Newsletter Vol. 1 # 38 – January 31, 2002

Dear Guitar Player,

Welcome to Guitar Noise News for January 31, 2002.

To make this mailing list even more useful to more people I want to make our newsletter into more of an e-zine. It is certainly a strength that most of our subscribers are practicing musicians. However, during the coming weeks I plan to broaden our appeal a bit by including information that may also interest non musicians and music fans. In doing this I am on the lookout for new features or contributions for the newsletter.

Beginning this week, each issue will features a different guitar tip. These tips will be useful for current guitarists as well as those considering becoming one someday.

You can send your tips to Guitar Noise and maybe you’ll see your tip here next issue.

In this newsletter:

News
Guitar Tip
Guitar and Bass Lessons
Recommended Books
CD Reviews
New Links
Email of the Week

You can recycle this newsletter by passing it on to a friend you think might benefit from Guitar Noise.

Tip of the Week

This week our tip comes to us courtesy of Guitar Man Acoustic Guitar Tips.

Practicing Your Guitar
Make sure you have a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted. I always practice in my den in the basement. Unless you have someone to quickly intercept phone calls or non-ringing voice mail, consider taking the phone off the hook for about a half an hour. Turn off the radio or TV.

Do a quick warm up, a scale or something you know for a couple of minutes. Then start with something difficult like the new song you are learning. When I’m learning a new song, I play it over & over for almost the entire session. The length of the session varies. I’m 45 now but I remember when I first started playing 31 years ago, I thought nothing of practicing 2 or 3 hours at a time. I’m lucky now if I do an hour. If you feel your practices are too tedious, practice different songs each day.

Finish up the session playing the most polished song you have with satisfaction.

Preparing for a performance is a little different. Play your songs completely through in the order you will perform them. If you use a capo or different tunings, arrange the songs so there is as little interruption between songs as possible. Think about what you are going to say between the songs. This may sound pessimistic but if you have an incredibly fancy move that you like to do during practice and you’re not 100% sure of it, then don’t do it during the performance. At best you’re at about 80% efficiency when nervous and performing. You probably won’t pull it off.

Gman ( o )==#

For more tips visit Guitar Man Acoustic Guitar Tips.

Guitar and Bass Lessons

Charts
Songwriting # 34
by A-J Charron (29 Jan 2002)
I found that when I bring a new song to my band mates, it can be a long learning curve for the other guys. Now I put everything into charts and give these to the guys a week or so before meeting them with our guns ready. Works a lot better.

The Fundamentals of Fun
Guitar Principles Essay # 15
by Jamie Andreas (01 Feb 2002)
Anyone learning to play guitar should have two goals in mind: one, making sure the technical foundation being laid is correct, and strong so that continuous growth is possible, and two, making some MUSIC as soon as possible, something, anything that that turns you on, that gets your emotional juices flowing, whether it is Bach or Rock.

CD Reviews

The Residents – Icky Flix
I wouldn’t even attempt to categorize this music. Either they are very well-known musical geniuses, or these guys have escaped an insane asylum.

New Sites

Auto-Transposer – Transpose chord progressions to all twelve keys with one click! Very useful for those of us who don’t have 27 octave ranges.
House Of Lyrics – A huge and ever-expanding database of song lyrics for all your favorite pop & underground artists. Featuring lyrics to complete albums, discographies, and hard-to-find b-sides. New lyrics posted daily.

Email of the Week

This issue’s email of the week concerns the Blackbird lesson we published in our Songs for Intermediates section last November.

I have just seen your transcription of Paul McCartney’s Blackbird which is very good however I have been having a debate with another guitarist over the tuning Paul used when he first did it, I read somewhere that it was played in open G tuning but the other guitarist says I am wrong and it has always been played in standard tuning as shown in most books, so I would be very pleased if you can shed some light on this matter. I look forward to hear from you very soon.

David’s Response
Thanks for writing. There’s a lot of debate about this and I just don’t know. I’ve tried playing it with open G and the fingering is just really too hard. But after you wrote I thought about it some more and I have an idea. Since the guitar is tuned pretty close to open G anyway and since the chords, okay the fingerings, are done primarily on the second and fifth strings, why not tune the first string down to D, that is, EADGBD tuning? This way you can play it throughout the whole song much as you do the open D (fourth) string. I’ve tried this and it does work. Again, you can hear that it’s not the same but it does give more ringing strings and a nice overall tone.

I hope this helps. Thanks again for the email and I look forward to hearing what you think of this. If I don’t chat with you between now and the first, I’d like to wish you, your family and friends a happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.

David Hodge

If you haven’t read it yet, be sure to check out our Blackbird Guitar Lesson.

Have a great week,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer