Newsletter Vol. 1 # 59 – July 08, 2002

Hello Guitar Players,

Welcome to our latest issue of Guitar Noise News, for the week of July 8, 2002.

Tomorrow is the day our summer holiday officially begins. I’ll be away on vacation and the newsletter will be on hiatus till I get back in about a month.

If you have a music or guitar question in my absence, you can send it to any of the instructors whose addresses are listed on the right. If you need to contact someone about the site please contact David.

Speaking of David, he has a great new intermediate lesson featured in this newsletter that he hopes will “leave everyone with a smile.”

Have a great summer!

In this newsletter:

News
New Guitar Lessons
Acoustic Guitar Tip
Recommended Reading
Concert Review
Email of the Week

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

News and Announcements

World Bass Challenge

Public Challenge to Any Bass Player in the World
Beat our champion and win a free 6 month membership!

Here’s how:

Record an Mp3 of your best bass playing (750Kb max file size).
Tab out eight bars of your entry
Make sure your entry complies with our copyright policy.
Email the Mp3 and tab to [email protected].
Don’t forget to include your name and city or country.
Cross your fingers.

If your entry is approved by our screeners, you will be entered in the World Bass Challenge. If you win, you will be awarded a 6 month membership, bragging rights, and a hero’s welcome. And by the way, you’ll be the new champ. We look forward to your participation. Open to non-members only.

Guitar Breakthrough Freebie Page

This is a new venture. Over the following months various guitar playing problems will be explained and wallpapers for your desktop will be available for download.

To get the freebie section underway you can download the first of 6 exclusive, and original, pieces of artwork for use as desktop wallpapers.

All the artwork comes from the Guitar Breakthrough program and is created by Len Collins. They are used to divide the various sections in the software.

The tutorial section (not yet ready for download) will begin with rhythm then open tuning.

Guitar Breakthrough
Guitar tuition software that provides the knowledge for all guitar players to become great guitarists.

New Guitar Lessons

Scarborough Fair
By David Hodge (08 Jul 2002)
Paul Simon’s version of Scarborough Fair is something I try to teach my students fairly early on in their studies. Like Blackbird, it seems daunting at first, but it’s truly not hard at all. Most of the song involves simple patterns that get repeated during the course of the verses.

Love Your Mistakes
By Darrin Koltow (08 Jul 2002)
Mistakes, errors, hitches and problems are a part of making music. And believe it or not, they are necessary to your growth as a musician. Let’s investigate some ways of looking at “mistakes” that ultimately help your playing, even if a particular mistake seems to be dragging you down.

Here is this week’s blast from the past.

Let’s take a look at some lessons on singing while playing.

Singing In A New Year
by David Hodge (15 Jan 2001)
Today we are going to take on those always scary playing and singing at the same time jitters. Singing requires, in many respects, the same sort of attitude we bring to the guitar. The more realistic we are in our approach, the better our chances of being happy with our performances. Not everyone has a great voice, but just about everyone has the ability to develop a passable one.

A-J has also written an article on this topic more recently and you’ll find that under his songwriting lessons. Playing the Guitar while Singing (Or Singing while Playing the Guitar) by A-J Charron.

Check out our Performance Lessons.

Acoustic Guitar Tip

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

Strumming Tips

Question:
I’m a beginner and I have trouble strumming naturally. How can I make it more natural so that all the songs don’t sound exactly the same?

~Holly~

Answer:
Realize that your guitar is also a rhythm instrument. You’re keeping time with the music at the same time you’re strumming. When you’re strumming the strings, keep time with the music like you’re playing a wash board.

You don’t always have to strum ALL the strings on every strum. Try an E major chord. Try hitting the bass string (down strum) then the higher strings on the second (down strum) and third (upward strum).

It will come with more practice.

Gman ( o )==#

A while back I had a question about my problem with not being able to play and sing at the same time, the whole washboard thing made some sense to me and after practicing my butt off I’m starting to be able to do it.

Thanks a lot!

I read a question from a player who had trouble strumming naturally. This was the HARDEST thing for me when I was learning – harder than forming chords, reading music, and even barre chords. One can usually learn technique, but you either have rhythm or you don’t. Here is a KILLER tip….buy a METRONOME! You can get the old, triangle wooden ones, or now they have digital ones – mine is the size of a credit card. You can set them at whatever speed you wish, and just strum along. Soon, you’ll be adding licks and things. Good luck.

We want to print your guitar tips here. Please send us tips to Guitar Noise with “Guitar Tips” as the subject of your message.

Concert Review

Steve Hackett in Trois-Rivières
By A-J Charron (07 Jul 2002)
The show itself was absolutely outstanding. The whole band was top-notch and the songs weren’t a simple rehash of old material as some veteran rockers will do. New arrangements, going into material that hadn’t been performed in a long while and a band that simply worked well together.

Email of the Week

This week our email of the week is also a repeat.

Knowing What Notes To Use In A Solo
How do you know what notes you can use in a solo, I know it is to do with what key the song is in, but how do you tell what key a song is in?

David’s Response
Thanks for writing. Okay, there’s actually a little more to it than this, but let’s start simply. The easiest way to tell what key a song is in is to look at the sheet music. The number of flats or sharps will pretty much tell you. Chances are, though, that you rarely use sheet music. You’re more likely to have a sheet which has the chord progression. (And to be honset with you, the chord progression is a lot more important than the key but we’ll come back to that…) If you look at the chord progressions of a song, the chances are pretty likely that the song is grouped into patterns of progressions. Usually, but not always, a song will begin and end on the chord of its key. Also, if you listen to the song, there are places where it just sounds like it comes to a conclusion and that will almost always be the same chord.

Knowing what I call the “primary and secondary chords” of any major key can be very useful to you. For instance, if you see that a song has G, A, D, Bm and F#m chords in it, you can make an educated guess that it is in the key of D major. Bm and A major are also possibilities and you’d have to listen to the song to know for sure, but look – you’ve narrowed it down to three of the twenty possibilities! That’s a great start. If you want to know more about how to figure out the primary and secondary chords of any key, read my article The Power of Three.

But you will find out that knowing the key is not always an indicator of what notes to use. This is why knowing some theory will help you out a lot. Take the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil. This song is in the key of E but the chord progression is E, D, A, E. I’m sure you know that the D note is not part of the E major scale. So what do we do? Well, if you know modal scales, an E Dorian scale (E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D, E) will work very well. You may not think that the G would work but it provides what is called a “blue note” that gives some nice tension to the proceedings provided you do not just sit on it for a long period of time. Sometimes it is a lot easier to look at the chord progression and think, “Okay, what key would normally have all these chords” and then work from there.

Another thing that works quite well fairly often is to use the relative minor pentatonic scale. If you know a song is in G major, for example, soloing in the E minor pentatonic scale (E, G, A, B, D) will sound perfectly fine.

I hope that I’ve demonstated here that while knowing the key of a song is very important, it’s also just as important to carefully examine the chord progession when trying to figure out what notes you want to use to solo. We’ll be examining this later this fall.

Peace

David Hodge

All the best,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer