Newsletter Vol. 2 # 113 – February 27, 2005
Welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News.
In This Issue
- News and Announcements
- New Articles and Lessons
- Email of the Week
- Forum News
- Sunday Songwriter’s Group
- Reviews
- Thoughts and Feedback
News And Announcements
Greetings!
Welcome to Guitar Noise News!
For those of you who’ve been writing about the 2005 slate of Guitar Noise Seminars, the good news is that we now have a schedule for the first part of the year!
APRIL 16 – LITTLE TOUCHES SEMINAR
On of the easiest ways to improve your guitar playing is to add some little touches to your strumming or picking. This can be anything from a simple hammer-on to adding an appropriate bass line or flourish of notes when changing between chords. We’ll examine and practice a good many of these and also use familiar songs as demonstrations.
MAY 14 – EASY SONGS SEMINAR
As you know from reading my columns and lessons here at Guitar Noise, I’m a big proponent of learning guitar by playing songs. In this seminar we’ll take a dozen or so songs and learn what we can from them. Some of the songs will be ones from our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, but most of them will be old favorites that we’ve not covered from songwriters such as the Beatles, Neil Young, Paul Simon and Van Morrison. There will be both fingerstyle and straight strumming songs. Bring a capo!
JUNE 11 – “MAKE YOUR OWN” SEMINAR
Here’s your chance to learn an arrangement for a song that you’ve always wanted to do. We will ask each participant to select one or two songs and then, as a group, we will learn them. Owing to the nature of this seminar, enrollment will have to be limited from six to eight participants. A list of the songs to be covered will be made as soon as humanly possible.
All Guitar Noise Seminars will be held at my home just outside of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It’s a big tourist area and there’s plenty to do if you want to bring your family and make a weekend out of it. Each seminar is $100 for the day’s lessons and materials and also includes food and (non-alcoholic) drinks. And you can always stay afterwards and jam the evening away!
If you’re interested or have any questions at all, please either IM me via the forum or email me and include “Seminar” in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you.
One of the cool things about the Guitar Noise Seminars is that is often the first chance that many people get to experience playing in a group setting. We are doing our best to encourage guitarists (and all musicians!) to make a concerted effort to get out and play with others this year. We are posting stories and thoughts of our readers concerning this vital topic. If you’d like to share yours, please do! Just drop me a line at my email – [email protected] – and I’ll be happy to make certain that you’re included in one of our upcoming pieces. Any thoughts are welcome because, just like in playing with others, no contribution is too small. And my thanks go out to those who have already contributed to this project of ours.
And now let’s take a look at what’s new this week at Guitar Noise:
New Articles And Lessons
Altered States
by Tom Serb
Tom has a gift of being able to explain complicated material in a very uncomplicated manner. After guiding us through the maze of extended chords in his last article, he returns to explain “altered chords” and does so in such a simple way that I wish I’d had him explain it to me many, many years ago!
Email Of The Week
I can’t speak for the other writers and contributors here at Guitar Noise, but I can say with certainty that I make a lot of mistakes! Fortunately, our readership seems to have people with all sorts of knowledge. So this week’s email serves to both correct an error of mine and to bring some more knowledge to all of you:
Was browsing around Guitar Noise for some lessons for my beginner friends. It’s a fantastic site, thank you!
Came across your “tuning by harmonics” lesson, and there’s a minor inaccuracy in it which I thought you’d like to know about. It’s to do with the equal tempered scale and the harmonics not matching exactly. Here’s a detailed explanation.
Cheers!
And my thanks for the information! As I mentioned, I will be the first to claim I’m not much of a scientist (rocket or otherwise!) and I do appreciate being able to find out more about this subject.
Forum News
In a fairly most recent outbreak of serendipity, one of our Forum members started a thread titled, “Playing With Other People,” where quite a few folks are chiming in with some wonderful thoughts and ideas. If you’d like to follow along or even add to it, please feel free to join in the discussion here.
As always, I look forward to seeing you on the boards!
