Newsletter Vol. 1 # 60 – August 19, 2002

Hello Guitar Players,

Welcome back everyone! I hope you all have been having an excellent summer. This is the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, for the week of August 19, 2002.

Now that our unusually long summer vacation is over it is time to get back to serious work. While it is hard not reminisce about the time I spent away from work there may be some of you interested in hearing where I went for so long.

Well, it had to be the longest trip I’ve ever taken in terms in mileage. I traveled halfway around the globe and then back again. During all this time I attended my brother’s wedding, went on a few road trips, bought a new guitar, took lots of pictures and had a great time wherever I went.

One of the biggest highlights of the journey was getting together with the Guitar Noise crew for the Riverside Jam 2002. We met in New Jersey for a day of fun, food and music. And to show you how happy we all look together take a look at this picture.

The jam was a success and people are already starting to talk about where it will be held next year…

In this newsletter:

News
New Guitar Lessons
Acoustic Guitar Tip
Recommended Reading
Concert Review
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

New lesson from Acoustic Guitar Workshop

Borrow – Don’t Steal! by Tom Yoder
This lesson will give you an introduction to the magic C tuning, and you’ll learn some wicked arpeggio patterns. Click here.

Incidentally, while we were away Acoustic Guitar Workshop was featured in the “Hot Artist Spotlight” for July on MP3.com. There are some 170,000 artists on MP3.com and not so many are lucky enough to make this hallowed ground. We’re still looking for a link to take you there to see and hear for yourself. You can visit the current spotlight but they’ve only archived May and June so far.

Head Banging Beavis is Back

Anyone who has been around this site for a really long time will remember the lovable head banging Beavis mascot. Well, now this peach fuzzy, rocking character is back. But he hasn’t really made his full comeback yet. You’ll have to look pretty carefully throughout the Website to see where he is hiding.

New Guitar Lessons

Jazz Comping II: Extending the chord voicing vocabulary
By Hans Fahling (19 Aug 2002)
In the previous installment in this series we defined and applied chord voicings with the roots on the fifth as well as sixth strings. We will achieve an even higher degree of flexibility by defining and practicing the same major scale harmonic layout in the following system.

The Importance of a Contract – Get it in writing to make the gig go smooth!
By Lesa McCabe (19 Aug 2002)
When you and a club have decided that you and your band are the perfect match, dates are settled on, price is negotiated, the next step is to put all this in writing. This is for the protection of both parties.

Worth another Look

In each newsletter I scan through the Website and recover some older lessons that are worth mentioning again. Here is this week’s blast from the past.

It was a shame while I was away that I couldn’t deal with a lot of technical problems that cropped up with the site. Namely, there have been some ongoing problems with printing some of the lessons. Looking back at the stack of mail waiting for me, there were far to many asking for help with printing. This problem occurs mostly with David’s beginner and intermediate song lessons. Now, there isn’t any real problem with the newer lessons, but your Email suggested that many of you are still working through the older lessons.

I have gone back and fixed as best I could the problems that made printing the entire lessons difficult. All of the printable versions of David’s beginner and intermediate lessons should work fine now. So for this week’s blast from the past I am going to feature two of David’s lessons. These are the two that attracted the most Email from people because they weren’t able to print them entirely.

Bookends
by David Hodge (20 July 2001)
Easy Songs For Beginners Lesson 11
Last time out we learned some basic fingerpicking with House of the Rising Sun. Today we’re going to do something that is both a little easier and also a little harder with an old Paul Simon song called Bookends. It’s a very simple song to learn and it will help us to develop some more coordination in our fingerstyle play. Specifically, it will serve to teach us to use two fingers on two different strings at the same time.

Blackbird
by David Hodge (01 Nov 2001)
Songs for Intermediates # 2
Today we’re going to start with that concept and then kind of warp it around a bit. The song is Blackbird by Paul McCartney (but being a Beatle at the time, it is officially a “Lennon/McCartney” piece). Not only is this a good “showing-off” song for the solo guitarist, it is also a great exercise for stretching one’s fingers.

Also fixed earlier this week were the following lessons: Happy Xmas (War Is Over), Moondance, Babylon, If Not For You, I Shot The Sheriff, House of the Rising Sun, Margaritaville, Kansas City, Before You Accuse Me, and Horse With No Name.

Acoustic Guitar Tip

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

Take Guitar Tuner to Music Store

One important tip that I learned the hard way is to always carry a tuner with you when you go guitar shopping unless you are really good at tuning by ear. If you ask a salesperson to tune the guitar they may tune it a little flat making it easier to play. Once you buy the guitar, get it home, and tune it properly, you may find that it suddenly doesn’t play as easily as it did in the store. Also, if you are really serious about a particular guitar, insist that the salesperson put a new set of strings on it so that you can hear how it sounds with new strings. I have found that the strings on most guitars on display sound dead.

