Newsletter Vol. 3 # 80 – December 16, 2008
Greetings,
Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #80 of Guitar Noise News!
In This Issue:
- Greetings, News and Announcements
- New Lessons and Articles
- Coming Attractions
- Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
- Podcast Postings
- Email? We Get Emails!
- Random Thoughts
Greetings, News and Announcements
Hello!
And welcome to the last 2008 issue of Guitar Noise News, the free twice-a-month newsletter of the Guitar Noise website. I know I so often say, “Where does the time go?” while writing these newsletters, but really, where does the time go?
Let me take this moment to thank all of you for making this past year so wonderful and also to pass along my best wishes to you, your families and friends for a safe and joyous holiday season and a Happy New Year.
New Lessons and Articles
Il est né (He Is Born)
By Doug Sparling
Guitar Noise continues its 2008 series of holiday song arrangements with the welcome return of Doug Sparling, who’s written a beautiful DADGAD arrangement of this traditional French Christmas Carol.
Angels We Have Heard on High
by David Hodge
Here’s another traditional French carol, arranged so we can review some of the lessons we’ve recently had on both bass lines and Travis style finger picking.
Targeting in on a Mode
Turning Scales into Solos – Part 6
by David Hodge
Knowing a single major scale opens the world of modal soloing to you, if you know how to read the signs. We’ll take a look at how to recognize when to use the Dorian scale, and also take a moment or two to compare and contrast it with the minor pentatonic scale.
Coming Attractions:
We’re constantly working on new lessons here at Guitar Noise. Sometimes we even get them up when we think we will! Here are some you’ll get to read (and listen to) very, very soon:
How To Make The Right Contacts In The Record Industry
by Tom Hess
You often hear that success in the music business is not about what you know as much as it is about who you know. So how does one go about getting to know the “whos?” How do we make contact and who are the right people to make contact with? Tom Hess gives some very valuable tips in this article.
Frame by Frame – Writing a Film Score
by Ian Hand
Guitar Noise would like to introduce you to another student of Tom Hess, Ian Hand of Bristol, UK, who tells us of his experiences in putting together his first film score.
Getting Past “Up and Down”
Part 2 – Trickier Timings
by David Hodge
In the second installment of this series on strumming, we’ll look at rhythms that are slightly more complicated and involved than simple quarter notes, eighth notes and sixteenth notes. In addition to dotted notes and triplets, we’ll also take a look as “swing rhythms.”
PLUS: Even more holiday song arrangements, including a new chord melody arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” in Drop D tuning and, keep your fingers crossed, new lessons in both the Easy Songs for Beginners and Songs for Intermediates pages!
Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
Tip for December 15
This tip concerns a Bb 7 arpeggio without the Bb. I wanted to show you an alternative to the standard 4-note arpeggio with the root, which can get kind of boring to play and listen to after a while. What you get when you take away the root of a dom 7 chord is a diminished chord — or arpeggio in this case.
You can play this with just fingers 2 and 3. The following notes are all eighth notes.
|---------------------10-10--13-13-|-10-10--------------------------| |-----------------6-9--------------|-------9-6----------------------| |-------------7-7------------------|------------7-7-----------------| |---------3-6----------------------|----------------6-3-------------| |-----5-5--------------------------|--------------------5-5---------| |-1-4------------------------------|-------------------------4-1----|
This isn’t the end of the exercise. Practice this above tab and in the next letter we’ll build on the exercise by subtracting from it.
Thanks for reading.
Copyright 2008 Darrin Koltow
Podcast Postings
Man, when things go wrong…
Suffice it to say that I totally screwed up the recording of Podcast #22, so much so that I ended up starting it over again from scratch twice! So, and feel free to wish on a star with me, said Guitar Noise Podcast is going up online today. Guitar Noise Podcast #22 continues our study of the traditional Irish folksong, “The Star of the County Down.” This time out we’ll get through the rest of the verse and start to address the chorus. Plus, a long overdue look at the importance of “playing loosely.”
Emails? We Get Emails
Hi David,
I was reading your articles on Guitar Noise, the Scales within Scales, and found them very informative. I have a question on the Beatles song, Across the Universe. In the lyrics there is the following:
Em7 Gm Possessing and caressing me.The song appears to be in the key of D. Judging by your articles, the Gm would appear to be a “borg chord.” Can you explain how this chord is being used/derived?
I have seen sheet music for the song and the key signature, 2 sharps(D), doesn’t change in the notation, so this is why I am a bit confused.
Thanks
Hi and thanks for writing!
And thank you as well for being patient about getting a reply. Things have been more hectic than I’d planned since Thanksgiving weekend and I’m still very far behind when it comes to catching up with all my emails.
The use of Gm in the key of D is a lot more common than you might think, but let’s backtrack slightly for a moment. First off, while it would appear that Gm should be what I jokingly called a “Borg chord” in one of my old guitar columns, it’s actually simpler and slightly more complicated than that.
If you get the chance, read the Guitar Noise Guitar Column titled, You Say You Want a Resolution, which you can find here.
One of the topics covered in this column is the idea of cadences, which are short chord progressions that create resolution. In the section on “plagal cadences,” which are IV-I chord progressions, you’ll note the following passage:
Another use of the plagal cadence (which is not as prevalent these days as it used to be) is the transition from IV (minor) to I. In the key of A major, this would be a cadence from Dm to A. I think the reason I find this particular cadence enchanting is that, much like V7 to I, it takes advantage of two half step resolutions.
In the key of D, Gm is the minor IV chord and, if my memory serves me correctly, the chord following the Gm in Across the Universe is D. Therefore, you’ve got a minor plagal cadence going. Yes, you are going outside of the key of D for a moment, but it’s a brief one and doesn’t truly herald a change of key or temporary modulation.
Another interesting thing, just as an aside, is that John Lennon was very fond of the minor IV to I resolution. You’ll find them popping up a lot in his music.
Hope this helps.
Peace
Random Thoughts
Ages ago, or so it seems now, my friend Laura wanted to talk with me about Christmas. Not so much about the holiday itself, but about the giving of presents. Specifically, about the two of us giving each other presents.
She had this idea. Since neither of us really wanted or needed anything, wouldn’t it be great if instead of buying a gift, we gave a donation to a charity in each other’s name? I readily agreed and we’ve continued doing so for more than ten years now.
Not only that, but I’ve also made the same arrangements with quite a few friends and family members. This isn’t to say I don’t like giving (or getting!) gifts. Quite the contrary! My feeling has always been that if I see something that I either think or know that one of my friends or family might appreciate or need, I just get it. Why wait for a holiday or birthday?
Call me silly or idealistic or whatever you’d like. But how many years does we have to hear “Why can’t people treat each other every day like they treat each other at holidays?” before it dawns on us that we can? I mean, what’s stopping us? Really?
I cannot tell you how many people tell me how great it must be to “live my dream.” And I’m sure I’ve written before about this. Truth be told, I’m not living a dream – I’m simply living my life, just as each of us has his or her life to live. It’s a matter of getting up each day and showing up and picking up in the footprints I left there yesterday. That’s all it is.
Last time out, I told you the story of my first employer and how she helped me realize that the word “work” didn’t have to carry ominous connotations. Work could be enjoyable and could be a welcome part of life.
Call me slow on the uptake, but it took almost twenty-five more years of my life to figure out that the same outlook she gave me about work could also be applied to life.
Most people spend most of their lives not being involved in life. We don’t like our jobs, meaning that if you’re like most folk in the “civilized” world, a forty-hour work week is one-third of a Monday through Friday stretch. We sleep a quarter to a third of our live away during this time as well and then fill the remainder of the time with what we can.
Perhaps it’s our nature. We want our lives to have meaning. We want to be creative, to contribute, and to know that we make a difference somehow. Or we simply want to be “ourselves,” whoever that idealized version of our imagination happens to be.
But we also fool ourselves, because when we say we want to be “a part of life,” we often mean that we want to be “apart” from it. It’s easy to want things, say like people to treat each other well, with respect and common courtesy each day, because we mean we want other people to do it. We don’t include ourselves in the solutions. And we may have dreams, but we call them dreams and, in doing so, separate our dreams from reality.
Somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and forty, I discovered something very important – there was absolutely no reason for me to be unhappy. This simple realization led straight to another, the reason that I had been unhappy up to that point was always about me. It had nothing to do with life except for the fact that I thought that life was all about me.
Strange as this may sound, I got this from practicing guitar. To get better, you have to be ready and willing to do the little things over and over to distraction. Work on the hammer-ons. Memorize the song arrangement. Coordinate the finger movement between the picking hand and fretting hand. Some things came easily and some did not. It wasn’t magic. It was work.
And, fortunately for me, work was not a word that filled me with distaste.
Likewise with life. It’s not easy and it’s far from perfect and there are so many things I want to do and learn and to get much, much better at. There are habits I need to take up and habits I need to break. There are people with whom I need to communicate better. There are situations that I should simply avoid.
And there is a world to be a part of. Not apart from. So much of our thinking, of our vocabulary, of our words written out here on the Internet are only about being separate, individual.
But as much as we are individuals, we are also community. Just as the ideal band makes every player better and creates a music that we could never create as individuals, we all make each other better when we take part in life.
Yeah, I kind of get this way over the holidays. And, as I’ve mentioned, I kind of treat every day as a holiday.
Again, let me wish each and every one of you, your family and friends has a wonderful New Year. Every single day of it.
Until our next newsletter, play well. Play often. Stay safe.
And, as always…
Peace