Sunday Songwriters Group
Year Three, Week 17
Two’s Company – This week we’re going to write about a couple. I’ll let you pick any couple, any age, but I want you to write about the way they are together so it should make a good study of people you know. You can write in either the third person, as one looking on as an observer, or in the first person, telling the story of the song as one member of the couple.
Good Writing
Bob
Reviews
Windminister – Bootsmann
CD Review by Graham Merry
Intricate, enjoyable music by the German duo is made up of Olaf Wegener and Eberhard Klunker, two friends who teamed up to produce the music that they enjoy playing, rather than follow a path trodden by many others. Two acoustic guitars, no overdubbing and no editing – did this brave step work?
Tomas Bodin – Sonic Boulevard
CD Review by A-J Charron
A new solo effort from the Flower Kings’ keyboardist is always something to look forward to! Is it as good as Pinup Guru? A-J definitely thinks so, even though Sonic Boulevard shows us a side of Bodin that we’ve not seen before.
Thoughts & Feedback
I’m thinking of renaming this section, “Thoughts and Feedback Inspired By Emails” since I’ve been devoting a lot of time lately to replying to various questions here. But maybe that’s the point. The following email reached me last weekend, but it’s one that pops up over and over again and, even though we’ve discussed this in the past, it certainly is worth delving into from time to time. I’ll even forgive the writer for not calling me “David!”
Mr. Hodge,
Thank you for the efforts that you have made to teach players and would-be players via the Guitar Noise web site. I have only recently discovered it and am extremely pleased. In my humble opinion it is about the best teaching site on the web. After fumbling with learning about playing the few visits and articles of yours that I have read have really helped me to become more focused on learning and given me a new level of motivation that was lacking. Once again thank you for your work.
My question is regarding the order of study for your, and other’s, various articles. Is there some page on the site that gives a basic order of articles to read and songs to start playing? If not would you please give me some direction regarding this. I am not an absolute beginner, but at the same time I am far from an intermediate player. My interest is greater than just learning fingering, it includes theory, composition, practice guidelines, song writing, and technique.
Thank you so very much for your time.
And you’re very welcome!
This story is old news to some of you, but when I first started writing for Guitar Noise, back in November of 1999, having a lesson plan or method was the farthest thing from my mind. I simply wrote about things I thought were important or interesting (luckily for me, all the interesting things are important and all the important things are interesting!) and I did my best to cross-reference things as best as possible.
The trouble now is that Guitar Noise, in many ways, is a victim of its success. Even as little as four years ago, I considered myself lucky if one of my articles received a hundred hits a month. Nowadays our site sees between fifteen and twenty million hits a month, and that represents about a million or so readers.
And each one of these million readers is here for his or her personal reasons. Some never venture farther than the Forum pages. Some are here to devour the articles and lessons. And there are a lot of those here on the site. On a good day, I’m not even certain that Paul, Nick or myself could tell you half of the material that is online here for folks to read. Most readers, in fact, probably don’t even know this newsletter exists!
And each reader comes to Guitar Noise with different levels and a different agenda. What I would like to try to do, albeit it on a limited basis, is to try to offer what tips I can to help. In all fairness to others, I tried to do something of this nature last year and made a total botch of it. But I think that I can do better.
And I don’t think that I have to do it alone. What I’d like to propose to the Guitar Noise community is that we get Nick to set up a Forum Page dedicated to “Courses of Study,” a place where you could introduce yourself and tell a little bit about where you’re at and where you’d like to be next. Then I, along with other readers of the site, could offer you our tips and suggestions as to how you may best use the wealth of material here at Guitar Noise to improve.
Is this a foolproof plan? Hardly, if for no other reason than I came up with it! But I think it’s worth discussing.
In the meantime, please feel free to write me directly and, together, we should be able to get you started in navigating our site in the best way for you to learn more and to improve as a guitarist and musician.
I look forward to hearing from you.
I hope you all have a grand week. Stay safe.
And, as always,
Peace
David