Newsletter Vol. 1 # 2 – January 12, 2001

Dear Guitar Player,

Welcome to Guitar Noise News, the weekly update for Guitar Noise. Our website currently has a small identity crisis. We are in the midst of re-designing everything and we are not quite finished yet. The crisis will soon be over and we will be launching our new look for the new millennium. If you wish to contact us about our website’s design you can send us some feedback.

New Lessons

Miking the Drums – Sound Engineering Q&A Part 5 by Dan Lasley
I have received a few emails asking about how to mike the drums, and a couple of others about setting up in a church. This article gives advice on those topics.

À la Bowie – Songwriting by A-J Charron
Back in the early seventies, David Bowie experimented a lot with lyrics – among other things. One of the things he did was rather original. He put together song lyrics without actually writing them. This week take the Bowie test.

New Reviews

Have your music reviewed on our site and appear in this newsletter for free!
Send us a copy of your disc or MP3 and we will review your music for the thousands of musicians that already belong to the Guitar Noise community. Get the details here.

This week we have two new reviews from Camino Records:

Steve Hackett – Darktown
Darktown is truly a window into the soul of a great artist. Recorded over an eight-year period, this album sounds very orchestral although most of the sounds you hear are done using guitars and the magic of the studio.

Steve Hackett – The Tokyo Tapes In this wonderful video, Steve Hackett (Genesis) is on guitar and vocals, John Wetton (Asia) on bass and vocals, Ian McDonald (King Crimson) on guitar, keyboard and flutes, Julian Colbeck (Weather Report) plays keyboards and Chester Thompson (Genesis) plays drums.

Email of the Week

We are listing – and responding!
Our redesigned Ask the Expert feature is getting a lot of positive attention. So much in fact that we will be reprinting one question and answer each week in this newsletter. Here is this week’s “Email of the Week”.

I have a question. I know standard tuning and things like that, but i have been getting into this band lately that have their guitars tuned CGCFAD. what is that? how do i tune to that? if u could help me out, i’d appreciate it. thanks for your time. Travis

Believe it or not, this is simply a standard “Drop D” tuning. But after you get a drop D tuning, then every single string is tuned down an additional step. If you were to play your standard D chord in this CGCFAD tuning (across all six strings), you would be playing a C major chord.

Of course, just telling you to tune to drop D (simply tune your low E string down to D)and then tuning each and every string down an additional whole step is probably not that helpful, so you might want to try it this way:

  1. make sure your guitar is tuned correctly to start with.
  2. tune the A (5th) string down to G by matching the open 5th string to the third fret of the 6h string (instead of the fifth fret like you normally do).
  3. once you’ve tuned the 5th string to G, you can then go and tune the strings above it in the normal manner (matching the 4th string to the fifth fret of the 5th string, etc). Essentially what you have done is to tune the first five strings down one whole step. Your guitar will now be tuned EGCFAD.
  4. Finally tune the low E (6th) string down to C. Your can do this either by matching it an octave lower than the 4th string (now tuned to C) or by matching the twelth fret harmonic on the 6th string to the open 4th string.

By the way, if you’re interested in various alternate tunings and how to go about using them, then check out some columns I wrote last spring. You might want to start with On The Tuning Awry.

I hope that this helps.

For more answers like this see our help pages.

New Sites

Find these new guitar sites on Guitar Noise this week:

  • Learning Guitar – Lesson Six – In part six of an ongoing feature designed for novice guitarists, we learn strumming patterns, barre chord shapes, 7th chords, a chromatic scale, and new songs. Now featuring RealAudio and MP3 files to boot! Take this free lesson.
  • Crossroads – guitar music news and reviews

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer