Newsletter Vol. 4 # 4 – June 1, 2011

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #4 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

  • Greetings, News and Announcements
  • Guitar Noise Featured Artist
  • Topic of the Month
  • New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
  • Great Advice from Great Teachers
  • Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters Group
  • Events Horizon
  • Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Being the first of June, it’s time for your latest issue of Guitar Noise News, the free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise.

And while the year is certainly flying by, it’s also turning out to be a fairly dangerous one for far too many people. All of us here at Guitar Noise extend our thoughts and hearts to the people of Joplin, Missouri in the wake of the disastrous tornado strike less than two weeks ago. We have quite a few members of the Guitar Noise community in the area, as well as in other parts of the country that have been hit by tornadoes lately, such as the Oklahoma City region. While it’s obvious that one can’t keep nature from doing what it does, we do wish you all safety, wherever you may live.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

It’s hard to believe that it’s going on sixteen years since Jerry Garcia passed away. And it’s hard to believe it’s taken us this long to make him a Guitar Noise Featured Artist of the Month. Read more about Jerry in Paul’s wonderful bio, which you can find on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

For some reason, the blues and summer just seem to go together! There may be no cure for the summertime blues, but you can certainly kick off your summer getting your blues mojo working! Just pop on by the Guitar Noise home page and visit our latest ‘Topic of the Month’ up in the top left corner, just below the blue banner and start checking out all the great articles full of tips and information we have for you. Before the summer’s out you’ll be playing the blues like you were born to it!

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

We have some new material from two of our favorite contributors this time out. Be sure to check out:

Why I Don’t Use A Plectrum
by Vic Lewis

Guitar Noise contributor and Forum Moderator Vic Lewis lists his reasons for not playing guitar with a pick, or ‘plectrum,’ if you prefer.

Secrets To Recording Wicked Guitar Parts
by Rob Gravelle

Rob Gravelle, former guitarist of Canada’s Ivory Knight, shares his secrets of making sure your guitar sounds its best when working in the studio.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re incredibly lucky to have a good number of great guitar teachers as members of the the Guitar Noise community. We’re even luckier to be able to have them contribute to Guitar Noise News on a regular basis!

Tom Serb returns this issue with the first of a multi-part lesson on ‘Speed Secrets.’

Speed Secrets (Part 1) from Tom Serb

For some styles of music, like metal, bebop, and bluegrass, fast guitar runs are an essential element of the genre. And no matter what style you play, a well placed display of speed can often be impressive. As a result, lots of guitarists put speed development on the practice agenda.

In this brief series, I’m going to reveal some of the ways you can make your playing speed faster – in fact, most guitarists will be able to play MUCH faster in a relatively short period of time.

In my teaching, I’ve noticed three barriers to developing speed: excess motion, excess tension, and a lack of coordination between the hands. Excluding virtuosi, we all suffer from one or more of these barriers. We’ll deal with them one at a time.

Excess motion is moving your fingers (or your pick, which I’ll get to in a moment) farther than you have to in executing a series of notes. Distance equals time: the more you lift your fingers, the harder you’ll have to work to achieve the same speed. If you lift your fingers one inch off the strings, your fingers must move EIGHT TIMES faster than a guitarist who only lifts an eighth of an inch!

You’ve probably heard the maxim ‘you learn to play fast by playing slow’. What this really means is rarely explained: playing slowly allows you to focus on your technique. Repeating a technical drill over and over at a very slow speed lets you build a habit, and once you have a habit ingrained, it becomes second nature – it’s what you’ll naturally do every time you play.

As you work through scales and other exercises you’ll find or develop on your own, start by slowing down… WAY down. 30-50% of your top speed is probably about right. Watch your fretting hand, and focus on keeping your fingers as close to the strings as possible. Don’t be impatient; it’s going to take a lot of slow practice sessions to make it habitual, so in the beginning I’d do only slow practice for a week or three before ramping up the tempo.

The picking hand needs the same attention, but in addition there’s a gear factor: the pick you choose. When I started working on developing my speed, I made the same mistake I’ve seen other guitarists make over and over – I switched to a thin pick, thinking it would move more easily through the strings.

As I got faster, I realized the problem with this thinking: thin picks are very flexible. As they pass through the string, they bend… and the point of the pick has to snap back into place before you can pick the next note. You’ll actually reach higher speeds with a stiff pick.

Since heavy picks are harder to force through the string, you’ll probably have to make an adjustment or two in how your pick hits the strings. The more pick you’re using (i.e., the farther your pick extends through the plane of the strings as you play), the more resistance there’s going to be. Devote some of your practice time to focusing on your picking hand, and trying to minimize the amount of pick you use – an eighth of an inch, or even less, is enough to get the string to sound.

Another adjustment you can make is to ‘cock’ your grip – instead of holding the pick parallel to the string, strike at an angle… the edge of the pick should be the surface hitting the string. This lets the rounded point glide across the string, instead of having to forcing the face of the pick through it.

To get the correct grip for this, start by holding the pick flat against a string. Without changing the placement of your hand, tip the point of your thumb either up or down; that will rotate the pick slightly, and you’ll be presenting the edge of the pick to the string. I cock my thumb down, but I know a few guitarists who are more comfortable cocking it up, bending the thumb joint slightly backward. Either way will result in less resistance than striking the string ‘flat’ with the pick.

