes (Part 14)

We continue our exploration of modes in this issue. Specifically, let’s move into C7 arpeggios as a natural follow-up to our study of C7 chords. As we did last week, we’ll work with position V, give or a take a fret.

Here’s our initial C7 garden-variety arpeggio:

|-8-6-------------|-----------------|---6-8---------|
|-----8-5---------|---------------5-|-8-------------|
|---------5-------|-------------5---|---------------|
|-----------8-5---|---------5-8-----|---------------|
|---------------7-|-------7---------|---------------|
|-----------------|-8-6-8-----------|---------------|

To add just a bit more variety to this pattern, repeat it–but with the beat shifted to the notes that got the off beat on the first run. Maybe the full tab will better explain what I mean:

|-8-6-------------|-----------------|---6-8-8-6-------|
|-----8-5---------|---------------5-|-8---------8-5---|
|---------5-------|-------------5---|---------------5-|
|-----------8-5---|---------5-8-----|-----------------|
|---------------7-|-------7---------|-----------------|
|-----------------|-8-6-8-----------|-----------------|

|-----------------|---------6-8-8----|
|-----------------|-----5-8----------|
|-----------------|---5--------------|
|-8-5-----------5-|-8----------------|
|-----7-------7---|------------------|
|-------8-6-8-----|------------------|

Thanks for reading.

Copyright 2009 Darrin Koltow

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

As I mentioned earlier, Tom “Noteboat” Serb is celebrating the first year of his music school, the Midwest Music Academy. One year ago today we ran a short interview with Tom and this would certainly be a great time to post it once again.

Random Thoughts

Not that this should come as any kind of surprise, but teaching, and teaching music, is always a topic of discussion at my home. There’s no end of subjects when it comes to thinking about how to bring knowledge of any kind, whether it’s about creating music or understanding mathematics or even instilling the idea that most things in life never have the wonderfully simplistic single answers that the much of the world would have us believe.

One of the biggest challenges, and I suspect also one of the biggest frustrations, is knowing that regardless of how good a teacher one might be, teaching itself is one small piece of the whole process of learning. Not everyone who goes to the same teacher learns the same things or even gets the same grades. That seems ridiculously obvious.

It’s also very obvious that everyone learns in different ways. But one thing that holds constant, at least as far as I can see, is that without some practical application of the learning, the process itself will be a slow one. Reading music, or even learning what notes make up a particular chord is a great example of this. A G chord consists of the notes G, B and D. People know the win-loss statistics of their favorite teams or any of the many PIN or passwords they use everyday, but something as simple as
remembering three notes requires more of a superhuman effort for some.

So a good part of teaching is not just giving knowledge, it’s giving, and more importantly, demonstrating and inspiring a student’s individual need for that knowledge. That’s not always easy.

If you’re having trouble with learning something in particular, go to your teacher and discuss ways to make that knowledge something you want to and need to learn. Without a student’s participation, there’s not all that much learning that can be done.

If you’re trying to learn something without a teacher, say through the Internet, then be certain to visit chat rooms and post questions. But also go one step further and look for answers yourself. Answers that you have to dig for will stay in your head longer than those you are simply given.

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

And, as always…

Peace