Newsletter Vol. 3 # 64 – April 01, 2008

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #64 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

  • News and Announcements
  • New Articles and Lessons
  • Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
  • Podcast Postings
  • Random Thoughts

News And Announcements

Hello and welcome to the April 1, 2008 edition of Guitar Noise News!

And we’ve got a lot to chat about today! First off, we’re absolutely thrilled to tell you about our Guitar Noise venture into the world of guitar manufacturing! Yes! Guitar Noise, in a joint venture with Strawgoh, one of England finest schools of luthery, headed by master guitar maker Frederick Weasley, is currently working on the first of what we’re hoping will be a line of incredibly fine guitars. The kind of guitar that people say “plays itself.”

And that’s not hyperbolae. At the risk of sounding loony, these guitars are magic! It’s like you can just say the name of the song that you want to play and the guitar does all the work for you. You’ll never have to practice again. You don’t even have to pick it up – it’ll play right there in the guitar stand. Even if you’ve never touched a guitar in your life, you can walk into any open mike, sit down, name your song and the guitar will do everything else for you, except sing. You’ll be amazing!

Just think – no more having to remember chords, no more waiting for whole days to remember a three chord progression, no more wasting of weeks to get down a strumming pattern. Think of all the things you’ll be able to do with your life without having to practice! You can spend more time on the computer!

As you can imagine, these guitars are going to be in huge demand. But Paul and I are determined to not let them get into the marketplace without personally inspecting each and every one. And that can take time.

More importantly, we truly want to make them affordable to everyone. Currently, we’d have to sell them for about $3,268,476,385.97 apiece, and that just won’t do. But we know we’re a few steps away from being able to get them into the hands of just about anyone who wants to play guitar without spending all that time learning.

As always, we’ll keep you posted on further developments. Watch here at Guitar Noise News for more details. Even though it’s probably a year away at this point, look for the big announcement on April 1, 2009!

New Articles And Lessons

“ii V I” Madness
by Nick Kellie

Please welcome Nick Kellie to the pages of Guitar Noise as he presents a tutorial on improvising over the “ii V I” chord progression. Jazz players may immediately recognize this type of progression, but it occurs in all kinds of music. Getting to recognize it so that you can be ready to solo is just the starting point.

Brain Damage
Easy Songs for Beginners #34
by David Hodge

This is another “Easy Songs” lesson that is geared to the “close to absolute” beginner. We’ll take basic chords that we already can play, add a very simple strumming / picking pattern and before you can say “lunatic” you’ll be playing a very cool song.

Walk Of Life
Songs for Intermediates #22
by David Hodge

This is more of a mini-lesson, taking a song you know with fairly easy chords and coming up with an arrangement that will work for the single guitar. And with a simple strumming pattern and the strategic use of a capo, even beginners can have some fun with it.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

One Finger Guitar Chord (continued…)

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. In this lesson we have a play-along to go with the two-finger chord shape we recently learned.

Here’s the two-finger shape.

Play this on strings 1 to 3, on any fret. In fact, you can use most of the shapes in the One Finger series on any starting fret.

Form the new shape by first making the one-finger foundation shape on strings 1-4 then bringing in finger two directly onto string 3, one fret up from the first finger. Don’t let finger two touch any strings besides three.

Watch the playalong carefully, because the shape just described is used for two different chords. One is played on strings 1 to 3, and the other, strings 2 to 4. The same left-hand shape applies to both chords; you’re only changing the strings your right hand plucks.

Here’s an important note about the following play-along clip, which also pertains to other media files in the One Finger lessons: download them with a right-click, followed by “Save As,” and not a left-click. The following file is “zipped” and must be unzipped before you can access it. If you’re a Windows user, you can unzip with reliable, free programs like Izarc or FreeZip. Windows Vista users can use Windows Explorer to unzip. Mac users can use Zipeg, another free program. I apologize for the inconvenience, which is caused by technical constraints.

After unzipping, play the file with the free and reliable media player VideoLan Media Player, available at VideoLan.org.

And here’s the play-along video.

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

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow

Email Of The Moment

Hi David

I hate to admit it, but I have wasted many, many, many, many, many, a great many, many, many years of my guitar life on a stupid quest for tone. I was absolutely convinced that if I could get my guitar to sound just like my guitar idol, in terms of tone that is, then I’d be able to play just like him, too.

To this end I probably purchased who knows how many thousands of dollars of guitars, strings, picks, amplifiers, effects boxes, even cables and straps (do you know that authentic Fender guitar straps don’t change a guitar’s tone one bit?), all in an effort to get the tone I desired. I also purchased sound analyzing equipment, just to make certain that my guitar playing produced the same exact wave forms as my heroes.

But, and I’m sure you’re probably already way ahead of me by this point, it was all pretty much a waste of time. Fortunately, my thirty-third guitar teacher was able to set me straight about this. We were talking about tone (yet again) during a recent lesson and she asked me if I knew that “tone” is an anagram (I hope I spelled that right) of “note.” Then she explained to me what an anagram was and I was astounded. The first thing I did when I got home was to write out the word “TONE” in big capital letters on a sheet of paper. Then I cut out the letters and, after seven tries, rearranged them to form the word “NOTE.” She was absolutely right and I felt both like a fool and also like a whole new world just opened up for me.