Scott Poupard

Yes, it’s also a good idea to have the guitar tuned up to proper pitch so you can make sure the intonation is good. Also check the lower tunings you like. There are some guitars that have good intonation tuned to Drop D for instance and some that don’t.

Bob, Gman ( o )==#

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

Concert Review

Carlos Santana – “All Is One” tour
By Bill Cozzo (19 Aug 2002)
Undeterred by mid-summer temperatures reaching into triple digits, Carlos Santana and his 10-member band treated a capacity crowd of 17,000+ to a scorching performance at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD on Friday night, August 2nd, 2002.

New and Notable Links

I have just added a new links section to the site for all our affiliate Websites. You know, this is in fact a surreptitious way of earning a little money towards our operating costs, since everything is free on Guitar Noise we need to earn a little bread from somewhere. If you are going to buy something online it wouldn’t hurt for you to visit our Affiliate Links Page and click on the site from there. Oh yeah, we don’t just sign up with anyone. We wouldn’t ask you to buy something from someone if we wouldn’t do it ourselves.

Acoustic Guitar Workshop – Online lessons in the art of fingerstyle blues, plus free resources and free ezine. Free acoustic lessons at the Acoustic Guitar Workshop.
Amazon.com – Amazon.com is pleased to have Guitar Noise in the family of Amazon.com associates. We’ve agreed to ship books and provide customer service for orders we receive through special links on The Online Guitar College. Amazon.com associates list selected books in an editorial context that helps you choose the right books. We encourage you to visit Guitar Noise often to see what new books they’ve selected for you.
Sheet Music Plus – Shop for sheet music and more at the Sheet Music Plus super store. Looking for a specific title? Click the SEARCH that matches your taste. Not sure? Curious what’s hot? BROWSE the best sellers, organized by style and instrument.

Here is a sample of some of the new links added this week:

Flamenco Guitar Graf-Martinez – Flamenco guitar methods, Flamenco Metronome, Flamenco CD-ROMs, Flamenco Guitar lessons (free download).
GuitarLearning.com – Smart software for smart musicians. Skill building tools for guitar, bass, banjo and many other instruments.
Music Theory Lessons – This web site offers free lessons on the basics of music theory including pentatonic and modal scales, chords, melody and harmony, and more.
Olav Torvund’s Guitar Pages – More than 20 Blues lessons, plus music theory, chord progressions, chord diagrams, scales, midi backing tracks, ear training and open tunings.

Email of the Week

Twiddling My Knobs
I’ve just spent about 5 minutes flicking through the site, and I’m already hooked. Why have I been wasting my time with so many other sites/books etc.? And I LOVE the fact that David Hodge can actually write “proper, like” – you know: spelling, grammar, syntax, style. A novelty in this day and age… Marvelous. I look forward to many happy hours of frustration trying to improve my woefully inadequate technique.

Now, I have a problem that may be relevant to others out there. I simply have no idea how to twiddle my knobs! It’s an embarrassing problem; one which one doesn’t really like to talk about in public. I simply don’t know where to start twiddling my Fender Princeton 65 OR my USA Strat in order to get some basic sounds (I’ve no fx pedals). Oh I know, I suppose it’s all down to personal preference, but I worry that what I think is okay may suck as far as everybody else is concerned – after all, I can’t hear from the audience’s point of view. All I need is a reference point to work from, really, but it’s sooo difficult to find! Can you point me in the right direction? Heeellllppp!

David’s Response
My advice to you is to do what I did and still do when I get a new guitar – first off, sit down by yourself in a room where you can plug your guitar in and walk a LONG ways off from your amp. Then sit down as far away as you can and experiment. And when I say “experiment” I mean to do so as a scientist would – TAKE NOTES!!! Start with one knob then work the others. Don’t forget to also get up and change the knobs around on your amp as well. It’s important to try out as many permutations as you can. This is going to take time and will undoubtedly be tedious, so perhaps you might also want to only try one set of settings at one sitting (sorry, I really should resist that sort of thing!).

Once you have an idea of what you’re dealing with, then, some day when you’ve gotten to a gig and everything is set up and you’re just killing time, have someone play your guitar on stage and you go out and listen to it. Give your “stand-in” directions on what knobs to turn. Again, try to listen as much as you can.

The sad thing is that once you get the whole band going, a lot of the little nuances will be lost in the overall mix. But if you have an idea of what the extremes and middles sound like, then you have a pretty good idea as to what is coming through to the audience.

I hope that this helps. Thank you again for the Email and please feel free to write again if you’d like to discuss this (or anything else) in further detail.

Peace

David Hodge

If you would like to read previous Email of the Week letters online visit the Guitar Noise Website for the complete list of questions and responses. You can also read copies of past newsletters at the Guitar Noise Newsletter Archives.

All the best,

Paul Hackett
Executive Producer