Newsletter Vol. 3 # 81 – January 1, 2009

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 3, Issue #81 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
New Lessons and Articles
Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow
Podcast Postings
Email? We Get Emails!
Tutorial Tips
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello!

And a “Happy New Year” to one and all! Welcome to the first issue of Guitar Noise News, the free twice-a-month newsletter of the Guitar Noise website, for the calendar year 2009! I hope that everyone had a pleasant holiday season and I also wish you all the best in this upcoming New Year.

It’s been a little hectic, as holiday seasons tend to be, but we did manage to put together two final song lessons to wrap up our 2008 selection. Let’s take a look:

New Lessons and Articles

Joy To The World
by David Hodge

It all started with being in Double Drop D tuning! Here’s a very easy chord melody arrangement of this popular Christmas carol.

Auld Lang Syne
by David Hodge

Say goodbye to 2008 and welcome 2009 in style with this beautiful chord melody arrangement in Drop D tuning.

Exploring Music With Darrin Koltow

Tip for January 1

Last time out we looked at a three note arpeggio that substituted for the Bb7 four note arp. I had you practice this with a repeated note, so it _felt_ like you were playing a four note arpeggio. In other words, this repeated note made it easier to practice, because each note of the pattern, as you move from one octave to the next, is played solely on the upbeat or the downbeat.

It’s a mental thing. When you hear the F note, for example, falling on the downbeat in the first octave, you expect to hear it on the downbeat in the next octave. It’s easier to learn that way.

But it’s also more monotonous that way. Let’s take out the repeated note and play the three note arp now as a true, three note arp.

|-----------------|-10-13-13-10---------|------------|
|-------------6-9-|-------------9-6-----|------------|
|-----------7-----|-----------------7---|------------|
|-------3-6-------|-------------------6-|-3----------|
|-----5-----------|---------------------|---5--------|
|-1-4-------------|---------------------|-----4-1----|

Once you can play this smoothly, play the version with the repeated note first, and then play this version again. Which do you think sounds more varied and interesting?

Thanks for reading.

Podcast Postings

Good news and better news!

We’ll be kicking off the 2009 series of Guitar Noise Podcasts starting Monday, January 12. That’s obviously the good news!

We’ll pick things up with the long-awaited arrival of Guitar Noise Podcast #22, which 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.”

The better news is, barring any incredible disasters, we’ll be posting new Guitar Noise Podcasts on a weekly basis through March! All recording systems are go and we’re fairly certain that all the potential snags have been cleared. So get ready to have some fun with strumming and rhythm, as well as a more in-depth look into chord voicings and other topics.

Emails? We Get Emails

Hi Dave

Just wanted to say that with the sea of information I found on the web about guitar, I was very fortunate to stumble upon your beginner lessons. I have learned allot of information. I tried, but I could not learn very well from playing with tabs. Your instructions are always clear and most times I can figure them out with a little patience and lots of practice. A person always wishes they could progress faster, like the Kid in the movie August Rush. But no such luck. I would like your opinion on ways to measure progress. I am 46 years old and started to play in April 08. I do have a high school back round in music clarinet for 6 years, a year of piano, but at that time lacked the discipline I needed. I devote about 30 minutes each day to go guitar, more on the weekends. I just finished “help” lesson by the beetles, not up to speed yet still getting chord changes down. I havent always studied your lessons in order, maybe that could make progress easier.

Thanks again Dave

Thanks for writing and thank you as well for your kind words. We’re glad you stumbled upon our lessons here at Guitar Noise, too!

As for my opinion on ways to measure progress, well, not to make light of it, but it’s kind of a measured opinion. Not to mention one many readers of this newsletter have heard more often than they probably care to admit!

First off, learning to play an instrument is not something that happens by magic. More importantly, it’s not a competition. Measuring progress by how others progress, or more often how others seem to progress, is close to pointless. This isn’t to say that it’s not important to measure progress – most people find it encouraging to know that there is improvement taking place.

But what that means is that one has to come up with a personal, individual measure. This is one advantage to having a teacher – the student and teacher can work together to set out specific, measurable and accomplishable (I know that’s not a word) goals.

You can do the same thing on your own, but it’s incredibly important to set out reasonable goals and most beginners aren’t really good at being reasonable with themselves. They might set goals that are too far out of their (current) reach or they may set goals so low that there’s no challenge or satisfaction in accomplishing them.

Adult students tend to be very unreasonable with goals, owing to their thinking that age and experience will carry them through. I’ve used this example many times but it bears repeating – if you are forty-six, that means that you’ve spent forty-five forty sixths of your life not playing guitar. That’s more than ninety-eight percent of your life and that’s what you’re up against.

On top of that, it’s safe to assume that you have a life. As a forty-six year old adult, you’re probably not going to have the luxury of shutting yourself up in your bedroom and practicing for hours at a time. So you’re going to have to practice when you can. It does sound like you’re doing well at this. Most folks I know can’t find thirty minutes a day to devote to practice.

The next step is that you want to maximize the effectiveness of your practice. We’ve a number of articles at Guitar Noise devoted to this, which you can find here: Practice Tips.

Regardless of how you decide to measure your progress, there are some important things you can do to help yourself – first, record yourself every now and then. Yes, you’ll have to deal with the “I sound dreadful” phase that we’ve all gone through. But then record the same song or chord progression a month, two months, six months down the line and notice the improvements. They will be there, I promise you. Having a tangible idea of how you improve (notice the “how” and not “how quickly”) will help you to set new goals.

The second thing you can do to help yourself is to always remember that this is going to be a lifelong journey. Yes, it’s a cliche, but it’s still true. People all learn and progress at different rates. Some techniques will come faster than others. Some will require more work. One thing that you should find true is that your learning curve will get less steep. Learning new chords will take less time. Changing between chords will get smoother and more rhythmic.

Also, don’t forget to look back realistically in order to see how far you’ve come. In less than a year you’ve managed to make some tricky chord changes (as evidenced by your playing of “Help!”) – that takes some doing!

And finally, never pass up the opportunity to play, especially to play along with others. This is not about comparing yourself with other players (although everyone does that) but rather to set yourself up realistic goals and to learn how other people progress. There is no better way to gauge what progress you’ve made and to plot out what you want to learn next than to see how well you hold up your end of the musical chores of playing in a group.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to write anytime.

Wishing you, your family and friends a wonderful and Happy New Year!

Peace

Tutorial Tips

Hello–

Your website is wonderful. I am new to guitar and I am 26 and a former college athlete. My hands took a pounding as a college basketball player so this is something I am learning really from scratch and teaching my brain new skills. I am taking the approach of learning chords first, being as I do not really know w here to start. I have been playing roughly two months, and I can move between the C, D. A, G. F, E, Em, Dm, Am and D7 chord with relative ease. I have begun working away at the Bm chord, my first barre chord and it is quite the challenge.

I just want to know, where do you feel a new guitarist should start? I do not have the time to take personal lessons, so I am teaching myself. I want to learn as many chords as I can by June or July, at which point I want to start learning songs. But I believe that the basics, the chords, the ability to move my hands, and hand strength are more important right now than playing songs. What do you think?

Thanks

Hello and thank you for writing.

If you’ve only been playing for two months and can already move between the basic chords with relative ease, you’re doing fairly well. But now it’s time to ask yourself a question – why do you want to play the guitar? What do you want to do with it?

This may seem a simple question and, for most people, there is a simple answer; they want to play songs. With the skills you already have, there is no reason not to be starting in on songs. And there’s an even more important reason. Learning chords is how beginners, most beginners anyway, start out. But there is a bit of a danger in learning just chords. Rarely will you come across a song where you where you don’t change chords. It’s easy, starting out, to think of chords themselves as being static, but when you play music you want to move fluidly from one chord to another. Plus you want to do it rhythmically, fitting into the tempo of a song. Plus you might want to throw in various flourishes, riffs and fills if you will, while both playing and changing chords.

This is one reason many teachers get their students into songs immediately. There are always going to be more chords, not to mention various voicings and embellished chords, to learn. The sooner you get working on integrating the chords into music, into songs, the better. You will develop all these skills – changing chords, developing rhythm and hand strength while playing songs. It’s not an either / or situation. It’s putting things to practice and learning as you go. And, again for most people, it’s the best way to go. You don’t know how many people that say they play an instrument and can’t play any songs. It’s kind of frightening, actually.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to write anytime if you’ve more questions. I look forward to hearing how things are going with you.

Peace

Random Thoughts

As John Lennon wrote (and sang), “…another year over…a new one just begun…”

“…and what have I done?”

Looking back at the past year in my mind, I’m finding myself listening to it more than looking at it. I got to play a lot of music with my friends, got to meet new people, got to see old friends again.

I can switch from Lennon to Dylan: “…I know every scene by heart…they all went by so fast…”

There was meeting Nick (not Torres, but “Clazon” as he calls himself on the GN Forum) and his friends and bandmates and having them as houseguests for an evening in March. They honored us by playing some of their original music and it was a lot of fun sitting in with them.

And GN Moderator Alan Green spent a few days in September, even performing for some of my friends and students at a local open mic. You couldn’t meet a nicer guy.

Well, there is our Nick Torres… We got together, what, five or six times this year?

The memories and many and I can hear them constantly – Mike Roberto’s arrangement of Something at the Riverside Jam in July, Dan and Laura making my jazz version of Takin’ Care of Business something the whole bar was dancing to, getting to play bass for a whole show of Kathy Reichert’s in May, hearing all of my songwriting workshop students perform their original material at an open mic just three weeks ago.

I hope that all of you have a safe and wonderful New Year. And I hope that you fill 2009 with magical, musical moments of your own making. I look forward to sharing them.

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

And, as always…

Peace