Newsletter Vol. 3 # 51 – September 15, 2007

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #51 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

News and Announcements
New Articles and Lessons
Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
Event Horizon
Random Thoughts

News And Announcements

In case you didn’t get the news last time out, Guitar Noise now has a Blog! Paul has put together a terrific little page where we’ll be posting all sorts of things from contests to mini-lessons to tips on practicing to thoughts about playing and music in general. Guitar Noise contributors such as Darrin Koltow will be visiting the Blog and you should make the trip yourself!

Currently you’ll find two giveaway contests as well as some valuable tips on general theory and practicing at the Guitar Noise Blog. So come on by and say hello.

Remember that the Guitar Noise Blog is meant to be a fun place as well as an additional source of information concerning this terrific website we call home.

In addition to that news, there’s quite a bit of “almost but not quite ready to be announced” news and little highlights that will be spotlighted here in the next two months. Be ready for a bit of excitement!

And in the meantime, let’s see what’s new at Guitar Noise since the beginning of the month…

New Articles And Lessons

Going Back To Our Roots
by Josh Urban

Way, way, way back when, mankind had only two instruments. And by examining how these two are still used today, we can improve our timing, phrasing and many other aspects of our guitar playing. Josh Urban takes us on this interesting tour from early to electric man.

How To Avoid Musical Burn Out
by Tom Hess

Sometimes it happens – you just don’t feel like picking up the guitar. Usually it’s a temporary thing, but there are times when it turns into more, into burn out. Tom Hess explores the reasons behind these feelings and offers advice on how to beat it.

Connecting The Dots (Part 1)
A (very basic) Primer for Walking Bass Lines
By David Hodge

Walking bass lines are an easy way to spice up your playing and also learn a little about music in the process. In this lesson we’ll look at a very basic walking bass line, how to put it together and how to recognize when we can use it in other songs. Plus, to illustrate the point of the lesson, we get a teeny little bit of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb thrown in.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

We’re continuing our lesson series Playing Guitar by Ear. We started looking at near-rules that help you massively in learning to play guitar by ear, in the last installment. This time, more near-rules.

Almost rule number next: sing. After you listen, and believe you have the melody in your head, sing. You don’t need any instructions to do this: you’ve probably been singing all your life. But what you may not realize is that singing reinforces the music in your head. If all you did was listen, the first time you tried to sing your notes would not match the notes you heard. In other words, your intonation would probably be poor compared to the more precise notes you get when you sing more frequently.

When you’re learning a tune by ear, sing the melody again and again. Isolate parts of the melody you’re not sure of, and repeat those several times. It may also help if you close your eyes when you sing, so whatever your eyes are seeing doesn’t distract your mind from the sounds you’re creating.

Think of how babies learn to speak: they babble to themselves, besides doing other things. That babbling helps them reinforce the sounds they heard mommy and daddy teaching them. If the baby never babbled, and instead tried to learn the language just by thinking about speaking, he wouldn’t get very far.

So, whether you feel certain that you know a melody or not, sing it.

A major scale pattern

Another skill you’ll want to have and almost ought to have: playing at least one major scale pattern.

You don’t absolutely need to know a major scale pattern to play by ear, but it’s a big help. Learning (at least one) major scale pattern is kind of like the employees at a food store organizing the food: you know, you can find the canned peaches together with the canned pineapple chunks in one aisle, and the eggs are in a separate aisle with the cheese.

If the employees at the food store suddenly stopped organizing the food this way, and started putting one carton of eggs with the pasta and another carton of eggs at the other end of the store, you, the food buyer, would have a tough time buying your food. You could find all the food you need, but it would take much longer and you’d get pretty impatient and upset also.

That’s why we have major scale patterns for music: to keep our fingers from having to “think” every time our inner ears told them to play a note. When you organize the major scale into a pattern on the fretboard, your fingers can automatically go to the right note.

We continue learning to play guitar by ear next time. Thanks for reading.

Event Horizon

I’ll be backing up local singer / songwriter / producer Todd Mack at the Monterey General Store tonight at 7:00. It’s located right in the middle of “downtown” Monterey, Massachusetts and it’s a terrific place to come hear music up close and personal.

I enjoy playing there so much they’ve given me my own gig there next Saturday, September 22. Again, the music runs from 7 until 9.

Random Thoughts

As you may have gathered from the “Event Horizon” page, or if you’ve visited the “Gigs and Performance” page at my website (www.davidhodge.com), it looks like I’ll be living at the Monterey General Store for the upcoming months. In addition to playing my own gig and providing backup for Todd Mack, I’ll also be part of the backup band for longtime SSG contributor Kathy Reichert who’ll be in from Chicago on October 13 and for Mr. Mojo himself, Nick Torres, who comes to town November 10.

It seems very weird to me, because at the beginning of the year I was talking with some friends about life and living where I do and I happened to mention that the only thing I wished was different was to be performing a little more often than I did. Maybe I should have wished for a pot of gold instead!

Performing can be a two-edged sword, though. While it may seem glamorous, there’s a lot of work and planning that (usually) goes into it and the time spent preparing can truly eat into just about any plans or schedule you may have gone through the pains of putting together.

Right now, even as I’m looking at how crowded the schedule is, I’m pleased that things are going pretty much at a reasonable pace. These past two weeks I’ve managed to contribute an article, write two more (one will go online next week), edit several and almost put the finishing touched on the music examples for one more. Plus I managed to critique almost every SSG contribution for the last two assignments. And the housework and yardwork hasn’t suffered too much!

We’ve got some very interesting ideas in play right now for the Guitar Noise site and I’m hoping that you’ll find some very cool things gracing our pages in the very near future.

Until our next newsletter, play well. Play often. And stay safe.

And, as always,

Peace