Newsletter Vol. 3 # 59 – January 15, 2008

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #59 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

  • News and Announcements
  • New Articles and Lessons
  • Guitar Noise Staff Picks
  • Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
  • Emails? We Get Emails!
  • Forum Findings
  • Reviews
  • Random Thoughts

News And Announcements

So, who’s still writing “2007” on their checks? Or am I the only one in the world who still uses checks?

Welcome to our second issue of Guitar Noise News for this New Year, 2008 and please accept my best wishes to all of you for a wonderful and musical upcoming twelve months.

I’m not certain what might be going on as to making “news,” but there are all sorts of little things going on throughout the worldwide Guitar Noise community. It only takes a quick glance at the Forum pages to see that many folks received gifts of a musical nature over the past holiday season, even if some of the gifts were bought for oneself! Hopefully everyone is having fun playing with his or her new toys…

As for myself, I’ve been spending a lot more time than I thought possible wrangling together a CD of live performances of shows I played this past year at the Monterey General Store. If all goes according to plan, you can order yourself a copy of “Songs & Sandwiches – David Hodge and Friends Live at the Monterey General Store” from my website (www.davidhodge.com) by the end of the week. As mentioned, the CD features ten original songs taken from three performances at the Monterey General Store in 2007. In addition to myself and Karen Berger on piano, you’ll also hear SSG stalwart Kathy Reichert performing two songs (one written by GN Forum member John “the Celt” Roche) and Greg (“gnease”) Nease contributing very tasteful guitar on three tracks. For a breakdown of the tracks on the CD, visit my site and you can also listen to unmastered copies of three of the songs (“Man in Black Blues,” “”Margaret Has a Lover” and “Saturn’s Moons”) at my Soundclick page. Cost is $15 US and shipping is free to anywhere in the world.

And back here at the Guitar Noise, let’s take a gander at what’s new and check out the lessons that have been put up online since New Year’s Day…

New Articles And Lessons

Guitar Injury: Cause, Prevention, Treatment
By Ysrafel

Guitar Noise welcomes first-time contributor, Ysrafel, who brings us an article about the various aches and pains you might suffer as a guitarist, their possible causes and things you can do to relieve the pain as well as prevention tips.

The Pattern Trap
By David Hodge

We’ll be spending a lot of 2008 looking at song arrangements, so it’s best to start off with a discussion on strumming patterns and the trap that you can get into by letting a strumming (or picking) pattern be your major concern.

Guitar Noise Staff Picks

Music is, well, music. But learning about it involves listening and, as any of you who go through the lessons here at Guitar Noise can certainly attest to, occasionally reading. Books of all sorts should be a part of your musical education, not to mention part of your enjoyment of music.

Continuum International Publishing Group has put out a wonderful series of small books, each one dedicated to a single record album. The series is, appropriately enough, called 33 1/3. And, like most albums, it is wildly across the spectrum – you can’t expect one book to be at all like another. Some books intricately examine the album in question, the writing, production, recording, critical response. Some are philosophical looks at the culture at the time. Some examine the life and times of the culture during the time when the album came out.

Two books from this series found their way into my stocking last month – “Pet Sounds” by Jim Fusilli and “The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society” by Andy Miller and I’ve been having a blast reading them, then getting out the CD and playing it and re-reading them. Each is a little over a hundred pages, so it’s a nice way to spend a quiet afternoon. The Kinks’ book is especially worthwhile – a look at one of the great songwriters of any age at what was perhaps the turning point of his career.

Whether you’re into Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, Prince, ABBA, Neil Young, Nirvana or Dusty Springfield, there’s bound to be a book you might be interested in.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Tip: One Finger Chord Primer (cont’d)

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. We’re going to look at some serious playing around this time out. And we’re going to focus on learning this lesson mostly through sound, through listening. When it comes to learning music, aural explanations are often more effective than textual ones.