So now I am no longer in search of the perfect tone. I am trying to find the one perfect note, which, I am absolutely certain, will give me the perfect tone.

You wouldn’t happen to know which note it is, would you?

By the way, I think Guitar Noise is the coolest website in the universe!

Thanking you in advance…

Thanks for writing and thank you as well for your kind words about Guitar Noise.

As it happens, I do know which note you’re looking for. It’s Eb. Specifically, the Eb found on the sixth fret of the A string.

But:

  1. It has to be played on an original 1950 Fender Esquire, and it has to be one of the first fifty-two ever made. The 2005 reissues won’t work.
  2. It has to be played on a Dean Markley Blue Steel, gauge 36, purchased on a Tuesday afternoon.
  3. Pickup has to be in the neck position.
  4. The A string has to be tuned to 438 Hz while all the other strings (except for the B) are tuned normally at 440Hz. The B string has to be tuned to Bb, and at 442 Hz.
  5. The guitar has to be played through a Yamaha G50-112 50 Watt, 1×12″ solid state Guitar amp, volume set precisely at eight and everything else, except for reverb, set to one. Reverb must be set exactly 5/8 of the way between five and six.
  6. Finally, guitar has to be played with a Dunlop USA Nylon, .60mm pick, a Monster Cable S-100 ¼” Straight cable and a Fender strap (yellow and brown).

I hope this helps. Congratulations on getting yourself straight and good luck with your search.

Podcast Postings

Our fifth GN Podcast hit the Internet airwaves on Monday, March 24 and in it we continue to make our playing more interesting by adding walking bass lines into our chord progression strumming. First, we work on a generic exercise to get ourselves geared to the task of adding a bass line. This involves altering our basic “bass / strum” pattern very simply. From there we use a progression of G to Am to C and back to G and work up to a specific strumming pattern that you can find the notation and tablature for right on Guitar Noise Blog.

And, as I’ve mentioned before, our first series of Guitar Noise Podcasts will cover strumming – moving step by step from the very basics to alternate bass picking, to adding hammer-ons and pull-offs to spice up simple patterns to crosspicking and partial chord playing to incorporating other playing techniques, such as palm muting and choking, to bring even more excitement to our strumming. Plus we’ll look at how to listen to patterns so that you can readily replicate complicated patterns you hear on recordings. And I’ll try to do my best to walk you through things step by step, just as we do in the many song lessons at Guitar Noise. Paul and I are hoping, schedule-wise, to post a new Guitar Noise Podcast every other Monday, so look for the next one on Monday, April 7, 2008.

And, as always, feel free to give us your feedback. You can post your thoughts here, at the Blog, or even PM or write me directly at [email protected].

Random Thoughts

I spent the very end of March, when I probably should have been finishing up this newsletter, jamming with five guys from London (England) who just showed up on my doorstep. Actually, they didn’t “just show up.” One of them, Nick (who goes by “Clazon” on the Guitar Noise Forums) had posted a while back that he and his friends were hoping to take a trip through the United States at some point in the spring. I PMed him and told him to come by if their trip took them to this part of the country and he managed to find the place without any hassle.

So we all talked a while and went out to eat and then played for some time. He and his friends have been making music for a while now. I mean in life, not just here at my home. You can find their latest effort here.

And this past month must have been an informal, unannounced “music exchange program,” because Dan and Laura Lasley, managed to meet up with Guitar Noise Forum stalwart Vic Lewis, as well as Sara (“Scrybe’) while visiting England a week or so back. You can read about that in this Forum thread.

To me, this is what Guitar Noise is supposed to be about. Making music and sharing music with people. Sometimes it’s done via the computer and the Internet, as in the many music collaborations on the “Online Gigs and Jams” forum pages. Sometimes it’s a writing collaboration, as we’ve done on numerous occasions with the Sunday Songwriters Group.

But sometimes it’s in person. And I can’t even begin to describe how incredibly cool that is. I feel lucky that I’ve gotten to meet so many of the Guitar Noise community in person. To see their faces while they make music. To hear their voices as they talk of things they hold important.

I know that many of our England members are trying to get a get-together going for sometime this coming August. And I wish them the best at doing so.

And I also encourage as many of you as possible to get out and meet and play with others. Guitar Noise members or not. I know I say this a lot, but you should spend more time playing than you do sitting at your computer.

As the late Albus Dumbledore once said, “Ah, music! A magic beyond all we do here!”

I hope you enjoyed this April 1 edition of Guitar Noise and that you have managed to figure out that some of the items written were, in fact, April Fools’ jokes. I also hope I don’t have to tell you which ones!

I’ll be in Italy when the April 15 newsletter comes out. But don’t worry. Charlie, my cat, has agreed to write the next newsletter in my place.

And until that next newsletter, play well. Play often. Stay safe.

And, as always,

Peace