Newsletter Vol. 1 # 6 – February 09, 2001

Dear Guitar Player,

Welcome to Guitar Noise News, the weekly update for Guitar Noise. Since last week over 100 new subscribers have signed up for this newsletter. Welcome to all you new readers of Guitar Noise News. I hope you find everything you are looking for in this newsletter.

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Site News

Sticky enough for you?

“Stickiness” is a term used by webmasters to describe how long a website keeps visitors reading it by always linking to itself rather than other sites. Recently Guitar Noise has become a really sticky mess. But let’s face it, if you have looked around GN you know there are so many lessons here. With such a large amount of archived knowledge you would have to hate learning about the guitar to leave our site. Well, we have just made it easier to get off our site. We have gone through all the external links on our site and arranged them into a much more organized system of pages. So if you are looking for something that we don’t have, it is now easier to unstick yourself from our pages.

New Lessons

Roll Over Beethoven – Easy Songs for Beginners 7
by David Hodge (05 Feb 2001)
Today we will look at the 12 bar blues pattern and typical blues shuffle rhythm. When we are done you will be able to play an amazing number of straight ahead rock and roll songs. All sorts, from Chuck Berry to the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin to Bruce Springsteen and more performers than I could possibly list in a simple introductory paragraph.

When To Get A Manager – Worth Another Look
by A-J Charron (17 Oct 2000)
When is it time to look for a Manager? What should you look for in a Manager? What does a Manager do? The answers to these and more questions have been supplied by Bob Roper.

Recommended Reading

After the popular success of last weeks book recommendation, we have decided to walk you through all the books in the Guitar Grimoire series. These books are invaluable to all guitar players. The second Grimoire book is on chords and voicings.

The Guitar Grimoire – Chords and Voicings
Every chord of every key and mode is presented with thousands of diagrams and charts. Includes polychords, chord substitutions, inversions and movable voicings. A unique feature shows you exactly what scale pattern to use for soloing over the chord you are playing. This indispensable volume belongs in every guitarist’ library.

Email of the Week

Now that we have published David’s second beginner piece on the blues, we have started receiving a lot of email on this topic. This week let’s look at a question sent to us about soloing over blues progressions.

Almost everyone knows that blues is based on a I-IV-V chord progression. My question is simply this: Can you regard a chord change in this progression as a key change so that in the key of A you would solo for four bars on the A minor pentatonic scale then use the D minor pentatonic scale for two bars and back to A etc…?

Here is our answer to this question:

Your reasoning here is fine; you wouldn’t think of the switch to D as a “key change” per se (technically the key of a song does NOT change with each chord change – things could get very weird if that were the case) but you can take advantage of the brief shift in modality to use a D minor pentatonic scale for the lead over these two measures. You can also use the same logic if you so desire to play an E minor pentatonic in the one measure of E (V) that comes up later on.

Two interesting things: the A minor pentatonic (A, C, D, E, G) could be used throughout the entire blues progrssion (I, IV, V). But if you wanted to try something interesting, you could also use the D minor pentatonic (D, F, G, A, C) either throughout the entire song or at least through the two measures of A after the two measures of D, just to spice things up a bit and create a very interesting feel.

FYI, we will be covering the minor pentatonic scale as part of the last blues section in the upcoming “songs for beginners” (due out next week!). So you will get even more answers to this interesting question in next weeks newsletter.

Don’t forget to check out this week’s beginner blues lesson.

New Sites

• Learning Guitar: Lesson 7 – This popular series is back again for another installment. In lesson seven, we focus on the basics of fingerpicking, new barre chords, hammer-ons, and pull-offs. Plus, as usual, we learn many new pop and rock songs to play.
• GuruBooks.com – Guru Books is the leading publisher of Instant Know-how and Instant Fun in the form of concise illustrated guides to popular topics. Our attractive books are available in Adobe PDF format, and can be downloaded quickly and easily. Right now we are offering a free Capo Guru for each visitor who clicks through to our site.
• Planet-Guitar – Planet-Guitar is a new german online magazin for musicians. We present interviews with famous guitar-players like Steve Vai, Robben Ford, Tom Morello or Jeff Beck plus interesting Guitar and Bass Workshops for free. There is a test section on the site. Here you find interactive Tests of Guitars, Basses, Amps and Effect-Gear.

Peace,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer