Newsletter Vol. 1 # 47 – April 05, 2002

Hello Guitar Players,

Welcome to the April 5, 2002 issue of Guitar Noise News. This newsletter is sent to you once a week because you, or someone pretending to be you, subscribed to it.

In case you are wondering how to get off this list there is always a link at the end of each email that you can click to automatically unsubcribe. If that doesn’t work for you, there is an unsubscribe form on our website. Just enter the email address you subscribed with and you will be removed. If none of those tricks work for you, send me an email and I will take you off the list myself.

The rest of this newsletter is written for all those who don’t want to unsubscribe. I have just finished adding a lot of great stuff to the site and I want to tell you about it first.

In this newsletter:

News
New Guitar and Bass Lessons
Guitar Pick
Acoustic Guitar Tip
Recommended Reading
CD Reviews
New Links
Email of the Week

Why not help a fellow musician? You can do them a favor by forwarding them this newsletter.

News and Announcements

Learning All the Notes your Guitar Can Play – Beginners Tip
As promised last week, I have been cleaning things up a bit. Since last year the graphics on Guitar Noise have improved a lot. Thanks to regular input from readers I am learning which ones are helpful for learners and what is easy on the eyes. So during my annual clean up I went in search of older graphics that didn’t live up to our always increasing standard of excellence.

This week I replaced our old raggedy fretboard map with a new, easier to read version. This is a useful reference chart for beginning guitarists. Learning all the notes on your guitar’s fretboard is an important early step for the beginning guitarist. Knowing where all the notes are will help you with forming chords, playing scales, soloing and improvising.

Click here for a Fretboard Map for the Guitar.

To keep things fair and equal, I took the liberty of making a Bass chart as well. A while back Dan informed that this is a very common question he receives via our Ask an Expert feature. It has, of course, been answered many times.

Click here for a Fretboard Map for the Bass Guitar.

Guitar and Bass Lessons

Soloing And Improvisation – Learning To Fly

Throughout the Spring of 2002, Guitar Noise is happy to feature articles and lessons on the topic of Soloing and Improvisation. We’ve found some incredible guitarists and writers from all around the world to share their thoughts, knowledge and experience with you. Soloing and Improvisation are as much mindset as technique. The theory and technique behind them can improve everyone’s playing, whether you are just starting out or have been playing for years. Even if you consider yourself to be strictly a rhythm guitarist or if you are a bass player, this is knowledge that will aid you in learning to fly, in creating great riffs and basslines that lay the foundation for your bandmates to soar over.

To improvise means “to make or do with whatever is at hand.” An individual’s style come from his or her own creative impulses. We at Guitar Noise would like to give you as much quality knowledge as possible to have “at hand” so that you can make your musical vision a reality that you can share with the world.

How to Improvise: A Guide for Beginning Guitarists
by Darrin Koltow (05 Apr 2002)
There’s nothing magical about improvising, except the great feeling you get when you hit the right notes. In this article we show you how to hit those notes.

Student Abuse
Guitar Principles Essay # 16
by Jamie Andreas (01 Apr 2002)
It is possible for any normally functioning person to play the guitar well enough to fulfill the goals of the average aspiring student. Further, it is possible for any normally functioning person to achieve the professional level of playing if they put the same amount of time and focus into it as one would for any highly sophisticated skill or profession, AND if the student receives competent instruction every step of the way.

Guitar Noise Interviews

Guitar Picks features interviews with guitarists and other musicians about their songwriting techniques and experiences with independent or major record labels. These frank answers by people who have already made it often deal with songwriting, inspiration, working within the limits of record companies’ wishes, and guitar techniques.

Glass
by A-J Charron (05 Apr 2002)
Glass is a three-piece band. I had the immense pleasure of chatting with brothers Jeff and Greg Sherman. They told me a very inspiring story. A story about never giving up. A story about three guys who worked hard and waited a long time but who are now reaping the fruits of their labor.

Glass – No Stranger To The Skies
A mix of Orchestral Rock and Jazz Fusion, No Stranger To The Skies has more than enough to please many people. As a trip down many roads of musical experiment, No Stranger to the Skies won’t let you down.

Acoustic Guitar Tips

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

Neck Reset

What does a guitar seller mean when he describes a guitar as having “Great neck angle as the action is currently very low with plenty of saddle height left?”

After a guitar is 25 or 30 years old, sometimes the neck starts to slant forward from the constant pull of the strings over the years. Instead of getting a neck reset, a less expensive fix is to lower the saddle, even sometimes making the bridge thinner. This less expensive fix is OK if the luthier knows what he’s doing and doesn’t make the bridge too thin or make the saddle too low. It’s inevitable however that the guitar will eventually need a neck reset which is a very expensive repair. The neck needs to be completely removed from the body and re-angled plus a bunch of other stuff.