Don’t forget to keep up with Tom at his school, the Midwest Music Academy, at their website.

Spotlight On The Sunday Songwriters’ Group

This month we take a swing through Nashville, Tennessee – Music City, USA and home to GN Forum member Jeff Martin and his song ‘Black Out.’ Jeff doesn’t get to contribute regularly to the SSG, owing to spending most of his spare time with his band, Spookhand. But when he does, it’s always a treat. Come on over to the Guitar Noise Blog and have a listen and also get a chance to read about what it’s like being in a punk-style band in Nashville!

Events Horizon

On Saturday, June 11, Tom McLaughlin and Slightly Offensive return to Jack Desmond’s at 10339 Ridgeland Avenue in Chicago Ridge, Illinois for a for a very fun night of great music. And they’ll also be at the Tilted Kilt in Chicago Ridge the following weekend for a show on Sunday, June 19. Tell Tom ‘hi’ for me if you make either show!

If you’re in Charlotte, North Carolina on Saturday, June 18, you can catch relatively-new-to-Guitar-Noise member Blakley Leonard be performing at the Tosco Music Party, which will be held at the Knight Theatre of the Levine Center for the Arts. He’Il be one of twenty artists performing for the show which has a Beatles Tribute theme this year. It runs from 7 to 11 PM and there’s only about 200 tickets left, so get them early.

And for those of you in England, you’ll be glad to know that The Wishing Well, a really fantastic Australian group will be there all throughout the month of June. They’ll be in Cambridge tonight (June 1) at Man on the Moon, located at 2 Norfolk Street for an 8 PM show.

Catch them at The Chester Arms (19 Chester Street) in Oxford, at 8 PM, Friday June 3 and then at the Brase Nose Arms on Station Road in Cropedy (that’s around Banbury, I think) on Saturday, June 4 at 9 PM.

Then they’ll be in Leeds (also a 9 PM show) on Thursday, June 9 at the Seven Arts Centre, Chapel Allerton (located at 31A Harrogate Road).

On Sunday, June 12, the Wishing Well will play at The Latest Music Bar in Brighton (14-17 Manchester Street). This will be a 9 PM show.

During the last half of June they’ll be in London and Bath, among other places, so catch all the dates and venues right here!

Random Thoughts

Along with a number of local musicians, artists and performers, I was recently asked by one of the (many) local free newspapers to answer two questions I actually get asked a lot. And, with your indulgence, I’d like to share my answer to them with you, and I’m warning you ahead of time it may seem overly indulgent and sentimental! But you already know that’s part of being me, right?

Anyway…

As a guitar teacher, writer and performer, I often get asked questions I truly don’t know how to answer, like ‘What’s it like to live your dream?’ or ‘What keeps you going?’ Both questions make assumptions or seem to look for a starting point that may not exist.

When I was younger and eventually found myself dreaming about being a musician, it was (understandably) more about the fame and perceived lifestyle of being an artist or musician, not about making the music or art. And, of course, the dreams were inevitably big ones, involving concerts with tens of thousands of people in attendance, more if you count those tuning in on the radio or television and me there in the spotlight playing and singing the most incredible songs ever written. Who dreams of playing at a coffee house, book store or farmers’ market?

But at some point while growing up, there came the gradual realization that the music being made was the most important part of the scenario, not the person playing it. The true joy of playing guitar or writing and performing a song you wrote came from the connection with the people who were listening to it. And that interaction between artist and audience, when you can look out and into the eyes of your listeners and feel a tangible connection with them, with the entire world, well, I may have dreamed about it but certainly not with the understanding of what it really is. In the dreams it was about me. In reality it’s about everyone and everything else. When a show is over I want to hear people saying ‘I had a great time and enjoyed it’ rather than ‘you were great.’ If they don’t have a good time experiencing and being part of the music, then I’m not being great at all.

So you can see that it’s impossible to tell people ‘what it’s like to live my dream’ because making music and (even more so) teaching people how to create and take part in this insanely beautiful magic is so far ahead of anything I was ever capable of dreaming. If I was truly living my dreams of old I suspect I wouldn’t be anywhere near as happy as I am now.

And this realization leads directly to the ‘what keeps you going?’ question. There isn’t any question about ‘keeping going’ because it’s not about ‘keeping going.’ It’s about who and what you are. Simply put, I am a teacher, a musician, a songwriter and a writer. Not necessarily in that order and definitely not in any of those terms being a sole description of who I am. The priorities continually shift and often take a back seat to more important priorities – being a friend, a companion, a partner, a listener, a motivator, a mentor and, most important of all, a participant in this incredibly wonderful thing called life.

Simply by living and taking part in the world instead of trying to live apart from it allows me to be who I am. Even when I’m not writing songs or playing, part of me is working on a potential new arrangement or a song lesson for an upcoming class. Another part is trying out and choosing possible harmony lines for the next time I find myself backing up Nick or someone else on vocals. And still another is examining, cataloging and shaping the little bits of every day life into potential lines for songs, listening to how they sound and getting a sense of what feelings they evoke.

It’s never a matter of ‘keeping going.’ To not be ‘going’ is to not be alive.

As I said earlier, this is a more than a little sentimental and my apologies for that. It’s been a very sentimental time of late and I strongly suspect that it’s going to be for a while!

So, until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And may you always be living much more than your dreams and may you never have to even think about what keeps you going!

And, as always,

Peace