The sound file works through several ideas for getting creative and improvising a bit, on just three chords. All those chords are formed on our foundational one-finger shape. Here are the ideas we’ll work through:

  • Instead of playing the chords in a certain order each time, change the order. For example, start out with the one-finger shape on frets 2, 7 and 9. Maybe pluck each of those chords twice. Once you can play that smoothly, change the order: play frets 9, 7 and 2. etc.
  • The next idea is lots of fun, and starts to get us into some melodic stuff. Play on frets 2, 7 and 9 as before, but focus your attention on your right hand and ask “what could I be playing besides plucking all three strings at once?” Listen to the sound file for examples of playing around here.
  • Next idea: approach chords. That’s a single term, like “ApproachChords.” And the underlying idea is, if you know your ultimate target is playing the one-finger chord on fret 7, try playing on fret 5 or 6 first, and then sliding into fret 7.
  • Next, we change the tempo, a very natural thing to do. You just slow down or speed up based on your preference and feeling.
  • Change from a dance-like rhythm or an “Oom-pah-pah,” vibe to a “one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four” thing. And this opens up a big area to play around in, because you can get into all kinds of cool rhythms. One approach to discovering interesting rhythms is realizing that you’re already using them all the time in speech. Listen to the rhythm of in interesting sentence and convert it to “One, ta, two, ta,” etc. or some other syllable that works for you. Then, pick up your guitar and “speak” those rhythmic syllables onto it.

The overriding idea that includes these other ideas is “Be creative. Have fun. Avoid monotony and keep that guitar in your hands.”

Here’s the sound file for this lesson.

If this link doesn’t work for you, I apologize. The company that hosts MaximumMusician.com has Mp3 “issues.” but you can still download the file. Go to this address and RIGHT-click on the sound file link. Do not left-click. Again, I apologize for the hassle.

Send your comments to [email protected]. Remove the no spam bit.

Thanks for reading.

Darrin Koltow

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

Emails? We Get Emails!

Boy, do we ever! No lie, this one came less than an hour ago, while I’ve been piecing together this issue of Guitar Noise News:

Subject: Thanks

Message:

Hey, thanks for this site. I have gotten more enjoyment out of my guitar after fifteen minutes on this site than all the tab and lesson sites I have visited combined!

GREAT JOB!!

Thank you for writing and thank you as well for your kind words concerning Guitar Noise. All credit for this website should go to Paul Hackett, who created it and still owns and runs things.

We’re glad that you’ve found Guitar Noise and we hope that our website continues to be a source of both inspiration and education to you as you learn about the guitar.

Peace

Forum Findings

It should come as no surprise to anyone that guitar teachers are part of the Guitar Noise community. After all, guitar teachers are guitarists and, just like you, started out as beginners and worked their way into teaching.

In order to create a bit of a Guitar Noise database, we’ve started a thread on the Beginners’ Q & A page of the Guitar Noise Forums where teachers can write a little bit about themselves and their teaching. You can find it here.

So if you are looking for a teacher, perhaps one of us is in your neighborhood! Or if you have questions about teaching, you can always drop a PM to any of the Guitar Noise teacher folks.

Coming Attractions

From Junky To Funky
By Mitch (“slejhammer”) Schlesinger

Mitch has most graciously taken the time to give us a fairly detailed account of one of his latest DIY projects – a Johnson manufactured bass guitar! Follow as he transforms this $80 eBay bass into an instrument worthy of gigging.

Cinnamon Girl
A Guitar Noise “Songs for Intermediates” Lesson
By David Hodge

It’s been ages it seems since we’ve had an intermediate song lesson. It also seems like it’s been ages since we’ve done something with an alternate tuning. And when was the last time we did a Neil Young song? And don’t let the “intermediate” label put you off – even beginners (with some practice, of course!) can make this song sound sweet…

And Don’t Forget

Guitar Noise is a community and it’s our sense of community that sets this website apart from other guitar sites on the Internet. People from all over the world, people who speak and read all sorts of languages and listen to all sorts of music, come here to help each other create music in their lives and to share that music with the rest of the world.

And I’m always amazed at how many people are willing to offer ideas, to share their musical knowledge and expertise. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t take part as well. If you’ve some thought about sharing what you can with your family of Guitar Noise readers, take a look at our submissions guide.

You don’t have to have a huge article. Don’t forget that we also now have the Guitar Noise blog, which nicely accommodates small pieces. So, why not make a New Year’s Resolution to become a bigger part of the Guitar Noise community? Feel free to send along an email to me.

And try to put “proposal” in the subject line. I’ll be more than happy to chat with you about your ideas and to see whether we can bring them out to the rest of the Guitar Noise community.

Random Thoughts

I’m beginning to wonder about the weather. It seems that every time I sit down to finish off another newsletter, the weather forecast suddenly predicts snow. Maybe the local ski areas will pay me to do nothing but sit and work on the newsletter…

But for now, I think, it’s time to get some sleep so I’ll be ready to shovel us out in the morning!

Until our next newsletter, play well. Play often. Stay safe.

And, as always,

Peace