If the seller states the guitar has, “Great neck angle as the action is currently very low with plenty of saddle height left”, that means he’s trying to convince you the guitar is not in need of this expensive neck reset repair. I just saw a used guitar the other day in a music store. At first, I was impressed with its playability but after a few seconds I realized the saddle (white part) was barely showing and the bridge (wood part) looked thinner than it ought to. This guitar had definitely had the cheaper fix done, maybe several times. I didn’t buy the guitar.

Also: If a guitar is hard to play and the bridge measures less than 5/16″ thick and/or the saddle measures less than 1/8″ tall, the guitar probably needs a neck reset.

Gman ( o )==#

For more tips visit Guitar Man Acoustic Guitar Tips.

New Links

Power Tab Editor – The Power Tab Editor is a tablature editing tool. It allows you to create tablature scores for stringed musical instruments and play them back via a MIDI device.

Email of the Week

This week I am featuring two letters and their responses. Both are by David, and they both concern tuning.

Getting In Tune With Your CDs
I know this question has been asked but I can’t seem to find the answer. Can someone tell me how to get my guitar in tune with my CDs so I can work with them?

David’s Response
Thanks for writing. In all honesty, I’m not sure this question has been asked. We did cover it a little in the trilogy about ear training (specifically the third part Solving The Puzzle) but it bears repeating.

The first thing you have to do is to have your guitar in tune, period. And tuned to standard tuning. To do this you need a keyboard or a tuner. Now for the most part this should allow you to play along with your CDs. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this:

The song is in a different key than you’re used to or than it is TABBED out or notated in. For example, Three Marlenas by the Wallflowers is often written out in the key of D. But on the CD it is in Eb which is a half step up. The simple solution is to play a capo on the first fret and play in D. I usually try to find out what key a song is in before I worry about playing along with it. Again, in the column Solving The Puzzle, I go over the procedure of finding the key to a song.
The guitars have been tuned differently. If you’re trying to play along with Pearl Jam or Korn or any of the bands these days that use guitars tuned down a half-step or a step or even more, then you’re going to have to make a decision to either do so yourself of to play in a different manner than that which is TABBED. For instance, if you wanted to play along with a Nirvana CD, it would be a good idea to have a guitar tuned down one step (low to high: D, G, C, F, A, D) for those songs which use low tuning.If you have determined that a song is in Eb, D, or Db, then you might want to listen to the chord voicings used in order to decide whether or not to lower your tuning. Or you could learn to play in these keys – it’ll make you a better guitarist in the long run.
The recording has been sped up or slowed down. This does happen, especially with some of the older recordings. The Beatles and Bob Dylan, for instance, did this a lot. If you find that you cannot find the key of a song then the chances are that this is the case. What you have to do is to get close. Say you listen to Across the Universe on the Let It Be album and you find that the song is higher than C but not quite at C#. Then play ONE NOTE ON AN OPEN STRING that is part of the chord (in this case the high E string or G string will do) until it is in tune with the song. To check it – you should then be able to noodle around on the one string and sound fine but you definitely sound off on the other strings. Once you have this one string in tune you will have to manually tune the other strings to it (and I’m assuming you know how to do this) and then you will be in tune to play this one particular song.

I hope this helps. Thank you again for the email and I look forward to hearing how things are progressing with you.

Blues Tunings
Does a blues artist tune a guitar different than other artists? It seems my chords don’t sound the same when I use the chords on the tab sheet and listen to the music.

David’s Response
Thanks for writing. There can be a lot of reasons why your chords from the TAB sheet don’t sound the same. It can be something as simple as the TAB being wrong (this does happen – more than people think!) or that the TAB is written in a different key than the one in which song is actually played. Or that the recording of the song has been altered (sped up or slowed down) so that it is not really in tune with the real world.

It can also be a matter of the blues’ artist’s guitar being tuned differently. This is especially true if it is a slide guitarist – they tend to use open tunings (DGDGBD, DADF#AD, EBEG#BE, etc).

But more often than not it is a matter of voicing and chord embellishment than anything else. Say a blues song is in the key of A. Well, the TAB will usually list the chords as A, D and E. But the guitarist may chose other, “embellished” chords (that is, chords with the same basic triads but with added notes for flavor). Instead of an A, he may play an A7 and then add to the confusion by playing it with this voicing:

E – open
B – 10th fret
G – 12th fret
D – 11th fret
A – 12th fret
E – don’t play

And then when he gets to the D, he may play a D7 or, better yet, a D9:

E – 5th fret
B – 5th fret
G – 5th fret
D – 4th fret
A – 5th fret
E – don’t play

Unless your TAB is specific about the exact chord and chord voicing you can see that there are all sorts of different reasons why you will not sound exactly the same.

But that’s cool, too – this is what learning is all about.

I hope this helps. Thank you again for the email and I look forward to hear how things are going with you.

Peace

David Hodge

Tunings are one of the more interesting topics we have covered in depth. Be sure to check our page of tuning lessons as well as our help pages dealing with this topic. To get the most out of your guitar you should always play in tune. I personally recommend getting a guitar tuner.

If you know anyone who might benefit from this free information please forward your copy to them. That’s all for this week.

All the best,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer