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Newsletter Vol. 4 # 27 – May 15, 2012

David Hodge — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:37:22 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #27 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello! And welcome to the May 15, 2012 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

In case you missed the announcement in our last newsletter, we’ve got another one of our old song lessons back up online. This month we are welcoming the return of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” This particular arrangement uses both fingerpicking and strumming and is a lot of fun to play! We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do!

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

For obvious reasons, our Guitar Noise “Featured Artist of the Month” usually is a guitarist. This time out, though, we’re putting the spotlight on a man who did a lot of drumming. And a lot of listening and tinkering. He may not have been known as a guitarist, but Jim Marshall has probably done more for rock guitarists and bassists than just about anyone! You can read about “The Father of Loud” in the latest bio on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

Having Jim Marshall as our May Featured Artist naturally led to us choosing “Performing and Playing Guitar Live” as our new Guitar Noise Topic of the Month. You can find many great lessons on this topic here at Guitar Noise by popping over to our homepage and clicking on the “Topic of the Month” link up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Counterpoint – Part 1 and 2
by Tom Serb

Counterpoint is a style of music where you have multiple instruments doing different things at the same time, adding up to something bigger than its parts.Tom Serb explains the intricacies in this new series:

How To Make A Lot Of Money In The Music Business
by Tom Hess

To make money in the music business, you have to think about music as a business. Tom Hess provides you with insights on how to start making your musical monetary goals come true.

The Only Theory Lesson You’ll Ever Need – Part 3
by Jim Bowley

Learn how to harmonize the major scale and create diatonic chords in the final part of Jim Bowley’s trilogy, “The Only Theory Lesson You’ll Ever Need.”

Ukuleles – Separating Instruments From Ornaments and Toys
by David Hodge

If you’re going to take up the ukulele, be sure to get an instrument and not a toy! Here are some tips on finding your first uke.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re incredibly lucky to have a good number of great guitar teachers as members of the the Guitar Noise community. We’re even luckier to be able to have them contribute to Guitar Noise News on a regular basis!

I have to make an apology at this point – we’re not going to be able to run the rest of Tom Serb’s series on Counterpoint, at least here in the newsletter. To best present the information in the coming segments, it’s vital to have a visual demonstration using music notation. And, at the present time at least, we can’t manage to do that here in the newsletters. But don’t worry! We will be posting the rest of the Counterpoint lesson on our blog in the very near future.

In the meantime though, here’s another piece of advice that you hopefully will find helpful.

Making Dynamic Changes in Volume

The art of communication or expression often lies in the little touches. In conversation, whether a friend or a stranger, your voice is alive. It may be loud and laughing one moment and hushed and secretive the next. Your volume and tone helps give weight to your words. The same idea applies in music. Think about the intense changes of emotion that occur in a song like My Chemical Romance’s “The Black Parade,” as it morphs from a classical lullaby to a thrashing rocker in the blink of an eye. Or how Eric Clapton’s quiet acoustic arrangement of “Layla” (from the “Unplugged” album) brings an entirely different intensity than the original (and no less powerful) electric version.

As a musician, your guitar is your voice and it’s capable of a wide range of emotions. Adding dynamics, such as a simple change of volume, is an incredibly easy way to impress listeners with your song arrangements! Let’s examine some very simple ways to bring dynamics to your playing…

Vary Your Volume

The easiest way to get started on dynamics is to play a song using different volume levels at specific parts of the song. You can be quiet on the verses and loud on the chorus. Or play loud on the verses and louder on the chorus. If your song has a “bridge” section, that might be a good place to vary the volume, perhaps getting really soft at this point before returning to the normal volume level for the rest of the song. One time-honored approach is to get really quiet on the last verse of a song and then coming in as loud as possible for the final chorus. Another idea would be to repeat the chorus (or even the last line of the song) a final time at a very soft volume.

For practice purposes, take a song you know well and work out three different arrangements. Try to use the song itself give you clues as to where to raise and lower the volume. If you begin with a bang, find a logical spot to bring things to a more intimate tone. If you start out softly try out different louder volumes. Be sure to experiment with different levels of loudness and not just settle for one setting of “loud” and one of “quiet.”

Simplify (or Complicate) Your Strumming

Another way to create a change in dynamics is to alter your strumming of the guitar, changing from your basic rhythm pattern to something else. This technique is both easy and a lot of fun.

For example, suppose for the most part of a song (in 4/4 timing) you’re playing a rhythm of first a quarter note and then two eighth notes each on the second and third beat, leaving the fourth beat open as a rest. This sort of strum establishes a driving rhythm that you can play at a good volume. Try breaking it up at various points with a measure consisting of a short eighth note followed (after an eighth rest) by a half note and is played much quieter.

Or you could go in a different direction and offset that first measure with a measure that is all sixteenth notes or just sixteenth notes on the first and fourth beats. That will change the dynamic intensity!

You can also vary your volume from beat to beat, creating crescendos and descrescendos within a single measure. Anything’s possible when you put your mind and energies into it.

Switch to Arpeggios

Besides altering your strumming of chords, you can switch from strumming full chords to playing arpeggios and pieces of chords (one or two strings) to create a change of dynamics. Think about “Ticket To Ride” by the Beatles. The verses have a simple arpeggio pattern that hooks you in and the chorus uses a full chord strumming attack to bring the emotion a step higher.

Sounds of Silence

There is one last incredibly easy and remarkably effective dynamic technique: total silence. This can be just the instruments or both instruments and vocals. Think about the Who’s version of “Summertime Blues” where the whole band drops out on the last line of each verse, leaving the vocals to stand on their own before all the instruments come storming back. The silence makes the band’s reentry more powerful.

As you’ve hopefully discovered in this brief discussion, creating dynamics through varying your volume is pretty easy to do. Be sure to go through your personal repertoire of songs to see where you can make some arresting and intense changes in your arrangements. People will soon be complimenting you on your ability to express yourself through your music.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. The latest one came got posted today and has events running through May 20.

As always, you should feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig information (dates, venues, locations and times) to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. Remember that we’ll be posting these every Wednesday so plan accordingly!

And who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!That’s how Nick got to meet Lars when the Flea Market Band (all the way from Norway) played in Washington DC.

Random Thoughts

It’s Sunday as I write this, Mothers’ Day here in the United States and Canada and other countries as well. Yes, it’s one of the easy-to-laugh-at holidays but at its heart, like most observances (shall we say instead?) the sentiment behind it might be one we should think about more often than on a once-a-year basis.

As a teacher, and as a human being, I am totally in awe of parents. Whether mothers or fathers, they are braver than I will ever be. Creating a life and then, much more importantly, helping to shape it in such a way that it can both stand on its own and yet be a contributing part of the community – that takes something special.

Many of my good friends are parents. Some of them purposefully put their music aside as part of parenting, thinking that perhaps there wasn’t enough time for both. Others included making music as part of their parenting, giving their children firsthand experience of the joy of creating and sharing songs with others.

I know musical parents whose children don’t play or listen to music that much at all. Likewise, I know parents who are not in the least bit musical but who have children who live for making music. There doesn’t always seem to be a rhyme or reason to who has the talent and who develops it later.

Maybe it’s simplistic on my part (and you can cite my not being a parent as part of my reasoning) but it seems that parenting is a huge lifelong relationship that is all about balance and harmony, whether because both are there or because both or one is lacking. A parent is a guide through life and there are an infinite number of fine lines between leading and coaxing, demonstrating and allowing for exploration, sharing and dictating. And, perhaps the toughest part of it all, as with almost all relationships, one never truly knows how one is doing. At least when one wants to know!

So to all the mothers out there, not to mention all the fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents and what have you – I wish you patience. And balance. And harmony. Whether you’ve been a parent seemingly all your life or have just started out on this incredibly wild trip.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And listen to any music that comes your way.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 26 – May 1, 2012

David Hodge — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:16:05 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #26 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello! And welcome to the May 1, 2012 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

This month we are welcoming the return of our song lesson, “Cat’s in the Cradle” This particular arrangement uses both fingerpicking and strumming and is a lot of fun to play! We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do!

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

For obvious reasons, our Guitar Noise “Featured Artist of the Month”usually is a guitarist. This time out, though, we’re putting the spotlight on a man who did a lot of drumming. And a lot of listening and tinkering. He may not have been known as a guitarist, but Jim Marshall has probably done more for rock guitarists and bassists than just about anyone! You can read about “The Father of Loud” in the latest bio on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Building A Chord Vocabulary
by Tom Serb

Can anyone really play 10, 15, or 20,000 different chords? Yep, you bet. Tom reveals the system for navigating the fretboard that he teaches his students.

How To Make The Transition From 6-String Guitar To 7-String Guitar
by Tom Hess

Tom Hess discusses how to improve your 7-string guitar playing by using the unique aspects of the instrument to guide you and to help improve your skills.

To Read or Not to Read
Part 3 – Some Practical Pointers
by Nick Minnion

The final installment of Nick Minnion’s excellent three-part series has some great tips for you to improve on your basic music notation reading skills in order to become better (and quicker!) at sight reading.

Finding Clyde – “Thoughts Of You” from the CD “Sacrifice It All”
CD Mini-Review by Lily

A powerful rock ballad from a hard-playing Michigan ban – definitely worth a listen!

Voice Leading for Guitarists – An Introduction
by Dan Vuksanovich

Voice leading, a vital component of harmony and composing, should be part of every guitarist’s technique. Here’s a great introduction to this musical topic and also a great introduction to Dan Vuksanovich, our latest Guitar Noise contributor!

Cat’s In The Cradle
by David Hodge

There’s a little bit of everything in this lesson, from easy arpeggios and strumming to some basic Travis style finger picking patterns. As always, David picks the song apart into small pieces that even many beginners can get with some concerted practice. Have fun learning this Harry Chapin classic!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

In the meantime though, here’s another piece of advice that you hopefully will find helpful.

Which Guitar First?

My students (or their parents) will often ask my opinion on which type of guitar to buy. For most beginners, it’s not even a question of brands or manufacturers. It’s whether to get an acoustic or an electric. While I have my personal preferences, I usually bring the question back to them: which guitar is going to make you want to play it? Then we go over the benefits of each.

Acoustic. Discussing acoustic guitars often leads to a conversation on body styles and sizes. For children, it’s important to take physical growth into account. A parent is often unaware that acoustic and electric guitars come in three-quarter and half sizes. Although dreadnoughts are widely available, they aren’t comfortable for many people. But before a student rules out acoustics, I always let him know about folk, auditorium, and parlor styles.

Electric. Students of all ages find electric guitars easier to finger and form chords. And the enthusiasm of playing an electric can spur many students to practice more often. Three of my young students switched from acoustics to electrics this year and their mothers regularly report that it’s hard to separate the student from the guitar!

If a younger student decides on an electric, again, size can be a very important issue. Like acoustics, it is possible to find “student sized” guitars and if a student is particularly young or small, a smaller guitar will usually result in less frustration in terms of trying to fret notes and eventually form chords.

For the would-be first time electric guitarist, it’s also smart to discuss and demonstrate the importance of playing at proper volume levels-whether with an amplifier or with headphones-and being courteous to the other family members.

Classical. It’s easy for the classical guitar to get lost in the list of possible first guitars, and that’s a bit of a shame. The nylon strings seem less intimidating (I caution students that their fingers will still hurt), the wider fingerboard often helps to cleanly fret notes, and the smaller body size usually allows most players to develop better posture and positioning.

The guitar is a highly personal instrument. One can learn the basics on any type of guitar, but a student who loves his or her instrument will usually play (and practice) more than one who’s hoping for a different guitar. As teachers and guitarists, we know that the first guitar is simply that-a first guitar, one of many more to come. People take pride in their instruments as well as in their achievements as students. By helping students choose the right guitar, one that they will want to play, you’re helping to get them started on a lifetime’s adventure.

The key thing to remember about the first guitar is that, above all, it should encourage the student to play at every opportunity. Make certain that it fits the student both in terms of size and personality and that the instrument is set up as well for the student as it can possibly be.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. The latest one has events running through May 12, and you can find it here.

Random Thoughts

We’re making this newsletter a little briefer this time out but, rest assured, we’ll be back with a lot more to discuss in the May 15 issue of Guitar Noise News.

So, until then, play well and play often. And listen to any music that comes your way.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 25 – April 15, 2012

David Hodge — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 15:20:03 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #25 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the April 15, 2012 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. And a belated “Happy New Year” to those of you in Thailand or Nepal, both of which celebrated the occasion on Friday the 13th. And no, that’s not a late April Fool’s Joke.

In case you missed it last issue, we’re thrilled to announce the return of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville”to the pages of Guitar Noise. You’ll find it back with our “Easy Songs for Beginners” series, along with many of our old song lessons. And, with a little luck (and some spare time!) you may find a brand new song lesson coming your way fairly soon.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

A wise man once said, “A wise man once said, ‘Never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.’” And that first wise man would be none other than our Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of April, Frank Zappa. You can read about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

Our Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for April happens to be “Scales and Modes.” You can find many great lessons on this topic here at Guitar Noise by popping over to our homepage and clicking on the “Topic of the Month” link up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 9
by Tom Serb

We’ve reached the conclusion of Tom Serb’s series on Scales and Modes. If you’ve been following along you’ll know there’s all kinds of scales possible. And he’s saved some of the wildest ones for last!

The Only Theory Lesson You’ll Ever Need – Part 2
by Jim Bowley

In Part 2 of Jim Bowley’s introduction to basic music theory, you’ll create the Major Scale, possibly the most important musical knowledge you can learn!

To Read Or Not To Read
Part 2 – Making Musical Milestones
by Nick Minnion

Nick Minnion discusses the three basic levels of playing and how being able to read notation affects one’s ability to become a better guitarist.

IDLEMOB
CD Mini-Review by Lily

The beauty of idleMob’s self-titled debut album is how it seamlessly fuses so many diverse styles into a single narrative of vivid, haunting songs.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This time out, we’re starting a new series from Tom Serb:

Counterpoint – Part 1

Perhaps you’ve heard of “counterpoint”. It’s a style of music in which you have multiple voices (or instruments) doing different things at the same time, and it all adds up to something bigger than its parts.

In this series, I’m going to explore that aspect of music. In some ways it’s highly technical; in other ways it’s not. It might seem like an academic exercise (which it is, kind of), but it’s also applicable to bands that want to do two things at once.

In this article we’ll just start with a few fundamentals:

The word “counterpoint” comes to us from the Latin “contra punctus”, or ‘against the point’. When music notation started, there weren’t notes of different lengths, like todays whole notes and quarter notes; there were only notes, marked as dots (or points) above the lyrics. The Latin word for point is “punctus”, and the inventors of counterpoint were medieval churchmen, who spoke, or at least wrote, in Latin.

So we’ve got this point in the music. And against it, we want to set some other point. Composers started doing this around the 9th or 10th century, and within about 500 years they’d developed a system of doing that which resulted in sounds that consistently made sense.

Medieval counterpoint bears little resemblance to today’s music. At the same time, all the elements of today’s music – our chord progressions, rhythms, and even how we cast lyrics against melodies – have their roots in counterpoint. So I’ll start with the basics and move on from there.

The model of medieval counterpoint is the masses of Giulanni Pierluigi de Palestrina. He wasn’t the only composer of his era; other important ones were Lassus (Orlande de Lassus), Victoria (Tomas de Luis de Victoria), and William Byrd.

What made Palestrina so memorable was the first widely used counterpoint manual, called “Gradus ad Parnussum” (Steps to Parnassus) published by Johann Joseph Fux (pronounced “Fooks”) in 1725. It’s still in print, and if you have a real interest in counterpoint I’d recommend it – it was used by Mozart, Beethoven, and countless others.

Fux distilled the masses of Palestrina down to basic rules, and taught them through a dialogue between a student (Josephus) and his teacher (Aloysius).

Like may theory works, Fux “dumbs down” some concepts. He’s reducing some of the things that Palestrina did to essential elements. Bear in mind that Palestrina didn’t follow Fux’ rules (how could he, since he’d been dead before Fux was born?), but applying them can produce at least a consistently adequate result.

There are a few things we need to cover before we dive in: intervals, consonance (or dissonance) and motion.

“Interval” in music theory refers to the distance between two notes. Interval names have two parts, the first describing quality, and the second describing distance. Distance is simpler, so we’ll look at that first.

The size of an interval depends solely on the distance between its letters. The lower letter is number one: A-F is a sixth, because A is 1, which makes B 2, C 3, D 4, E 5, and F is the sixth. It doesn’t matter at all what kind of A or what kind of F we’re looking at – Ab – F# is a sixth, as is A# to Fb or any other combination.

The other part of an interval name describes quality. To really get this idea requires a knowledge of scales; in this example I’ll use A major (A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#-A) and other scales as required.

Intervals are measured starting from the lower note. If the lower note is A, and the upper note is B, we have to also look at the major scale of the upper note, B major: B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#-B. We find that B is in the key of A (the lower note), but A is not in the key of B. That makes the interval “major”. Since B is the second letter starting from A, A-B is a “major second”.

If we look at the interval A-D, we get a different situation. The D major scale is D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D; here A is in the key of D, and D is also in the key of A. When that situation occurs, we call the interval “perfect”; A-D is a “perfect fourth” (because D is the fourth letter starting from A).

With those two starting points, we can define other intervals. A major interval made smaller by a half step becomes a minor interval; A-C# is a major third, but A-C is a minor third.

If we make a perfect interval smaller by a half step, we get a “diminished” interval. A-Db is a diminished fourth. Notice that this sounds just like A-C#, but in counterpoint they are not the same – A-C# is a third (because C is the third letter starting from A); A-Db must be a fourth (because D is the fourth letter starting from A). What we call things matters a lot in counterpoint!

If we make either a major or a perfect interval bigger, we get an “augmented” interval; Ab-C# is an augmented third, because we’ve made the distance between the notes bigger by lowering A. And A-D# is an augmented fourth for the same reason – we’ve made the interval bigger.

Making a perfect or a minor interval smaller results in a “diminished” interval. A#-C (or A-Cb) would be a diminished third; A-Db (or A#-D) would be a diminished fourth.

Making a diminished interval smaller results in a doubly-diminished interval (like A#-Cb), and making an augmented interval larger (like Ab-D#) creates a doubly-augmented interval. Both are rare in practice.

To sum up intervals, here’s the hierarchy:

dd -> d -> m – M – A – AA
(doubly diminished -> diminished -> minor -> Major -> Augmented -> doubly Augmented

dd -> d -> P -> A -> AA
(doubly diminished -> diminished -> perfect -> augmented -> doubly augmented

Next we’ll take a quick look at the idea of consonance and dissonance.

Consonance means the sounds get along with each other. Dissonance means they don’t. But the way we hear sounds depends on what we’ve been exposed to; in Palestrina’s day, perfect fourths were considered dissonant, and today they aren’t.

I’m going to confine the ideas in this series to what Fux/Palestrina had to say (with my own observations at the end to make them more appropriate to today’s music), so I’ll sum up their categories:

Perfect consonances – the sounds that are always consonant:
Unisons (the same pitch in both voices/instruments)
Octaves (the same letter names, but not the same pitch)
Fifths (A-E, D-A, etc.; the fifth note of the major scale)

Imperfect consonances – the sounds that sounds really good together, and are almost always consonant:
Thirds (major or minor)
Sixths (major or minor)

Dissonances, for our purposes, are everything else. When I teach composition, I divide dissonances into two categories: always dissonant and sometimes dissonant, but you don’t need to break them out to grasp basic counterpoint.

The last piece before we can tackle counterpoint is motion: how sounds move against each other. Depending on which music theorist you follow, you end up with either three or four different types of motion. I prefer three, but I’ll outline the fourth possibility.

Contrary motion occur when the melodies move in the opposite direction – the higher line moves up while the lower line moves down, or the lower line moves up while he higher line moves down.

Oblique motion occurs when one melody remains stationary while the other moves; a change from A-D to A-E is oblique motion (as is a change from A-D to G-D).

Similar motion happens when both voices move in the same direction: A-C# moving to B-G is similar motion. Although A moves just a whole step to B, and C moves a diminished fourth to G, both are moving in the same direction.

The fourth type of motion is called “parallel” motion; it’s similar motion where both voices move by exactly the same amount. A-C# moving to B-D# is parallel motion, because both voices move in the same direction by a whole step; A-C# moving to B-D is similar, but not parallel, because both voices are moving in the same direction, but by different intervals (A-B is a whole step; C#-D is a half step).

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website, as well as their Facebook page. And don’t forget that Tom frequently visits the Guitar Noise Forums, so don’t be shy about asking him a question there.

Events Horizon

One thing we at Guitar Noise would really like to do is to help promote your shows, whether it’s in a stadium or at a ten-seat coffee house. Not only is it a great way to help support each other, it’s also a terrific way to meet more musicians!
And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. The latest one came got posted today and has events running through April 22,.

Random Thoughts

Speaking of our “Events Horizon,” this last one (April 11) has, I believe, the most listings of gigs that I can remember posting. It’s close to two dozen, I think. And while that certainly isn’t an earth-shattering number, it’s great to know that so many of our Guitar Noise community are out there performing shows.

Unfortunately, because we have readers all over the globe, the odds certainly aren’t great that we’re going to list something that you might be able to go see., as much as you might want to go and support some of the friends you’ve made online. But if you’re interested in finding out how any particular show might have gone, you can often get “gig reports” from Guitar Noise community members on our “News” page on the Guitar Noise Forums, which you can find here: http://guitarnoise.com/forums/

Just this past week, for instance, we got reports from Tom McLaughlin (it’s always a delight to read his posts about the gigs of his band, Life is Drama) as well as debut reports from Randy *Dogbite” Reeves (and his new band, Coulee Rock Invaders) and Chris (“cnev”), whose band has overcome an epic tale of drama (over a dozen pages of Forum posts!) to perform their first show. It’s great encouragement for anyone who’s thinking about getting out and playing.

If it’s at all possible, get out to see and hear a show sometime before the end of the month You shouldn’t ever go more than two weeks without hearing some live music somewhere!

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And listen to any music that comes your way.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 24 – April 1, 2012

David Hodge — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 15:49:22 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #24 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the April 1, 2012 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

We have

A major

announcement to make – Guitar Noise is hard at work producing its first app. That’s right! We’re hoping that within the next few months you’ll be able to purchase our new “give you the chord of any song you can name the title of or even just remember a line of lyrics to or even hum just a teeny bit of the melody” app for the electronic device of your choice. There are still a few bugs to work out (like the name, for instance) but we’re thinking this is going to revolutionize the way you play guitar. Just imagine yourself getting a chance to play a live gig, getting up on stage, picking up your guitar, looking out at the audience and saying “does anyone know the name of the song I want to play so I can download the chords on my iPad and then play it for you?” You’ll immediately make a huge name for yourself in the music industry.

Of course, you’ll also want our “Bifocal chord filter (with optional lyric filter slightly extra in cost)” in order to view the lyrics and chords when you play Each chord that appears on the Guitar Noise app and filter will

B sharp

and clearly defined against the background no matter what sort of lightning you may be dealing with when you perform. Even if a song has a half-dozen chords, you will

C6

chords clearly through our soon-to-be-patented Guitar Noise soon-to-be-renamed chord app for your PDA of choice.

We know that more and more performers are relying on PDAs and apps to make their gigs be the most up to date and professional performances possible, which is why the Guitar Noise app will have unique, helpful features designed specifically for the guitarist who gigs with a PDA. Our “remember your audience” app will instruct you at random intervals to

Look at audience

Smile

or even

Seem like you’re having fun

You can also program your Guitar Noise app to give you personalized instructions for specific song. If you’re playing a Morrissey song, for example, your Guitar Noise App might instruct you to

Sound sad

or even

Sound really sad

We’re working practically ’round the clock to fix the remaining glitches and to have this available at your favorite app store as soon as we can! And as soon as it’s ready, we’ll be sure to announce it right here in the April 1 edition of Guitar Noise News.

In other news, we’re thrilled to announce the return of another song lesson to the pages of Guitar Noise. Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is now part of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” series once again. Just in time for Spring Break!

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

In case you’re wondering, the Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for April happens to be “Scales and Modes,” And if you think I’m going to try to come up with some joke about sturgeon with ice cream, forget it! Instead, why not just go over to our homepage and click on the “Topic of the Month” link up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner where you’ll find a slew of great lessons and articles on this topic.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 8
by Tom Serb

Because the starting point of any scale can be shifted to make an entirely new scale, we can quickly get lost in the permutations.

Quarter Note Triplets
by David Hodge

Playing quarter note triplets – dividing two beats into three equal parts – is tricky. David demonstrates how you can do it easily.

An Interview With Andrew DuBrock
by David Hodge

Andrew DuBrock, one of the best when it comes to guitar tutorial books, discusses the challenges and rewards of learning fingerstyle guitar playing.

Margaritaville
by David Hodge

Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet doesn’t take long to learn. We only need three chords and even a relative beginner will be able to impress their friends.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This time out, we’ve something a little different from Tom Serb (and it’s NOT an April Fool Joke!):

A Punk Primer

This week my younger son came over with a rough cut of one of his bands (the Hollywood Nightmares) first CD, which should be released in May or June. They play “punk pop” music – which I’d characterize as tight vocal harmonies over driving guitar based punk progressions (think of the Beach Boys singing Ramones tunes and you’ll be pretty close to their sound).

That got me to thinking punk music might be a fun thing to explore in a quick lesson here – so I decided to write a quick punk primer. Bear with me – or eagerly anticipate – my typical digressions into music theory stuff along the way.

Punk music is generally loud, fast, and distorted. And that means you’ll be playing power chords almost all of the time.

Digression one: A power chord isn’t really a chord at all in music theory terms – it’s an interval. “Chords” require three or more different pitches; “intervals” have only two. So you’ll be playing only two different notes at the same time.

Power chords are usually “perfect fifth” intervals. Intervals have two different parts to their names – the first part tells you the quality of the sound, and the second part tells you how far apart the letter names are. So a “major third” interval will have a different quality than a “minor third” interval, but both are thirds… which means they’ll both be exactly three letter names apart in the musical alphabet. We can have A-C as a third, which means the space between them is A (1), B (2), and C (3).

Sharps and flats don’t matter for how far apart interval notes are. Ab to C# is a third, as is A# to Cb, Ab to C, or any other A-C combination. If you’re looking at Ab and C#, you could also call those notes G# and Db. But then it wouldn’t be a third anymore – it would be a fifth, because you’d be looking at a spacing of G (1), A (2), B (3), C (4), and D (5). So this is one of those areas where music theory diverges from musical sound… what we call the notes determines the interval size, not what they end up sounding like.

The other part of an interval name gives us the “quality” of the interval. Power chords are “perfect” fifths. That means the first note is in the key of the second note… and the second note is also in the key of the first note. When this happens, the notes agree with each other and sound good together.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program. On the guitar, we can play three open power chords: 02xxxx is an E power chord, written as E5; x02xxx is an A power chord, or A5; and xx02xx is a D power chord, or D5. If you look at the basic shapes of those, you’ll see that there’s the note that names the chord, called the root (the open sixth string for E5), and another note on the next string two frets higher.

If we moved both notes of that E5 power chord up a fret, you’d have 13xxxx. Since the root note is now the F on the first fret, that’s an F5, or an F power chord. Up another couple of frets you’d get 35xxxx – with a root note of G, making G5, or a G power chord.

It’s worth taking the time to learn the root notes on the sixth and fifth strings, and maybe even the fourth string.

From the E string:
Open = E
1st fret = F
3rd fret = G
5th fret = A
7th fret = B
8th fret = C
10th fret = D
12th fret = E again… after this point, the letters repeat, adding 12 frets each time, with
13th fret = F
15th fret = G and so on.

Starting from the open 5th string, we get:
Open = A
2nd fret = B
3rd fret = C
5th fret = D
7th fret = E
8th fret = F
10th fret = G
12th fret = A
14th fret = B etc.

And from the 4th string:
Open = D
2nd fret = E
3rd fret = F
5th fret = G
7th fret = A
9th fret = B
10th fret = C
12th fret = D
14th fret = E

You might have noticed that you can get the same letter name on any combination of strings. Some, like xx02xx, x57xxx, and 10-12-xxxx, will sound almost exactly the same (a digression for why that’s so is coming). Others, like 35xxxx and xx57xx, will sound in different octaves. All have their uses.

Being able to get the same pitch in different octaves is important, though – there’s an F on the sixth string, first fret… and a different F on the fourth string, third fret. If we include BOTH in the power chord, that’s called a “doubling”, and it doesn’t change the chord name. So you can play 133xxx and still get an F5 power chord! Punk bands will often do just that to thicken their sound.

That brings up another point – since the F5 power chord consists of just two notes (F and C), we can play them in two different ways: with F as the bass note (13xxxx) or with C as the bass note (x33xxx). Both are power chords… but the second example is turned upside down. In music theory terms, that’s called an “inversion” – the same notes played in a different order.

Digression two: Interval inversions always add up to nine. Inverting a fifth will always get you a fourth; inverting a third will always get you a sixth. With many intervals, inverting the tones means a change in quality – a major interval becomes minor, a minor interval becomes major. With power chords, it doesn’t matter… a perfect interval inverted gives you a perfect interval. However, our fifth has become a fourth; some music will identify a C-F interval as “C4″, indicating a perfect fourth power chord. Even if it doesn’t, you CAN play C-F (x33xxx) in place of F-C (13xxxx) if you’d like. It doesn’t change your chord progression.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of power chords, let’s move on to the bass line.

Power chords aren’t major or minor. In fact, what makes it a power chord is the fact that it’s missing the tone that would create a major or minor sound for a chord – so they’re both (or neither, however you want to see it).

I gave a lesson this morning on power chords, and we applied them to the progression for the Beatle’s tune “Let it Be”: G, D, Em, C, G, D, C. Here you could play 35xxxx, xx02xx (or x57xxx), 02xxx (or x79xxx), 35xxx (or 8-10-xxxx), 35xxxx, xx02xx (or x57xxx), and x35xxx. An E5 power chord works in place of Em, just as a G5 works in place of G major.

When you’re working out a punk tune, you want to pay close attention to the bass line. That’s going to dictate the chords you use: C-G-Ab-F will describe Green Day’s “Holiday”; A-D-E will describe the Ramone’s “Blitzkrieg Bop”. Follow the bass line with your power chords, and you’ve got the tune under your fingers.

There are two basic sounds you’ll use to create punk tunes. One is just the basic, raw power chord. The other is called “palm muting”. In palm muting you’ll rest your picking hand close to the bridge, but on the vibrating strings. This will dampen the tone, giving you more of a thumping sound than a ringing sound. If you get to far from the bridge, you’ll deaden the strings too much…. too close to the bridge and you won’t get much of the effect. Play around with the position of your hand doing simple exercises like this:

A5-A5-A5-A5-A5-A5-D4….A5-A5-A5-A5-A5-A5-E5

All the A5 (57xxxx) power chords will be palm muted; the D4 (x57xxx) and E5 (02xxxx) will ring out. The rhythm I Intended as I played through these is 1 & 2 & 3 & 4, with the last power chord – D4 or E5 – held for a full beat.

Time now for digression three, explaining the ‘why’ of power chords and a couple other things of interest – but stay tuned; I’ll come back for one last point on dropped tunings.

All musical sounds have four basic components: pitch (how high or low), intensity or dynamics (how loud or soft), duration (how long it lasts), and “timbre” which is everything else that determines what it sounds like to our ears. Bagpipes or church organ can play the same pitch at the same volume level for the same amount of time, but we instantly know which one is which. That’s timbre.

Timbre is determined by the distribution of overtones in a sound wave. When we pick a single string, like the open 6th string E, we actually produce several sounds at the same time: the E (the open string, also called the “fundamental”, or lowest tone in a mix of sounds produced by one pitch), the octave E (the same as the fourth string 2nd fret, or the octave of the fundamental), the next B (the same as the open 2nd string), and the next E (the same as the open 1st string).

Every instrument produces these same pitches, called the natural harmonic series. But the relationship of the pitches varies… in a flute, the overtones (the sounds above the fundamental) are pretty weak in relation to the fundamental; in a French horn, they’re pretty strong. Each instrument distributes them in a different way, which lets our ears tell them apart – a bagpipe doesn’t sound like a banjo because they have different overtone distributions.

So we’ve got E, the fundamental, and then E (the 1st overtone), B (the 2nd overtone), and E again (the 3rd overtone). After that it gets dicey – the next overtone is ROUGHLY G#, the same pitch as the 1st string 4th fret; then B again (1st string 7th fret), and then E again (1st string 12th fret).

The “roughly” G# is really important here.

In a tube amplifier, vacuum tubes amplify the fundamental pitch, and all of the overtones created. But we reach a point called “saturation”, where the fundamental pitch can’t get any louder for some technical reasons I won’t go into here.

In any instrument’s overtone series, the overtones are always weaker in intensity (or volume) than the fundamental. These overtones aren’t yet at saturation, even though the fundamental is.

When we reach tube saturation on the fundamental, our guitar still sounds like it did below saturation. But as soon as we get above that level, it sounds different – because the overtones, being weaker, can still get louder – but the fundamental, since it’s at saturation, can’t. At this point the sound of the guitar starts to change, creating that crunchy sound we’ve all grown to love from rock guitars.

As the volume continues to increase above saturation, the first overtone (the next E) also reaches saturation, followed by the B, and the next E. Now they’re all just as loud as the amp can get them… but the “roughly” G# can still continue to increase.

When we play an E major chord, the pitches are E-G#-B. If we’re playing all those tones at the same time, they’re all creating overtones. The E creates E-E-B-E-G#*-B-E; the G# creates G#-G#-D#-G#-B#*-D#-G#, and the B creates B-B-F#-B-D#*-F#-B (the asterisks denote the ‘roughly’ pitches).

So now we’ve got a G# pitch, the fundamental from the chord – for an open chord, that’s produced by the 3rd string, 1st fret – and we’ve got a “roughly” G#, produced by the overtone series of the open E string, and another an octave higher produced by the 2nd fret of the 4th string, and still another an octave higher produced by the open 1st string. Since the “roughly” G# pitches don’t match the exact G# pitch from the 3rd string, we start to sound dissonant, or muddy.

Removing the G# from the basic chord means we get only overtones from E and B:
E: E-E-B-E-G#*-B-E
B: B-B-F#-B-D#*-F#-B

It doesn’t matter as much that the D# and G# pitches aren’t dead on, because there aren’t any overtones to directly compete with them. That’s why an E5 power chord sounds “solid” with distortion, and an E major chord doesn’t.

All done with that digression.

A lot of punk bands (and a lot of metal bands, which typically also use distortion) play in drop tunings. “Drop D” tuning means you’re lowering the 6th string until it’s a D pitch. All the other drop tunings are related – “drop C” means you tune to drop D, then tune EVERY string an additional whole step lower, creating a tuning of C-G-C-F-A-D.

When you’re in a drop tuning, the 6th and 5th strings are now a perfect fifth apart – they’re a perfect fourth apart in standard tuning. Since power chords are perfect fifths, that means you can now play a power chord with just one finger: 33xxxx is F5 in Drop D tuning. This makes it possible to play entire power chord progressions using just one finger.

And one finger and sufficient attitude can make a hit tune!

Finally, digression four: why xx02xx and 10-12-xxxx are the same pitches, but they don’t sound exactly the same. Strings produce overtones based on their length, tension, and mass. In this case, we’ll assume that all of our strings are under the exact same tension. But the 10th fret of the low E string has a string vibrating for much less length than an open D string, even though they produce the same fundamental pitch. At the same time, the low E is much thicker, giving it more mass.

I’ll spare you the acoustic science equation, but the differences in mass and length mean they’ll produce different overtone distributions. This concept is called “string inharmonicity” – or why the same pitch created on two different length/mass strings sounds different. If you’re an acoustics geek like me, you can Google it for more detailed explanations.

But then again, if you’re an acoustics geek like me, you probably already know!

–

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. The latest one was posted a few days ago and has events running through April 8.

Random Thoughts

This is also not an April Fool’s joke – please take time today to share some laughs with friends and family. And some music, too, if you’re in the mood.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And listen to any music that comes your way.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 23 – March 15, 2012

David Hodge — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:08:59 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #23 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Welcome to the March 15 issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

It’s unfortunate to start out a newsletter on such a somber note, but I’d like to pass along condolences to Guitar Noise Forum Moderator Vic Lewis, whose wife passed away late last Friday evening. I never got the chance to meet Marilyn. But, like many folks at Guitar Noise, I did get the chance to know about her and to see the inspiration Vic drew from her and from their life together. By his own estimation, more than 90% of the songs Vic wrote for the Sunday Songwriters’ Group had a start with her.

As we discussed in our last newsletter, sometimes the beauty of music can help us all find strength to deal with all the curves life can throw us. If you get the chance, take a moment to listen to Vic’s songs, especially this one, called “Carry Me Home”

And take another moment to keep Vic and his family in your hearts, thoughts and prayers.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Van Morrison is our Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of March! You can read about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

And you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, Van Morrison’s Irish and it’s March and Saint Patrick’s Day is literally right around the corner, so there must be some theme going on here?” Of course you are absolutely correct! “Celtic Music” is the Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for March and you might want to take advantage of the many wonderful and beautiful Celtic music arrangements for guitar here on the pages of Guitar Noise. Go to our home page and click on the “Topic of the Month” link up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner and you’ll find a lot of great lessons and articles to satisfy the bit of Irish in all of us. Be sure to check out the arrangements by Doug Sparling!

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

The Only Theory Lesson You’ll Ever Need – Part 1
by Jim Bowley

Jim Bowley lays down the basics of music theory – in “Part 1″ you learn about notes and where they are on the fretboard of your guitar.

Straight Jacket Lessons – “Sofia”
Mini-Review by Lily

Captivating melodies, a driving punk beat and a tasteful touch of haunting harmony add up to Wales’ Straight Jacket Legends and their new EP, Lemon Party.

How To Record Guitar Parts in the Studio
by Tom Hess

Recording your guitar parts in a studio can be both frustrating and costly. Tom Hess details how to be better prepared to play your best while recording.

Adding The Bass – “Moondance”
by Dan Lasley

Dan Lasley shares a fun lesson with us. It’s a bass lesson to accompany our easy guitar song lesson on Van Morrison’s “Moondance.”

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 7
by Tom Serb

After the pentatonic, major, and common minor scales and the modes, everything else – with one exception – can be considered an exotic scale. Let’s look.

Home Routes – Bringing Music to the People
by David Hodge

House concerts are becoming a viable option for working musicians. Home Routes discusses the basics of house concerts for both would-be artists and hosts.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re starting a terrific new series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb your chord vocabulary:

Building a Chord Vocabulary

There are lots of possible chords. Almost all popular music follows “tertian” harmony, with chords built in thirds: C-E-G, etc.

Let me define “lots” a bit more precisely. By my count, there are roughly 47 different chord names used in the tertian system, including power “chords” and various altered and suspended chords used in popular music and jazz. Each of those chords can be built on 12 different tones, for a total of over 550 different chord sounds. (There will actually be more chord names than this, because of enharmonic spellings – Gb7 and F#7 have the same sound; on the other hand, there are fewer chord sounds than 47×12, because some, like C6 and Am7 contain identical tones).

Chords will vary in the number of pitches they can contain, from just two for power chords to seven for thirteenth chords. Each chord can have a number of ‘inversions’, which simply means a different note is in the bass – C-E-G, E-G-C, and G-C-E are all C major chords. The number of possible inversions will equal the number of tones in the chord, and the 47 chord names represent 228 different inversions. Multiply by twelve tones, and we’re up around 2700.

But we’re not done yet. Chords can be ‘voiced’ in many different ways. Since a C major chord contains the notes C-E-G, we can play a C major by using 332xxx, 3320xx, 33201x, 332010, x320xx, x3201x, x32010, xx201, xx2010, or xx010. That’s ten different voicings, and we haven’t even left first position. The fact is, many chords can be played in over 100 different voicings on the guitar. There will actually be a lot of duplicates (for reasons I’ll get into later on), but a guitar can play well over 20,000 different chord voicings. In fact, the guitar is capable of playing more chord voicings than any other instrument I’ve encountered.

Can anyone really play 10, 15, or 20,000 different chords? Yep, you bet. But if you learn one chord at a time it’s a Sisyphean task (as long as I’m building your chord vocabulary, I might as well build your regular one as well!). What we need is a strategy. I developed a system that worked for me in navigating the fretboard, and I’ve refined it as I’ve taught it to others; if you follow this system, you’ll be able to do it too.

Step 1: Learn the ‘cowboy’ chords. These are the open position major, minor, and dominant 7th chords: A, C, D, E, G, Am, Dm, Em, A7, B7, C7, D7, E7, and G7. That’s just 14 chords, and you can learn them by rote in two or three weeks if you don’t know them already.

Step 2: Learn the way notes are named. The musical alphabet contains the letters A-G, with two pairs of letter names one fret apart: B-C and E-F. All the other letter names are separated by two frets, and the fret in between can be called either of two names – on the first string, we have F at the first fret and G at the third fret; the fret in between can be called either F# (F-sharp) or Gb (G-flat).

Step 3: Any chord fingering can be moved to any position on the neck. As long as ALL the strings you play are moved by the same amount, the chord type will remain the same. So if you know that x02220 is an A major chord, xx444x will be a B major chord.

The trouble here is that it’s hard to strum a chord that doesn’t have strings played at one end or the other – the first or sixth strings. Since we had to move two frets to get from A to B, moving the open first string up two frets gets you a strummable B chord: xx4442 (finger it 2341).

Using this logic, you can turn the 14 cowboy chords into hundreds of different chord voicings. This is the essence of barre chords: you can turn E major (022100) into F major (133211) by using your first finger across all six strings.

What might not be so obvious is that you can also turn other cowboy chords into moveable voicings by leaving out one or more strings. G7 (320001) can become Ab7 by leaving out the two bass strings: xx1112. G major (320001) becomes C major by leaving out bass strings (xx5558) or the high E (87555x). You can actually create about 3-400 different voicings just by moving these basic chords!

Don’t overlook the possibilities of moving the two four-fingered chords either. Angling your third finger to dampen the second string on B7 creates a x212x2 voicing – since it has no open strings, it’s moveable. So is C7 if you angle your first finger to dampen the high E: x5452x is a D7 voicing.

Step 4: Take common chords and learn which chord tones fall on each string, and then learn to change them according to some basic rules of thumb. To illustrate this idea, I’ll use E major: 022100. The notes of the voicing are E-B-E-G#-B-E; those are the root (E), third (G#) and fifth (B) of the E major scale. So our chord voicing is R5R35R.

Notice that you’ve got a couple of ’5′ notes in there. You’ve also got three ‘R’ notes. In music theory terms, those are called ‘doublings’, and they don’t change the name of the chord.

Now let’s apply some rules of thumb…

The 9th note of the scale is the same as the 2nd note; that’s going to lie 2 frets above a root (R), or 2 frets below a 3rd (3). Since this particular voicing has only one third, we want to keep it for now, and we’ll change one of the ‘R’ notes to a 9, creating an Eadd9 chord: 022102 (R5R359)

The 4th note of the scale is the same as the 11th note, and it lies one fret above 3 or two frets below 5. But an 11th chord is a dominant chord type, so it also contains a b7 – we’ll get to that shortly. But a ‘sus’ chord replaces 3 with 4 – so 022200 creates an Esus chord (often written as Esus4).

The 6th note of the scale is the same as the 13th note – 13 is used when it’s a dominant chord (containing a b7), and 6 when the 7th isn’t present. The 6 is two frets above 5, or three frets below R. So we can turn E major into E6 by using 022120. We can create a different voicing by changing the other 5, playing 042100.

The 7 is special – lowering R by one fret gives us the major 7th; lowering it two frets gives us a b7, which is what’s used in dominant 7th chords. Now we can create Emaj7 by using 021100, or E7 with 020100.

The b7 also lies three frets above 5 (and the natural, or major 7th is four frets above 5). That gives us another voicing of E7: 022130, or R5R3b7R. Or we can double the b7, playing 020130 for another E7 voicing. If you’re ambitious, you can even try 021140 for Emaj7 (R5737R) – flatten your first finger across the third and fourth strings, but bend backwards at the knuckle to clear the high E. Can’t clear it? That’s ok too – if you can lift enough to dampen the string, 02114x is yet another Emaj7 voicing (R5737x).

Having a b7 in a chord to create an E7 voicing allows us to revisit 9, 11 and 13. A 9th chord is a dominant 7 with the addition of the 2 (or 9) of the scale – as you’ll recall, that’s two frets above R. So we can turn the 020100 E7 into 020102 E9 (R5b7359). We can also make E9 by using 020132 (R5b73b79) or 024130 (R593b7R).

11th chords are dominant chords with the 4th scale tone added. In theory, an 11th chord also contains the 9th; in practice it doesn’t have to – including too many tones in a chord makes it sound muddy, so most voicings stick to a total of just 4 or 5 different tones, no matter how many notes might be allowed by theory. Since 4 is a fret above 3 or two frets below 5, we can create 000100 (R-11-b7-3-5-R) for E11.

13th chords are dominant chords with the 6th scale tone included. Like 11th chords, they contain 9 and 11 in theory, but usually not in practice. Since the 6 or 13 is two frets above 5 or three below R, we can easily build E13: 020120 (R-5-b7-3-13-R).

Step 5: Learn to apply the same logic to the chords of step 3. Because full barre chords often use too many fingers to make these variations practical, I start by simplifying them. Let’s take the A-shape barre chord for this one: played as a C major, it’s x35553, or xR5R35. If you barre it across all six strings, its still a C chord (3R5R53).

I start by considering what I’ll need to change for a chord. For an add 9 chord, I’ll want to move R up by two frets, or 3 down by one. So I’ll form a four-finger chord voicing that doubles only the note I want to change. So I might start with x3555x (xR5R3x) – and raising R by two frets I get my Cadd9: x5555x.

Experimenting with these rules of thumb can bring you tons of new voicings. Starting with the same chord, I can lower R by one fret for Cmaj7: x3545x (xR573x), two frets for C7: x3535x (xR5b73x), or three frets for C6: x3525x (xR563x).

Step 6: This is the pinnacle of chord formation, and it involves four parts:

a) Learn the notes on the fretboard
b) Learn the letter spellings of every major scale
c) Learn what notes are altered for each chord name
d) Learn which notes are important

If you can get these under your belt, you’ll never again need a chord dictionary, and you’ll create your own voicings anywhere on the guitar.

For learning the fretboard, I recommend learning by rote. Although it’s possible to learn by reference to other notes (especially in octave patterns), I think note names are as important to a musician as multiplication tables are to a mathematician – they’re part of our basic tools. When I set out to learn the fretboard, I did it by making flash cards; I’d shuffle my little deck, flip over a card, and try to find that note name on all six strings as quickly as I could. Then I’d move on to the next card. As I recall, it took me about three weeks to have the fretboard down cold, working about 15 minutes a day.

I’d take the same approach to scales. Major scales are a basic element in music theory, so if you have them absolutely memorized you’ll find lots of uses for what you’ve learned.

For chord names, there’s a key built right into the name:

‘m’ in a chord name (or a minus sign in some charts) means minor – the third is lowered one fret from the major scale

‘+’ or ‘aug’ in a chord name means the fifth is raised one fret from the major scale.

‘sus’ in a chord name means the third is raised one fret to become a fourth (NOTE: many publications are now using names like ‘sus2′; these names imply the third is replaced with the scale degree that follows ‘sus’. This isn’t part of standard music theory – and leads to duplication of chord names, as Csus2 is the same chord as Gsus – but it’s also a fact of life for guitarists today, even if it’s theoretically incorrect!)

‘ °’ in a chord name means both the third and fifth are lowered one fret

‘add’ in a chord name means the tone that follows (like add9 or add11) is added to the chord, with no other alterations

‘maj’ in a chord name followed by any number refers to the 7th; the chord will include a major 7th rather than a b7. (In some jazz charts you may see a triangle instead of ‘maj’, as in C 7)

’7′, ’9′, ’11′, and ’13′ imply two things: first, that the 7 is flatted – it’s two frets below R; second, the chord may include any odd number below the one in the name (so an 11 may include 9)

‘alt’ in a chord name means you can raise or lower the 5 by one fret, and you can raise or lower the 9 by one fret. So “C7alt” may be C7b5, C7+, C7b9, C7#9, C7b5b9, etc. – it’s your choice

Chord symbols may appear in any order without changing the meaning; C+7 is the same as C7+.

There are some other variations out there – the use of lower case for minor chords, as in d7 for Dm7, but they’re pretty rare.

At the end of this lesson is a handout I made for my students a few years ago showing all the chord names, symbols, and formulas:

The last key, especially for chords with formulas of five or more notes, is knowing which tones are important to include. Your ear should always be your guide, but as a set of general rules:

Always include the highest number in the chord name (i.e., an 11th chord needs an 11th)
Include any altered tones whenever possible (#5 for a + chord, etc)
Include both the 3rd and b7 for dominant chords whenever possible
Include any tones that create a characteristic sound (b3 for minor chords, 4 for sus chords)

Notice that this list of rules doesn’t mention the root. There’s a difference between what we do in theory and what we do in practice, and the root of a chord usually isn’t very important to the sound – or at least not as important as other chord tones, and if a chord has too many notes to play them all, something has to go. For a little more information on how to handle the ‘big’ altered and extended chords, see my previous GN lessons on those topics.

Chord spellings

TYPE                                  SPELLING WRITTEN AS
‘Power’ 1-4                                                       C4
‘Power’ 1-5                                                       C5, C(no 3rd)
Diminished 1-b3-b5 Cº, Cdim, Cmb5, C-b5
Minor 1-b3-5                                                 Cm, Cmi, Cmin, C-
Major b5 1-3-b5                                                 C(b5)
Major 1-3-5                                                   C
Augmented 1-3-#5 C+, Caug
Suspended 1-4-5                                                   Csus, Csus4; ‘sus2’ etc. sometimes used (incorrectly)

Diminshed 7 1-b3-b5-bb7                                      Cº, Cº7, Cdim7
Half-diminshed 1-b3-b5-b7 C ø, Cm7b5, Cmi7b5, Cmin7b5, C-7b5
Minor 6th 1-b3-5-6 Cm6, Cmi6, Cmin6, C-6
Minor 7th 1-b3-5-b7 Cm7, Cmi7, Cmin7, C-7
Minor add9 1-b3-5-9                                                         Cm(add 9), Cmi(add9), Cmin(add9)
C-(add 9); ‘add 2’ sometimes used
Sixth 1-3-5-6 C6
Dominant 7th                     1-3-5-b7 C7
Major add9 1-3-5-9                                                C (add9), C2
Minor add4 1-3-5-11 C (add4), C (add11), C4 – can be
confused with power chords
Major 7th 1-3-5-7                                                Cmaj7, CM7, C∆
Augmented 7 1-3-#5-b7 C7+, C+7
Augmented major 7 1-3-#5-7 Cmaj7+, C+maj7, C+∆
Minor 6/9 1-b3-5-6-9                                          Cm6/9, Cmi6/9, Cmin6/9, C-6/9,
Cm69, Cm6 (add9)
Minor 9th 1-b3-5-b7-9                                       Cm9, Cmi9, Cmin9, C-9
Ninth b5 1-3-b5-b7-9                                       C9b5
Sixth/seventh 1-3-5-6-b7                                          C6/7, C7/6, C7 (add13), C7/13, C67
6/9 1-3-5-6-9                                            C6/9, C69, C6 (add9), C9/6
Seven flat 9 1-3-5-b7-b9 C7b9
Ninth 1-3-5-b7-9                                          C9
Seventh sharp 9 1-3-5-b7-#9                                       C7#9
Major 9th 1-3-5-7-9                                            Cmaj9
Seventh b9 aug 1-3-#5-b7-b9                                     C7b9+, C+7b9
Augmented 9th 1-3-#5-b7-9                                       C9+, C+9
7 sharp 9 aug 1-3-#5-b7-#9                                     C7#9+, C+7#9
Suspended ninth 1-4-5-b7-9                                          C9sus, C9sus4
Minor 11th 1-b3-5-b7-9-11 Cm11, Cmi11, Cmin11, C-11
Seventh b9#9 1-3-5-b7-b9-#9 C7b9#9
Seventh b9#11 1-3-5-b7-b9-#11 C7b9#11
Ninth #11 1-3-5-b7-9-11                                    C9#11
Major 9th #11 1-3-5-7-9-#11                                    Cmaj9#11
7b9#9 augmented 1-3-#5-b7-b9-#9 C7b9#9+, C+7b9#9
7b9#11 augmented 1-3-#5-b7-b9-#11 C7b9#11+, C+7b9#11
13th suspended 1-4-5-b7-9-13                                    C13sus, C13sus4
Minor 13th 1-b3-5-b7-9-11-13 Cm13, Cmi13, Cmin13, C-13
13th #11b9 1-3-5-b7-b9-#11-13                         C13#11b9
13th #11 1-3-5-b7-9-#11-13                           C13#11
13th 1-3-5-b7-9-11-13                              C13
Major 13th 1-3-5-7-9-11-13 Cmaj13
Major 13th #11 1-3-5-7-9-#11-13 Cmaj13#11

–

Events Horizon

Random Thoughts

House concerts, such as those described in this month’s interview with Home Routes, aren’t new But in this day and age, the idea of having an intimate and engaging show, for you and people you know who love music, they can be absolutely magical.

Another benefit of house concerts that wasn’t mentioned in the Q & A is this – they can help you establish local musical friendships which could grow into neighbor jams and get-togethers. We get a lot of emails from people asking how to find other guitarists and musicians to play with and hosting a house concert would certainly be one way to find potential jam partners.

And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll see you out on the house concert tour circuit!

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And listen to any music that comes your way.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 22 – March 1, 2012

David Hodge — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:38:14 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #22 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
EMail of the Moment
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

I’m half tempted to make some sort of joke that even though it’s March first and you are currently reading the March 1 issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com, that we’re still a day later than usual in getting this to you. Leap year, you see. And then I realized that if I had to explain that all to you, it really isn’t that good of a joke. So instead, let me just welcome you to the latest newsletter!

This time of year is a bit tough for writing the newsletter. We’ve got the “Day before Groundhog’s Day” issue, then the “Day After Valentine’s Day” issue and then the “Day After Leap Day” issue. And, then the “Ides of March” issue comes up and then it’s April Fool’s Day yet again. And then the “Taxes Due” issue! No wonder I try to talk Charley into writing these whenever February rolls around.

But Charley seems to have other plans at the moment. For starters, he’s attempting to learn Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” the latest of our returning Guitar Noise song lessons. Starting today, this classic tune joins our other lessons – “Three Marlenas,” “Horse With No Name,” “Hey There, Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons (“Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight)” – back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page, where each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for continuing to work with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons. It’s great to have a Van Morrison song back on the pages!

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

So great, in fact that we’ve decided to make Van Morrison the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of March! You can read about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

And you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, Van Morrison’s Irish and it’s March and Saint Patrick’s Day happens in March so are these guys going to be so lazy that they’ll have “Celtic Music” be the March “Topic of the Month?” Of course we are! Seriously, though, there are some wonderful and beautiful Celtic music arrangements for guitar here on the pages of Guitar Noise. Go to our home page and click on the “Topic of the Month” link up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner and you’ll find a lot of great lessons and articles to satisfy the bit of Irish in all of us. Be sure to check out the arrangements by Doug Sparling!

Email of the Moment

Hi David!

I can’t help but notice (since I live with you) that you, and probably Paul as well, get maybe hundreds of requests to review things each month. Understandably, there’s nowhere near enough time to do so, especially as I know you like to write detailed reviews about anything you hear. But I’d like to suggest that I can help. If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to do short reviews (my time is also fairly limited as I have a lot of naps scheduled through my day) if you’d like. Have Paul check with Lucky, too. I’m betting she would also be more than happy to help. Beats sitting in the clothes dryer!

Meow!

Lily

Hi Lily!

Thanks for offering. Paul has talked with Lucky and we’re both more than happy to have you help us! Please feel free to write up some “mini-reviews” of whatever strikes your fancy. And I’m not even going to ask how you’ve managed to read my emails to find out all this stuff in the first place! I figure that Charley probably gave you the password!

Peace

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

The Hang – “Anthem”
Mini-Review by Lucky

This video, shot mostly on an iPhone, features Jon Sosin of The Hang recording the solo for “Anthem,” a song from the band’s upcoming album “Playola.”

When Kisses Become Scars – “Caught Up”
Mini-Review by Lucky

If you like Jimmy Eat World and Foo Fighters and want to hear the unsigned indie version, then this U.K. band is for you.

Songs Are Overrated – Riffs Rule!
by Jim Bowley

Guitar Noise welcomes Jim Bowley to our pages! Here he discusses the positives of learning the guitar riffs of songs and how doing so can make you a better guitarist in the long run.

Marilyn Miller – “Nighthawk”
Mini-Review by Lily

A passionate debut CD that both rocks and sighs, Nighthawk takes you through a wild musical journey through the heart of Hudson, New York.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 6
by Tom Serb

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of. Part 6 deals with modes.

Will The Wind Ever Remember – A Tribute To Steinar Gregertsen
by David Hodge

Steinar passed away Monday, February 27, 2012. We at Guitar Noise offer our condolences and thank him for sharing his music with us and with the world.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 9

Even More Exotic Scales!

At the end of the Part 8, you may have noticed I wrote “in our twelve-tone system.” Western music currently divides an octave into twelve equal parts, and the tuning we use is called 12TET, for 12 tone equal temperament. Prior to the 18th century, we used twelve tones, but they weren’t equally divided. Scales in the earlier Western systems (which was used by Bach, Mozart, and others) had twelve tones, but they weren’t equally divided – you can find some recordings of -period’ instruments using the earlier tunings, and you can probably hear a difference in the scales. But the scales used have the same names I’ve outlined in this series, because they use the same twelve tones.

The reason Western tuning changed was because of a mathematical oddity in scales – a “perfect” octave has one note vibrating exactly twice as fast as the other. In a “perfect” fifth, one note vibrates exactly one-and-a-half times faster than the other. Twelve perfect fifths make seven perfect octaves, but if you take a starting frequency and multiply it by itself 12 times, you don’t get the same result as doubling it seven times. The first person to figure this out was Pythagoras (yep, the triangle guy) and the difference is called the “Pythagorean comma”. What it means in practical terms is that we can’t have all our notes perfectly in tune – if we try to get some sounds really, truly, perfectly in tune with others, we force OTHER tones to be out of tune! Our Western solution was to make every note equally spaced, which makes every note except the octave just a bit out of tune.

Other cultures have taken different approaches to the problem of the Pythagorean comma, and their solutions have divided the octave into some other division than 12. That means you won’t be able to just fret these scales – you’ll have to selectively bend notes to hit pitches that are between our twelve tones. I’ll outline two of these systems for you to experiment with.

In the Arabian peninsula music theorists took a mathematical approach, and the theory (which dates back about 1200 years) divides the octave into 17 parts. But it’s not quite as simple as dividing by 17! Most of the music of the middle east and North Africa is vocal, or accompanied by instruments like the oud, which is fretless – so they’re not constrained by “fixed intonation”. As a result, there are regional differences that have developed in their scales. What I’m calling “Arabian” is a broad description; it covers music from the Arabian peninsula all the way up to the Black Sea, as well as much of north Africa and the Southwestern parts of the former Soviet Union.

Modern Arabian music uses at least 24 different pitches to the octave, and the placement of those pitches can be a little different in Iraq than they are in Algeria! If you’re really interested in this sort of music, listen to it closely and use what you hear!

But here’s the basic structure: Arabian scales are called “maqams”, and each maqam is made up of two or more “jins”, which are fragments of 3 to 5 notes. The jins may follow one another, or they may overlap (i.e., the last two notes of one jin may also be the first two notes of the next jin), or they may be separated by one or two other tones, usually equivalent to our half steps and whole steps. This means there are a HUGE number of possible maqams, so I’m going to focus just on the jins. I’ll start them all from C; you’ll need to transpose them up to create whole maqams from these. The Hijaz, Bayati, and Sikah are the ones most commonly heard.

We’ll start with the ones that can be played without bends:

C-Db-Eb-F is the Kurd jin. It’s the same as the beginning of our Phrygian scale.

C-D-Eb-F is the Nahawand jin. It’s the same as the beginning of our minor scales.

C-Db-Eb-Fb is the Zamzama jin.

C-D-Eb-F#-G is the Nawa Athar jin, and

C-Db-Eb-F#-G is the Athar Kurd (it’s the Nawa Athar with the second note flatted)

Now we start bending. Here you’ll have to use your ears, because the differences can be small.

C-D-E* (the E is played just slightly flat, so you bend from D# about 90% of the way to E) is the Ajam.

C-D-E** (with the E just a little more flat than in the Ajam – maybe 80% of the way to E) is the Jiharkah.

C-D-Eb*-F is the Busalik

C-Db*-E***-F (with E bent sharp by about 10%) is the Hijaz.

Several jins make use of notes about halfway between our pitches. I’ll indicate those with the notes on either side, as in Db/D – you bend halfway from Db to D to get the right sound:

C-Db/D-Eb/E is the Sikah jin. If you want, you can bend the C to be C/C#, and just follow it with D and E.

C-D/Eb-Eb/E is the Mustaar. You can also go from C/C# to Eb and then E.

C-Db/D-Eb-F is the Bayati.

C-D-Eb/E-F is the Rast.

C-Db/D-Eb-Fb is the Saba.

The music of India consists of an entirely different system, called raga. When I studied Indian music in a college class, we were taught that there were 72 ragas – I’ve since learned that wasn’t exactly true (it’s more like 300!) The music of Southern India follows a system of “Carnatic” ragas; Northern India uses “Hindustani” ragas. They have different origins, so while there is overlap, it’s either coincidental or the result of unrecorded past influences from the other system. What I was being taught was a Southern system (as it turns out, it’s not even the only Southern system!), which does have 72, but there are modifications used that push that to 100 or so.

Ragas have cultural and religious implications; some are to be performed at certain times of the day, or during certain seasons of the year. I admit I’ve never really gotten a good grasp on that aspect of ragas. But I do understand at least a bit about how they work musically – ragas, like our Western diatonic scales, each consist of seven notes in an octave.

Every raga contains two fixed notes, Sa (our “do”, or C) and Pa (our “sol”, or G). Because of this, raga melodies can have cadences that are virtually identical to those in Western music. But the other five notes in a raga can take either two forms (like our D or Db) or three forms – like Db, D, or D#. Some of their pitches are identical in sound, like our F# and Gb.

Ancient ragas divided an octave into 22 divisions called shruti. In most parts of India this has given way to a twelve tone system – that’s the one I’ll present here. But drawing on the shruti heritage, the 12 tones that make up ragas aren’t equally spaced. So we’ll need to start with a slightly different scale. The one I’m presenting I can’t pretend is standardÃ¢ï¿½Â¦ but that’s because there ISN’T a standard! The actual divisions of the octave can vary from place to place, and even from one performance to another.

But to make this at least a bit accessible, I’m going to simplify the tones. I’ve worked this section from recordings of ragas, and where the pitch is within 5 cents or so of what we use, I’ll just make them equivalent (a cent in music is 1/100th of a half step). You’ll need to adjust a couple of tones in the ragas:

C# will be about 10% flatter than our C#; bend up the C below most of the way to C#
A will be about 15% flatter than our A; bend up from the G# below

Got that? Ok, on with the scales. I’m showing all of them with sharp tones to keep things simple, and to avoid having to go into how shruti are named.

Kanakangi = C-C#-D-F-G-G#-A-C
Ratnangi = C-C#-D-F-G-G#-A#-C
Ganamurti = C-C#-D-F-G-G#-B-C
Vanaspati = C-D#-D-F-G-A-A#-C
Manavati = C-D#-D-F-G-A-B-C
Tanarupi = C-D#-D-F-G-A#-B-C
Senavati = C-C#-D#-F-G-G#-A-C
Hanumatodi = C-C#-D#-F-G-G#-A#-C
Dhenuka = C-C#-D#-F-G-G#-B-C
Natakapriya = C-C#-D#-F-G-A-A#-C
Kokilapriya = C-C#-D#-F-G-A-B-C
Rupavati = C-C#-D#-F-G-A#-B-C
Gayakapriya = C-C#-E-F-G-G#-A-C
Vakulabharanam = C-C#-E-F-G-G#-A#-C
Mayamalavagowla = C-C#-E-F-G-G#-B-C
Chakravakam = C-C#-E-F-G-A-A#-C
Suryakantam = C-C#-E-F-G-A-B-C
Hatakambari = C-C#-E-F-G-A#-B-C
Jhankaradhwani = C-D-D#-F-G-G#-A-C
Natabhairavi = C-D-D#-F-G-G#-A#-C
Keeravani = C-D-D#-F-G-G#-B-C
Kharaharapriya = C-D-D#-F-G-A-A#-C
Gourimanohari = C-D-D#-F-G-A-B-C
Varunapriya = C-D-D#-F-G-A#-B-C
Mararanjani = C-D-E-F-G-G#-A-C
Charukesi = C-D-E-F-G-G#-A#-C
Sarasangi = C-D-E-F-G-G#-B-C
Harikambhoji = C-D-E-F-G-A-A#-C
Dheerasankarabharanam = C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C (not quite our major scale, because A is a bit flat)
Naganandini = C-D-E-F-G-A#-B-C
Yagapriya = C-D#-E-F-G-G#-A-C
Ragavardhini = C-D#-E-F-G-G#-A#-C
Gangeyabhushani = C-D#-E-F-G-G#-B-C
Vagadheeswari = C-D#-E-F-G-A-A#-C
Shulini = C-D#-E-F-G-A-B-C
Chalanata = C-D#-E-F-G-A#-B-C
Salagam = C-C#-D-F#-G-G#-A-C
Jalamavam = C-C#-D-F#-G-G#-A#-C
Jhalavarali = C-C#-D-F#-G-G#-B-C
Navaneetam = C-C#-D-F#-G-A-A#-C
Pavani = C-C#-D-F#-G-A-B-C
Raghupriya = C-C#-D-F#-G-A#-B-C
Gavambhodi = C-C#-D#-F#-G-G#-A-C
Bhavapriya = C-C#-D#-F#-G-G#-A#-C
Shubhapantuvarali = C-C#-D#-F#-G-G#-B-C
Shadvidamargini = C-C#-D#-F#-G-A-A#-C
Suvamangi = C-C#-D#-F#-G-A-B-C
Divyamani = C-C#-D#-F#-G-A#-B-C
Dhavalambari = C-C#-E-F#-G-G#-A-C
Namanarayani = C-C#-E-F#-G-G#-A#-C
Kamavardani = C-C#-E-F#-G-G#-B-C
Ramapriya = C-C#-E-F#-G-A-A#-C
Gamanashrama = C-C#-E-F#-G-A-B-C
Vishwambari = C-C#-E-F#-G-A#-B-C
Shamalangi = C-D-D#-F#-G-G#-A-C
Shanmukhapriya = C-D-D#-F#-G-G#-A#-C
Simhendramadhyamam = C-D-D#-F#-G-G#-B-C
Hemavati = C-D-D#-F#-G-A-A#-C
Dharmavati = C-D-D#-F#-G-A-B-C
Neetimati = C-D-D#-F#-G-A#-B-C
Kantamani = C-D-E-F#-G-G#-A-C
Rishabhapriya = C-D-E-F#-G-G#-A#-C
Latangi = C-D-E-F#-G-G#-B-C
Vachaspati = C-D-E-F#-G-A-A#-C
Mechakalyani = C-D-E-F#-G-A-B-C
Chitambari = C-D-E-F#-G-A#-B-C
Suchantra = C-D#-E-F#-G-G#-A-C
Jyoti swarupini = C-D#-E-F#-G-G#-A#-C
Dhatuvardani = C-D#-E-F#-G-G#-B-C
Nasikabhushani = C-D#-E-F#-G-A-A#-C
Kosalam = C-D#-E-F#-G-A-B-C
Rasikapriya = C-D#-E-F#-G-A#-B-C

Many, many more scales are possible. I’ve only touched on the ones that are commonly used in Western music with the 12TET scale, and those that are culturally widespread. But theorists and composers are continually experimenting – tuning systems now exist that divide an octave into 15, 17, 19, 22, 24, 31, 34, 41, 53, and 72 equal divisions, and unequal tuning systems are also possibleÃ¢ï¿½Â¦ from the historical ones like the Werkmeister tunings used by Bach to tomorrow’s innovations.

I hope this series has given your fingers some food for thought!

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website, http://mwmusicacademy.com/, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

Random Thoughts

Little did I realize that the “Random Thoughts” of our last newsletter would be back in my head so quickly, This past Monday, February 27, I learned of the passing of Steinar Gregertsen, who’s been a member of the Guitar Noise community since the summer of 2005. Ask anyone who’s corresponded with Steinar or interacted with him on the Guitar Noise Forums (or on the Steel Guitar Forum pages, where he was also a frequent contributor) and you’ll hear about his generosity and giving spirit. He was all about sharing music and advice and giving help to whomever might ask.

If you’ve not done so, take a moment and read our blog post about him, Watch and listen to the videos or go directly to YouTube and do a search on him. Or visit his webpage. Whenever you hear his music, even if you didn’t know him, you keep a vital part of his life in your heart. He’d be thrilled that you did.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And listen to any music that comes your way.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 21 – February 15, 2012

David Hodge — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:25:35 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #21 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts
Subscription / Unsubscription Info

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the the annual “did you really go and miss Valentine’s Day” issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. If you totally spaced out on the date, you are hereby granted permission to stop reading further until you’ve made amends with the love of your life. We’ll wait to bring you up to speed until you get back!

Okay, then, as you hopefully read in our last newsletter, we’ve brought back our song lesson on “Three Marlenas,” written by Jakob Dylan and performed by the Wallflowers to the pages of Guitar Noise.. This latest lesson joins “Horse With No Name,” “Hey There, Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” – back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page, where each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for continuing to work with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Great songs transcend genres and when a particular band is cited as an influence by those in rock, punk, metal, pop and more, you have to know that it’s the music that made it so. This month Guitar Noise celebrates the Davies brothers – Dave and Ray – and their band, The Kinks. Read about them on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

We’re showcasing our lessons on finger picking for the February “Topic of the Month” here at Guitar Noise. Who knows? Maybe “Finger Picking February” will catch on! Stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner and you’ll find a lot of great lessons and articles to help you get started and to improve upon your finger picking skills. And also be sure to visit our “Song Arrangement” page where you’ll find even more songs on which to practice you fingerpicking skills.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

5 Things Designers Can Teach Musicians
by Nadine Gressett

Within the creative industry, it’s perhaps designers that offer the best perspective on how to make you and your music irresistible.

Playing Percussively
by David Hodge

Learn to add percussive strumming to your rhythm playing. David walks you through the basic technique, step by step, with audio examples.

Q & A: Choice Of Scale For Soloing
by David Hodge

When faced with the many choices one has when soloing, sometimes it’s really best, at least at first, to start out very simply.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 8

Additional Exotic Scales

In addition to what composers have done, theorists have provided us with many scales. In an earlier installment I outlined Heinrich Glaren’s theory of modes; he found that the existing church modes and secular scales could all be seen as the major scale “starting from” different notes.

The harmonic minor scale had the formula 1-2-b3-4-5-b6-7 compared to the major scale. If we’re starting from A, the A harmonic minor scale will be A-B-C-D-E-F-G#-A.

If we shift the starting point, we can construct a scale of B-C-D-E-F-G#-A-B. We can think of this as a ‘mode’ of the harmonic minor scale.

Because any scale can be shifted this way to make an entirely new scale, we can quickly get lost in the permutations. The easiest way to deal with this problem is to think of each new scale as one of the scales you already know with one note altered. This scale is our B Locrian scale with the sixth note raised – in other words, you can think of this as the Locrian #6 scale. It’s often called the Locrian 13 scale. To understand why it’s called that, we’ll take a quick look at extended chords.

Chords are built in thirds – that’s every other note of the major scale. If we take a B major scale as our starting point:

B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#-B

We can take every other letter and build chords:

B-D#-F# = B major
B-D#-F#-A = B7 (dominant 7th chords have a lowered 3rd; this has A instead of the scale’s A#)
B-D#-F#-A-C# = B9 (notice that the 9th, C#, is the same note as the 2nd scale note)
B-D#-F#-A-C#-E = B11 (E is the 11th; it’s also the 4th note of the scale)
B-D#-F#-A-C#-E-G# = B13 (G# is the 13th; it’s the same note as the 6th of the scale)

Because the ‘modes’ of the minor scales are often used for improvising over extended jazz chords, calling the scale “Locrian 13″ tells us it’s going to work over an altered minor 13th chord. It’ll work because it’s got the 13th; it’s going to work better over minor 13th chords because it’s got a b3 – the scale has F instead of F#; and altered chords change either the 9th or 5th… in this case, the scale has a b5. By naming these scales using altered odd numbers, we can sort of key in their use to particular chord formulas.

Starting from the next note, we get C-D-E-F-G#-A-B-C. This is our major scale with a raised 5th, or the Ionian #5 scale.

Moving on, we get D-E-F-G#-A-B-C-D. This is our D Dorian scale with the 4th note raised. Since the 4th of a scale is also the 11th of a chord, this is called Dorian #11.

The next scale would be E-F-G#-A-B-C-D-E. This looks a bit like E major, because of the G#, but it doesn’t have any other sharps – E major also has F#, C#, and D#. Lowering the 7th note of a major scale gets us a Mixolydian scale, so this is E Mixolydian with TWO notes altered – the 2nd and 6th notes are lowered. In keeping with our chord/scale labeling system, this is called E Mixolydian b9 b13.

Next we get F-G#-A-B-C-D-E-F. That’s our F Lydian scale with the 2nd note raised, so we call it Lydian #9.

And finally, we get G#-A-B-C-D-E-F. This one gets ugly for naming, because there’s no G# major scale. In theory there could be, but it would have a double-sharped F, so it’s not practical for everyday use. But we’ll take it as our starting point – the symbol for a double sharp is ‘x’ – here’s the G# major scale and our latest mode:

G#-A#-B#-C#-D#-E#-Fx-G# = G# major
G#-A-B-C-D-E-F-G# = 7th mode of the harmonic minor

You can see that this scale changes just about everything! A is the b2, and D is the b5 – both are found in the Locrian scale, along with the B. But we’ve also lowered the 4th, and we’ve lowered the 7th TWICE! Because this one is so heavily altered, it’s not going to work over any common chords, and we simply call it Locrian b4 bb7 (yes, that’s a double flatted 7th).

We can do the same thing with the melodic minor scale, but we’ll only form ‘modes’ from the ascending pattern (because the descending pattern is already a mode of the major scale – the Aeolian, so the ‘modes’ are the same as the other major scale modes). Here’s the A melodic minor:

A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#-A

The first mode will be B-C-D-E-F#-G#-A-B, which is the Dorian scale with a b9.

The second mode is C-D-E-F#-G#-A-B-C. The F# makes this a Lydian scale type; the G# means it will blend well with augmented chords (major chords with a raised fifth), so it’s called the Lydian Augmented.

The third mode is D-E-F#-G#-A-B-C-D. G# makes this another Lydian scale type; the C is lowered compared the D major scale, so this is the Lydian b7.

Next we have E-F#-G#-A-B-C-D-E. The first five notes match the E major scale. But E major has a D#, so this has a lowered 7th – that’s a Mixolydian type scale, but with the C also lowered; we call this Mixolydian b13.

Then we have F#-G#-A-B-C-D-E-F#. In our major scales, F# is the key of G; the F# scale built from G major notes would be Locrian. But F# Locrian would have G natural, so we call this the Locrian 9 (meaning we’re using the 9th/2nd from the major scale).

Finally, we have G#-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#. If you go back to our theoretical G# major scale (G#-A#-B#-C#-D#-E#-Fx-G#), you can see that this is G# major with EVERYTHING lowered – in other words, scale formula 1-b2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7. This one is simply called the ‘altered’ scale. You can also think of this as the Locrian scale (1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7) with the fourth lowered, or Locrian b4.

Perhaps at this point you can see how useful it is to name scales by altering a note or two from more common scales. Many other scales can be identified this way – and created this way. You could play E-F-G-A-B-C#-D-E, and think of it as the Phrygian #6. You could play F-G-A-B-C#-D-E-F, and think of it as Lydian #5. Any and all combinations of basic (or not so basic) scales with altered notes are possible.

So when you hear someone talk about the “Lydian dominant” scale, you can think of it as a Lydian scale – that’s the major scale with a #4 – combined with a dominant chord, which has a b7. 1-2-3-#4-5-6-b7 is the Lydian dominant. The “Phrygian major” scale is just the Phrygian (1-b2-b3-4-5-b6-b7) with the third raised, or 1-b2-3-4-5-b6-b7.

Another scale created by theory before it was ever used in music is the “two semitone tritone” scale, created by Nicholas Slonimsky. Focusing on the fact that altered chords in jazz make use of the b5, 5, or #5, he started there – with the series F#, G, and Ab. Those tones are each semitones (or half steps) apart; duplicating that pattern a tritone away gave him C, Db, and D. So the two semitone tritone scale is C-Db-D-F#-G-Ab, or 1-b2-2-#4-5-b6. It’ll work over any altered dominant chord in jazz.

Theorists even create scales just for the fun of it – an Italian music journal in the 1800s posted a scale as a challenge to composers to find a way to harmonize it; Opera composer Giuseppe Verdi answered the challenge, composing “Ave Maria (sulla scala enigmatica)”, naming the scale in the process – the enigmatic scale contains C-Db-E-F#-G#-A#-B going up, and substitutes F natural for F# going down. It’s been used by a few other composers since then, including Joe Satriani in the tune “The Enigmatic”.

There are still other scales in our twelve-tone system, but the ones I’m leaving out really haven’t been used in music (at least not yet). They’re still in the theory books waiting for composers to try them out.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

Random Thoughts

Valentine’s Day or not, do yourself a favor. Make a point to tell someone you care about that you do care about him or her. You could write a song, but simply saying so is perfectly fine, too.

Why? Because the last thing you want to deal with in life is thinking that you never told someone what he or she meant to you. Because there will always come a time when you won’t be able to do so. Life is incredibly unpredictable in that way. Don’t take for granted that you’ll always have time. Instead, take time to make certain that the people in your life know how you feel about them.

Some people ask why can every day be like Christmas. Why not ask yourself why every day can’t be like Valentine’s Day?

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 20 – February 1, 2012

David Hodge — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:28:16 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #20 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. My wishes for a happy “February 1″ (not to mention the rest of the month!) to each of you.

Being the start of a new month, we’ve got the return of another classic Guitar Noise song lesson to our pages – “Three Marlenas,” written by Jakob Dylan and performed by the Wallflowers. This latest lesson joins “Horse With No Name,” “Hey There, Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” – back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page, where each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for continuing to work with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And, just in case you missed our last newsletter, I’m also pleased to announce that I’ve finished another “Complete Idiot’s Guide” for Alpha Books – “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Ukulele.”This title will be out in bookstores (online and on earth) on July 3 this summer.And it features our own Nick Torres, providing vocals for many of the song examples (wait ’til you hear him doing his best Robert Plant voice for “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain!”). Nick also was kind enough to contribute an original song of his own, one of my favorites of his, in fact – (“It’s Not a Love Song – for the chapter on how to play ukulele in a traditional band setting. And if that’s not enough, you’ll also get an incredible fingerstyle arrangement of “Over the Rainbow” for ukulele and voice.

We’ll be posting more about this upcoming book, including some cool ukulele lessons not included in the book, later on this spring. And Paul will be posting a link for the book on our bookstore page as soon as it’s available. As with all my previous books, I cannot thank the Guitar Noise community enough for all their support. I hope you’ll find this new to be up to the high standards you set.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

With everything that’s been going on, I kind of forgot what the February “Topic of the Month” is supposed to be! So, the first thing I’m going to do today is to stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner. I’ll let you know what I find out in the next newsletter! Or you can visit our home page and find out for yourself!

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Guitar Tips: Faster Chord Changing
by David Hodge

We’ve gotten lots of questions from beginners about how to get faster at changing chords. While practice is important, here is one tip that can help a lot.

Q & A: Time In A Bottle
by David Hodge

“Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce draws together all sorts of things we have been learning. It uses capos, features two guitars, and even changes key mid-song.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 5
by Tom Serb

In our last post we learned there is only one kind of major scale. Now let’s look at the minor scale – and there are LOTS of different minor scales!

Q & A: “Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special”
by David Hodge

Time to dip into the “email bag” once again! Today’s question concerns two of the song arrangements from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar.

Fender Select Carved Maple Top Telecaster
by Steve Williams

The latest addition to the new Fender American Select range is the Fender Select Carved Maple Top Telecaster and it’s certainly special.

To Read Or Not To Read?
Part 1 – The Tyranny of Tablature
by Nick Minnion

It’s an eternal debate as to whether or not a guitarist should learn to read music as opposed to tablature. Nick Minnion gives us his take on the topic.Complete with video!

Three Marlenas
by David Hodge

Learn to play The Wallflowers’ “Three Marlenas” – picking up some easy and interesting chord changes and strumming tips along the way!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 7

Exotic scales

After the pentatonic, major, and common minor scales and the modes, everything else – with one exception – can be considered an exotic scale; these won’t be used very often, but they’re still pretty cool, and each has its own sound.

The one exception is the chromatic scale. The word “chromatic” comes from the Greek word “chroma”, which means “color”. We can think of accidentals (sharps and flats) as adding a color, or inflection, to the natural note – so C# can be seen as a ‘color’ of C. If you use all the crayons in the box, you get the chromatic scale, or all the possible colors.

The chromatic scale is used sparingly in all sorts of music as a series of passing tones. It’s also used as the foundation for almost all atonal music, which avoids a sense of key by using all the possible notes equally. That means avant-garde composers are fond of it, and it’s worth knowing.

The guitar’s strings are mostly tuned in fourths, and perfect fourths are two and a half steps apart – five frets on a guitar. The exception is the second and third strings, which are a major third apart, or two whole steps (four frets). Since we can only fret four notes on a string without stretching or shifting position, the most common chromatic scale fingering will shift position on every string except the third/second – here’s a chromatic scale starting from 6th string 8th fret C:

4-5-6-7-8
5-6-7-8
5-6-7-8
6-7-8-9
7-8-9-10
8-9-10-11

In order to get two full octaves, I’ve put five notes on the first string. You could put the extra note on any string, so there are multiple fingerings of a two-octave chromatic scale. You can also shift on any finger – the first string in the example above could be fingered 1-1-2-3-4, 1-2-2-3-4, 1-2-3-3-4, or 1-2-3-4-4. This gives you a lot of possibilities, but a pretty simple structure.

If you use a chromatic scale run in an improvised passage, you’ll find it’s actually trickier than it looks. Because you’re constantly shifting position on each string, you’ll want to keep track of what base scale fingering you were using at the beginning, and know what fingering you’ll move to at the end.

For example, if I were playing in a 7th position C scale, and decided to do a one octave run up from C, I’d have this:

-
-
5
6-7-8-9
7-8-9-10
8-9-10

Now I’m in fifth position, which is very friendly for C major. But other chromatic runs, or other starting points, might not be so favorable. Always know where you are on the fretboard!

The chromatic scale is the simplest of the symmetrical scales – those that have an equal distance between each note. The other fairly common symmetrical scale is the “whole-tone” scale, which has six notes, each a whole tone apart: C-D-E-F#-G#-A#-C (or C-D-E-Gb-Ab-Bb-C). Like the chromatic scale, this requires shifts on most strings:

4-6-8
5-7
5-7
6-8
7-9
8-10

There are a few pieces of music composed entirely of the whole tone scale; most of the ones I’ve heard that sound decent are piano pieces. But there’s one chord where the whole tone scale is appropriate for improvising: the augmented chord.

A C+ chord (the ‘+’ is the symbol for augmented) or a C7+ (augmented seventh) is composed entirely of whole steps or double whole steps: C-E-G# for the C+ chord, and C-E-G#-Bb for the C7+. So even though the scale itself isn’t all that common, there are some situations where you can use a bit of it for good effect, even if your improvisational line is based on a different scale.

The augmented triad is one of two chords in music that is perfectly symmetrical: a double whole step from C brings us to E, another double whole step brings us to G#, and one additional double whole step brings us back to C.

The other chord that’s perfectly symmetrical is the diminished seventh, written as C°7, or just C°. In this chord, you have a minor third between each note: C-Eb-Gb-Bbb (or A), and one more minor third brings us back to C.

All the scales we’ve looked at so far, except for the harmonic minor, have a whole step as the largest interval between notes. The most common exotic scale for improvising over a diminished seventh chord is called the diminished scale, but there are actually two different versions of it: the WH diminished (pronounced whole-half diminished) and the HW (half-whole) diminished.

Since a minor third is a whole step and a half step, if your chord contains only minor thirds you can add them in either order. A C WH diminished scale would be C-D-Eb-F-Gb-Ab-A-B-C; the HW scale would be C-Db-Eb-E-F#-G-A-Bb-C. Some people refer to these scales as “octatonic”, because they have eight tones in an octave.

Here’s a C WH diminished scale, starting in 8th position:

7-8-(10)
7-9-10
8-10
9-10-12
8-9-11
8-10-11

Notice we’ve got one stretch and one shift in that fingering. We could also do it with just one shift:

7-8-(10)
7-9-10
7-8-10
9-10
8-9-11
8-10-11

The HW diminished scale works out pretty much the same way, but with a little more moving around:

6-8-(9)
7-8-10
6-8-9
7-8-10
7-9-10
8-9-11

Next we’ve got a couple of scales that are from traditional styles of music. This one I could have presented earlier, right after the pentatonic (which is what I usually do in lesson) – it’s the blues scale, which is the minor pentatonic with the addition of a b5 note: 1-2-b3-4-b5-5-b7. Here’s the A blues scale in fifth position:

5-(8)
5-8
5-7-8
5-7
5-6-7
5-8

If you’re improvising blues with this, you might or might not fret the “blue note” or b5 – it’s pretty common to bend to it instead.

Then there’s the style of “Gypsy jazz”, like the music of Django Reinhardt. A common scale in this style is called the Gypsy minor scale; it’s the natural minor with a raised fourth, or 1-2-b3-#4-5-b6-b7. Here’s that scale in A, in 5th position:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
5-7
5-7-9
6-7-8
5-7-8

You could do the same scale with a shift:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
4-5-7
5-7
6-7-8
5-7-8

By now you’ve hopefully got a command of the most common scales, and if you’ve worked at it, an understanding of where the notes are on the fretboard. We’ve still got a lot of scales to cover, so from this point forward I’ll be outlining only the scale formulas, and leave it to you to find the fingerings. If you get lost, just go back to the major scale fingering patterns and adjust the notes to the formulas – if you find a lot of notes are out of position, shift the fingering forward or back.

The Hungarian minor scale, which is also known as the Gypsy minor or the double harmonic minor scale, has the pattern 1-2-b3-#4-5-b6-7. You might have noticed that I’ve already shown you a “Gypsy minor” scale – there’s no common naming system for scales, so sometimes the same name will be used for more than one scale. You’ll notice there are two places in the scale where there’s an augmented second (a three fret space): between the b3 and the #4, and again between the b6 and the 7. Since the only common scale that includes an augmented second is the harmonic minor, that’s led to this scale often being labeled the ‘double harmonic minor’ – having no common naming system, we can also end up with more than one name for the same scale!

Continuing the naming confusion a bit further, this isn’t the only Hungarian minor scale. The other one is 1-b2-b3-4-5-b6-7. It’s sort of a cross between the harmonic minor scale and the Phrygian scale, and it’s also called the Neopolitan minor scale, and some folks even call this the “Arabic” scale.

It’s not actually an Arabic scale, as the actual Arabian system is different from our 12 tone system… I’ll cover that at the end, along with scales from India, which is also outside our 12TET system (12 tone equal temperament) – our guitars are designed to produce 12TET tones, so these take some real work to achieve on the guitar.

You might also come across the Neopolitan major scale… but it’s the same as the Lydian mode. Exotic scales seem to have sprung up in many different styles of music, so there ends up being a lot of overlap in the names!

Some of our exotic scales are simple alterations of our common scales. The major/minor scale is a good example of that: it’s a natural minor scale with a major third, or 1-2-3-4-5-b6-b7.

Jazz has also given us a lot of scales, especially bebop jazz. Bebop scales have eight tones, with a passing note between two ‘normal’ scale tones. The scale that’s usually called the “bebop” scale is a cross between the major scale and the Mixolydian: 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7-7. This is also called the “bebop dominant” scale, because it includes the dominant chord tone of b7.

But we can put the half steps in other places, which gives us the Bebop Dorian: 1-2-b3-3-4-5-6-b7. That’s a cross between the Mixolydian and the Dorian scales.

We also have the Bebop Major, 1-2-3-4-5-b6-6-7. This scale works well over major 7th or major 6th chords.

If we lower the third of that scale, we get the Bebop Melodic Minor: 1-2-b3-4-5-b6-6-7.

Finally, we can lower the 3rd of the Bebop Dominant, and get the Bebop Harmonic Minor: 1-2-b3-4-5-6-b7-7. That’s a harmonic minor scale with the added b7.

Jazz also makes extensive use of altered dominant chords. If you’ve read my chord lessons, you might remember that dominant chords have a tension; altered dominant chords increase the tension by including notes altered from the underlying scale – substituting b5 or #5 for the fifth in the chord, or including the b9 or #9 note. These chords may be spelled out in the name, as in C7b9, or they may just be indicated on a chart as “C7alt”, leaving it up to the performer which non-scale tones to include.

Because these chords can include b9 (the same tone as b2), #9 (same as #2), b5 or #5, a scale that will work over any of them should contain those notes – as well as the root, third, and b7 common to dominant chords. The resulting scale is 1-b2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7.

This one takes a bit of explaining to unravel the spelling – we want it to have just one of each letter name; the b3 is the same pitch as #2 (or #9). Having used a 3, the natural third from the chord ends up being spelled as a b4. b5 is there, as is b6 – that’s the same tone as #5. And the b7 is needed to blend with a dominant chord.

Compare this scale with the Locrian mode, which is 1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7, and you’ll see it’s the Locrian with a lowered fourth. So this scale is sometimes called the “superlocrian” (which is how I first learned it), but a more common name is simply the “altered scale”.

Another big source of scales in music has been the deconstruction of chords used in specific tunes. If you take a chord like a m7b5, we have scale tones (I’ll show those in C): 1-b3-b5-b7. We’re missing 2, 4, and 6. We can fill those in with any tones from the scale, creating these:

1-b2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7
1-b2-b3-b4-b5-6-b7
1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7
1-b2-b3-4-b5-6-b7
1-2-b3-b4-b5-b6-b7
1-2-b3-b4-b5-6-b7
1-2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7
1-2-b3-4-b5-6-b7

Any of these scales will work over a m7b5 chord, since they each contain all of the chord tones. One (the 1-2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7) is used commonly enough to call it a “half diminished” scale, but in fact ALL of them can be considered half diminished scales!

Some composers will create a chord and build a piece around it. They’ll usually follow the same process I showed above, filling in the missing notes with possibilities from our chromatic scale. The resulting scales are often named after the piece the composer created that contains the chord…

The Prometheus scale comes from a symphonic work by Alexander Scriabin called “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire”. The chord can be spelled in several ways, but it’s often seen in fourths: C-F#-Bb-E-A-D. Arranging these in scale order, we get C-D-E-F#-A-Bb, or 1-2-3-#4-6-b7. To continue the naming confusion, the chord is also called the “mystic” chord – and the scale is naturally also called the mystic scale.

Igor Stravinsky wrote a ballet called “Petrushka”, and in it he used the Petrushka chord. It’s a foray into bitonality, with two different tonal centers at the same time… if you have two guitarists, and one plays a C major chord while the other plays an Gb major chord, the result is the Petrushka chord. Combining the notes C-E-G and Gb-Bb-Db gets us the scale C-Db-E-Gb-G-Bb.

That causes a little problem because we’ve got two G notes. Spelling the second chord enharmonically (as F# major, which is what Stravinsky actually did) gets us two C notes (C and C#). So the scale ends up being spelled as a mix of the two: C-Db-E-F#-G-Bb, or 1-b2-3-#4-5-b7. It’s also known as the “tritone” scale, because it’s made up of several notes that are a tritone, or three whole tones, apart: C-F#, Db-G, and E-Bb.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

Random Thoughts

Working through “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Ukulele,” much like writing “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar,” involved creating quite a few arrangements of Public Domain songs. The idea in both books was to create arrangements that could stand up on their own and make the listener think, “Hey! This song is actually pretty cool!”

And when I listen to the arrangements that Nick and I created for these two books, with me handling the guitar or ukulele part and Nick the vocals, I find myself thinking that there’s a good reason these songs have continued to be sung for, in some cases, hundreds of years. They’re simply fun songs. Some are beautiful and moving and some are silly but it’s impossible to dismiss them as unworthy of attention and consideration.

As I mentioned in the blurb about our Guitar Nose Featured Artist of the Month, great songs transcend genres. A song should never be thought of as just a “guitar song” or a “piano song” or a “rock song” or a “pop song” or whatever. As musicians we have the ability to take the raw material, the gemstone of a song if you will, and place it in all sorts of different settings, each of which will give the beholder a new insight or appreciation of it.

Maybe this is a continuation of the “New Year’s Resolution” theme, but if you find yourself looking to kick start your creativity, try taking a song that you don’t really like and seeing what you can do to turn it into one you enjoy playing and performing. It’s a lot easier than you think! And it’s also usually a lot of fun as well.

More to the point, it gives you the chance to add your own personal touch to a song. Instead of producing a copy, you’ve come out with an original arrangement. And who knows? It may be your arrangement that inspires someone else to pick up an instrument and play.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 19 – January 15, 2012

David Hodge — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:15:35 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #18 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Emails? We Get Emails!
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

So, did you notice that I still had 2011 in the date of our last newsletter? The one which started out with the bold “In case you’ve not been told, it is now 2012″ as its opening line? If not, forget I even mentioned it! Instead, let me welcome you to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. And I hope that your New Year has been a good one so far.

We’ve also another New Year coming up! A week from tomorrow, which is Monday, January 23, is Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dragon! If you happen to be born this year or (much more likely) happen to be turning 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84 or 96, then this is your year.

Not that it really has all that much to do with anything, but when Nick was up here in the Berkshires last fall to record some songs, we got breakfast at a local shop that had a zodiac based on various delicatessen items. Turns out I was born in the Year of Chopped Liver. No lie. And I swore I’d never tell what year Nick was born in, so don’t ask!

In case you missed the last newsletter, we’ve brought back “Horse With No Name” to the pages of Guitar Noise. It joins “Hey There, Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page, where each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And at the risk of being predictable, I’d also like to repeat a bit from our last two newsletters concerning the “Sparks of Life” program at New York Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New You. They are looking for volunteer musicians to spread the joy of music to their patients in their various pediatric, physical rehabilitation, geriatric and oncology units. They are very flexible in terms of scheduling and more than willing to work with you to help them brighten the days of their patients. It can be a once-in-a-while gig or a regular ongoing one depending on your schedule.

Any musician, guitarist or otherwise, is more than welcome. You should have a variety of music to play as you’ll be dealing with people from all ages and background. Obviously you’ll also want to have good communication and people skills.

If you live in the Brooklyn area and are willing to help by sharing your talent, please give Amand Nable a call at (718)780-5397, extension 105, or email her at abn9006@nyp.org.

Here’s hoping we can get some of our New York Guitar Noise community members hooked up with Amanda’s program and bring some music to people truly in need of it throughout 2012 and beyond. This is the sort of New Year’s Resolution you might find beneficial to yourself and to many, many others as well.

Finally, just in case you’re wondering exactly what Nick was up here recording last fall, I’m please to announce that I’ve finished another project for Alpha Books. It’s another in their “Complete Idiot’s Guides” series – “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing the Ukulele” and it will be out in bookstores (online and on earth) on July 3 this summer. Nick recorded vocals for many of the song examples and also contributed an original song of his own (“It’s Not a Love Song”) for the chapter on how to play ukulele in a traditional band setting. We’ll be posting more about this upcoming book, including some cool ukulele lessons not included in the book, later on this spring. And Paul will be posting a link for the book on our bookstore page as soon as it’s available. As with all my previous books, I cannot thank the Guitar Noise community enough for all their support. I hope you’ll find this new to be up to the high standards you set.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

The plan is to have Eddie Van Halen be the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of January and Paul’s whipping up a bio of this celebrated guitarist and you’ll be able to read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

On top of everything else, we’re doing some revamping of our Guitar Noise Topic Pages. For over fifteen years now we’ve been a premiere guitar tutorial website and thousands (if not tens of thousands) of beginner guitarists have found help and advice to start them on their musical adventures. We’re going to be putting the best of all our beginner lessons together in one place. So whether you are totally starting from scratch or whether you’re just looking to get some beginner advice for a particular topic like finger picking or basic theory, you’ll now find them all in one easy step.

Stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” – Beginner Guitar Lessons – up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Gustavo Assis-Brasil – Hybrid Picking Lines & Licks For Guitar For All Styles
by David Hodge

An excellent companion book for Gustavo Assis-Brasil’s “Hybrid Picking for Guitar.” A great source for lead guitarist whether you use hybrid picking or not.

Andrew DuBrock – Easy Fingerpicking Guitar
A Beginner’s Guide to Essential Patterns & Techniques
by David Hodge

“Easy Fingerpicking Guitar” has to be the best step-by-step fingerpicking tutorial for beginners that exists. You’ll learn great technique immediately.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 4
by Tom Serb

Believe it or not, scales are your friend. There is no reason scales should scare or confuse guitar players and with Tom’s help we’re going prove that. Part 3 covers various the Major Scale, which is considered by most musicians to be the most important one you can learn.

Adding Some Personal Touches
by David Hodge

Our lesson of “Horse With No Name” continues with a advice on how to spice up your strumming as well as a look at the solo from the original recording.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 6

Modes

Modes are probably the single most confusing element of music for guitarists. There’s a ton of mis-information out there, which just makes things worse. But they’re not that difficult to understand and use if they’re approached properly.

What we think of today as “modes” are simply scales. Several of them are very old – the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian modes were used in Gregorian chants written over 1500 years ago. At the time, they weren’t called “modes” (at the time, a mode was actually a rhythm!), but the word was first used in the 6th century by a theorist named Boethius in translating some 1st century Greek music theory. About 300 years later, a monk named Hucbald applied the term to the already existing church scales, and we’ve called them “modes” on and off since then.

The church modes were simply considered different scales that composers could use in creating chants. There wasn’t any relationship between them, and no one thought of them as the same notes. That changed in 1547, when a guy named Heinrich Glarens (or Henricus Glareanus as he called himself in Latin) realized that the four church modes and two secular scales – the major and natural minor – made use of the same notes. Glarens created all the confusion by organizing the six scales this way:

C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C = the major scale

D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D = the Dorian “mode”

E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E = the Phrygian “mode”

F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F = the Lydian “mode”

G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G = the Mixolydian “mode”

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A = the natural minor scale

Since the four church scales had Greek names, Glarens decided the major and minor scales should also have Greek names; he called the major scale the “Ionian mode” and named the natural minor the “Aeolian mode”. He also theorized that there should be a scale which started with B:

B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B

Glarens called this one the “Locrian mode”. That’s pronounced “luh-cree-in”, “lock-ree-in” or “low-cree-in”; I use “lock-ree-in”, but I’ve heard different theory professors use all three… I suppose it depends on where you went to school! He quickly discarded the scale as useless in practice, but it remained a part of music theory.

On to how to use them… I first encountered a mention of modes in a book on rock guitar in the early 70s, accompanied with a brief explanation of Glaren’s classification and a few exercises. They seemed interesting, but it wasn’t enough information for them to actually be useful to me. Then I headed off to college, and modes were covered in a music history class – we had to learn the names of them, again by Glaren’s system: test questions included things like “which mode begins on the third note of a major scale?” I tried my best to use them on my guitar, but they really didn’t sound different from other scales.

Then I took improvisation lessons from Paul Zibits, who still teaches – he’s currently with California State University at Long Beach. I told him the problem I was having, and he told me I was doing it wrong – I was focusing on a related scale – trying to play F Lydian while I was thinking in C major, the “related” major scale. Since modes are scales, and scales relate their pitches to the key note, I needed to be thinking in F, not C. That’s the whole trick!

So let’s start by looking at the F major scale and the F Lydian scale:

F-G-A-Bb-C-D-E-F = F major

F-G-A-B-C-D-E-F = F Lydian

The only note that’s different is the B. Looking at Lydian as a scale formula, it’s 1-2-3-#4-5-6-7. All you have to do to play a Lydian scale is to take a major scale and raise the fourth note! Here’s how it would finger in second position:

(2)-(3)-(5)
(3)-(5)
2-4-5
2-4-5
(2)-3-5
(2)-(3)-(5)

And in fifth position, with a shift on the third and fourth strings:

5-7-8
5-7-8
4-5-7
4-5-7
5-7
(5)-(7)-8

I’m sure you can apply this logic to the other positions of the major scale.

The Mixolydian mode works out the same way:

G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G = G major

G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G = G mixolydian

This means the mixolydian scale is 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7, or the major scale with a flatted 7th. Here’s G Mixolydian in 2nd position:

1-3-5
3-5
2-4-5
2-3-5
2-3-5
(1)-3-5

There are two important things to take away from our look at modes so far:

1. Modes are just scales. If you’re going to relate them to something, relate them to a scale with the same key note; any other approach is extra thinking at best, and musically misleading at worst.

2. There’s no such thing as a “modal fingering”. We’ve already seen that in 2nd position you can play in C major (C Ionian), G Mixolydian, or F Lydian. We can actually play almost ANY mode in this position, and that’s going to be true anywhere on the guitar. If you’re thinking in fingerings, you’re not thinking in sound – so your results will probably seem mechanical.

Time for one quick detour – when I say you can play “almost” any mode in this position, some will be easy, some hard, just like the many varieties of the major scale fingering. The ones that will be impossible will be the ones that are “related” to Eb major. Because of the guitar’s tuning, none of the 2nd fret notes (F#/Gb, B, E, A, C#/Db, F#/Gb) are in the Eb major scale (Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb-C-D-Eb). I call this the “guitar’s gap”; each major scale has exactly one position (and possibly its octave) with no notes.

The remaining modes could also be compared to the major scale, but the ones that are left all have something in common – a flatted third. (The Ionian mode is the major scale, and the Aeolian mode is the natural minor; we’ve covered both of those earlier)

D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D = D major

D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D = D Dorian

1-2-b3-4-5-6-b7

E-F#-G#-A-B-C#-D#-E = E major

E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E = E Phrygian

1-b2-b3-4-5-b6-b7

B-C#-D#-E-F#-G#-A#-B = B major

B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B = B Locrian

1-b2-b3-4-b5-b6-b7

Since each of the remaining modes has a b3, I find it easiest to treat them as alterations of the natural minor scale.

D-E-F-G-A-Bb-C-D = D natural minor (relative to F major)

D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D = D Dorian

Compared to the natural minor, Dorian has a raised sixth. So if you want to play in A Dorian, just take the A natural minor and raise the sixth – make all your F notes sharp. Here’s fifth position:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
5-7
5-7-9
5-7-9
5-7-8

Or you could shift on the fourth and third strings:

5-(7)-(8)
5-7-8
4-5-7
4-5-7
5-7
5-7-8

Next up is Phrygian:

E-F#-G-A-B-C-D-E = E natural minor (relative to G major)

E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E = E Phrygian

Compared to the natural minor, Phrygian has a b2. To play in A Phrygian, think in A minor, and flat the 2nd (B):

5-(6)-(8)
5-6-8
5-7
5-7-8
5-7-8
5-6-8

The final mode, Locrian, is the only one that requires changing two notes from the natural minor:

B-C#-D-E-F#-G-A-B = B natural minor (relative to D major)

B-C-D-E-F-G-A-B = B Locrian

There are two ways you can approach this one, mentally… you can either alter two tones from the natural minor scale, or if you’ve got the other modes down cold first (which I’d recommend), you can alter ONE note from the Phrygian – simply play Phrygian and flat the 5th. Here’s how A Locrian will shape up in fifth position:

5-(6)-(8)
6-8
5-7-8
5-7-8
5-6-8
5-6-8

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy, at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Emails? We Get Emails!

We’ve not dipped into the “email bag” for a bit (not that there haven’t been questions! not a day passes without at least two or three!) so I thought I’d share this one, concerning the CAGED system of learn and other things, with you all:

Hi Dave,

A couple questions, if you don’t mind!

A) Are you familiar with the whole “CAGED fretboard layout” (I’m 99% sure you are!) and what is the “best” way to go about memorizing/utilizing this?? I rack my brain every night, but always feel I’m one piece short of the puzzle!

B) What is the best methodology for learning to sing & play, simultaneously?? Metronome? “Hearing both guitar and vocals, simultaneously”, etc.?

C) Not to be vague, but how can you, objectively, determine if you have the “raw talent” to rock professionally?? If at all.

Thanks for writing.

In regard to “Question A” about the CAGED fretboard layout. While this is a standard traditional way for guitarists to learn their way around the fretboard, for the average guitarist, it can be a lot to take in at once. That’s one reason why I first try to work with students to get through three forms of the CAGED system first, namely the “E,” “D,” and “A” parts of CAGED. Why? Because it’s easy to associate these three shapes with open chords that you already know and use a lot. You might want to check out the article at Guitar Noise called “Moving On Up” to get you started.

As for singing and playing at the same time, most people have troubles with this initially. We have quite a few lessons (including a few of our Podcasts) at Guitar Noise that deal with this topic. You can find them here: Singing Lessons.

Personally, I find it easiest to do this by getting the rhythm of a song down first. A lot of beginners strum to the melody of the song when the reality is that the rhythm has to hold steady while the melody dances around it on its own rhythm. If you can’t hold the rhythm steady you’re always going to have problems doing both strumming and singing.

And as to the “raw talent” needed to rock professionally, well, there’s a lot of things that I have to ask about that. First off, what do you mean by “rock professionally.” There are a lot of people who make their living playing music and only doing that, but it’s more of the living you might associate with being a tradesman like a contractor or a plumber (or even a teacher) more than with the dream life style of a rock god (name your favorite band or guitarist here).

More times than not, the reality is that it’s not about talent but rather about the business effort one puts into making music his or her business. It helps to be good, but that’s secondary to spending pretty much all your time marketing and getting yourself gigs. Essentially you (or your band) is a small business and you have to be willing to put all the effort and energy into it like someone who owns a restaurant or a store or someone who is a commission sales rep does.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to email again with any more questions you may have. I look forward to chatting with you again.

Peace

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from today through January 22.

Random Thoughts

Imagine for a moment that you’ve taken a trip to a place where the majority of the people don’t speak your language. And imagine that you enjoyed the trip so much that you’ve decided to spend some serious time there, seeing the sites, enjoying the food and culture, taking part in the life that you find attractive enough to want to be part of it.

Would you think twice about learning how to say “hello” or “thank you” or “please” in whatever the native language happened to be? I highly doubt it. You’d probably make a point of doing so. And simply being there every day would give you the chance to pick up new words every day. Learning one new word a day, even for the most language-challenged of us (that would include me!) isn’t that strenuous a goal.

And before you knew it, you’d have more and more of the language in your ears and head. Obviously you wouldn’t be fluent at it for quite some time, but at least you’d have the ability to communicate. And you’d improve on your abilities with each use of the language.

I think that most of us would agree on this scenario, even though I suspect some would be more of the “what kind of person would choose to live in a foreign place and not learn at least enough of the language to get by comfortably?” Whatever, the point is that learning something, anything about your surroundings would be to your advantage. If not today, certainly at some point in the future The only reason that anyone would not do so is simply that one chooses not to.

So why shouldn’t we apply this logic to learning to read music? I’ve mentioned this in past newsletters, I’m sure, but it bears repeating. The true reason most guitarists don’t learn to read music is simply because they don’t want to. And I can respect that, provided they are being truthful about that reason and not dressing it up as “I don’t because I don’t need it” or “I don’t because it’s not necessary” or “I don’t because someone-who-s-been-in-the-music-business-all-his-life-doesn’t-and-he’s-doing-okay.”

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of how I could possibly know what I might need in the future or what is or isn’t necessary to my lifelong enjoyment of playing guitar. And since I’m not that one particular “someone-who’s-been-in-the-music-business-all-his-life” I certainly wouldn’t be so presumptuous to put myself on the same plane as my idol.

What I do know is that any musical knowledge that I have learned over the years has always helped to make me a better player at some point down the road. Not always immediately, but definitely at some point. If I had only learned what I needed to know for that moment, it would have taken me another dozen decades or so to get to the point where I am now. Not that I’m even a fraction of a percent of where I would like to be as a player.

If you’re still looking for a New Year’s Resolution, I’d like to suggest learning a new language. You can start out very easily and learn one note a day. If you do, you’ll have all the vocabulary you need for guitar music in less than a month. Then it’s all about practicing and using your vocabulary and you can find lots of ways to do that.

And, as with all your skills and knowledge, you’ll find ways to use that will surprise and hopefully delight you!

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 18 – January 1, 2012

David Hodge — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 01:50:54 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #18 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

In case you’ve not been told, it is now 2012. Which means I can say hello and welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. I hope that, so far at least, your New Year is a good one.

I’ve spent the last week of 2011 with a broken computer, so needless to say I’m in the middle of doing a lot of catching up on things. The plan is to write the newsletter as if everything is going smoothly and according to plan and then to panic and rush about and get as many other things done as possible! So if some of the lessons I mention are not yet up online, please be patient! They will get there as soon as possible. My resolution of not making my life more stressful will obviously have to wait until next year!

First on the to-do list is bringing the latest song lesson back to the pages of Guitar Noise. And what better way to bring in the New Year than by revisiting the very first of our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, namely “Horse With No Name?” This classic song will be joining “Hey There Delilah.” and our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page. Each lesson comes complete with lyrics, music notation and tablature and also a healthy dose of educational and entertaining text. Again (and always), we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And although it’s not a lesson or an article, I’d also like to repeat a bit from our last newsletter concerning the “Sparks of Life” program at New York Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New You. They are looking for volunteer musicians to spread the joy of music to their patients in their various pediatric, physical rehabilitation, geriatric and oncology units. They are very flexible in terms of scheduling and more than willing to work with you to help them brighten the days of their patients. It can be a once-in-a-while gig or a regular ongoing one depending on your schedule.

If you live in the Brooklyn area and are willing to help by sharing your talent, please give Amand Nable a call at (718)780-5397, extension 105, or email her at abn9006@nyp.org.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Keeping A Guitar in Open Tuning
by David Hodge

Is it okay to leave a guitar in open tuning? Or should it be retuned to standard tuning when you’re not playing it? The answer is fairly straightforward.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Part 3
by Tom Serb

Believe it or not, scales are your friend. There is no reason scales should scare or confuse guitar players and with Tom’s help we’re going prove that. Part 3 covers various Hexatonic Scales.

The Left Way
by David Hodge

There is a right way to play guitar, but is there a left way? Regardless of how you play, a regular guitar book will work with a left-handed guitar.

O Little Town Of Bethlehem
by David Hodge

For this lesson on “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” we show how using two notes of a chord can create a beautiful chord melody arrangement.

Consider…
by David Hodge

It’s quite surprising how many people opt to learn guitar by only using videos and when you think about it logically, you’ll come up with a lot of questions that the videos rarely answer. If you’re serious about learning to play guitar, you’ll want to use as many different sources as you can find. And take in every bit of information you can..

The Top Guitar Noise Posts of 2011
by Paul Hackett

As 2011 comes to a close, we at Guitar Noise are taking a look back at our most popular lessons to find out what interested you, our readers..

How Do I Transpose A Particular Song?
by David Hodge

Another question about capos and transposing songs. How do you know which fret to put the capo on if you’re playing along with another guitar? And what if that other guitar has a capo on a different fret? David gives you some good advice on how to figure it all out!

Horse With No Name
by David Hodge

Our very first “Easy Song for Beginners” lesson returns to the pages of Guitar Noise. You’ll learn the very basics of the song and then get a chance to tinker with the rhythm and the strumming.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 5

Minor scales

Just as we have major and minor chords, we’ve got major and minor scales. Minor chords and scales have one thing in common – they’ve got a flatted third (when compared to the same major chord or scale). But there’s also one big difference worth noting: there’s only one kind of major scale. That’s what makes it so valuable to music theory as a yardstick for measuring other scales and chords – there is never any confusion about what the notes will be for any given application. On the other hand, there are LOTS of different minor scales!

There’s also one area where major and minor scales overlap: the ‘relative’ major and minor scales can be constructed using the SAME notes. This concept is called “modality” (as in “modes”), and it can be one of the most confusing aspects of music theory for guitarists. So before we get into the various types of minor scales, we’re going to take a brief detour back to the pentatonic scale and apply the concept of modality.

Our first position minor pentatonic scale looked like this (in A):

| 5 |   |   | 8 |
| 5 |   |   | 8 |
| 5 |   | 7 |
| 5 |   | 7 |
| 5 |   | 7 |
| 5 |   |   | 8 |

The notes in the scale are A (the root), C (the b3 – because an A major scale’s third is C#), D (the 4th), E (the 5th), and G (the b7, because A major contains G#). But if we look at the letter names, A-C-D-E-G, we can see that they’re also all part of the C major scale.

These notes can be arranged C-D-E-G-A to create the C major pentatonic scale. Comparing it to the major scale, we find the formula 1-2-3-5-6. And here we’ve got a big clue for why this scale is so useful… the major scale notes that are missing are 4 and 7. I’m going to digress even more here and show you why the pentatonic is the most widely used scale for beginners.

When notes interact with each other, as in simultaneous melodies or notes played against a chord progression, the result is harmony. And although the word ‘harmony’ implies agreement, that’s not always true in music. Some sounds agree very well, and we call those “consonant” sounds. Other notes played in tandem sound more like two cats tied up in a bag; we call those “dissonant” sounds.

What one listener considers pleasing won’t be universal. That might explain why some folks prefer listening to the Carpenters, while others put on Korn when they want to relax. So when we classify sounds as consonant or dissonant, we’re really talking about what the average listener perceives. To complicate things a bit, what the average listener considers consonant or dissonant has changed over time. Given today’s ears, we can classify intervals (two pitches sounded at the same time) into these broad groups:

Consonant              Mostly consonant         Mostly dissonant          Dissonant
Unison/octave (C-C)    minor 3rd (C-Eb)         Major 2nd (C-D)           minor 2nd (C-Db)
Perfect 4th (C-F)      Major 3rd (C-E)          minor 6th (C-Ab)          tritone (C-F#/Gb)
Perfect 5th (C-G)      Major 6th (C-A)          minor 7th (C-Bb)          Major 7th (C-B)

These are broad categories, and the “mostly” ones will depend on context – a minor 6th may sound just fine in one sequence (especially in a minor key), and not so good in another. These are the grey areas of music. But the consonant ones will always sound consonant, and the dissonant ones will always disagree.

Music, like cooking, can be improved when you add a little spice. Just like cooking, too much spice makes something unfit for human consumption. Dissonance is the spice of music – you want some, but not too much. Let’s look at the major scale notes played against each other – upper case “M” is major, lower case “m” is minor. I’ve also marked the usually dissonant intervals with an asterisk, and the always dissonant intervals with two:

	C	D	E	F	G	A	B
C	Unison	M2*	M3	P4	P5	m6*	M7*
D	m7*	Unison	M2*	m3	P4	P5	M6
E	m6*	m7*	Unison	m2**	m3	P4	P5
F	P5	M6	M7*	Unison	M2*	M3	Tritone**
G	P4	P5	M6	m7*	Unison	M2*	M3
A	m3	P4	P5	m6*	m7*	Unison	M2*
B	m2**	m3	P4	Tritone**	m6*	m7*	Unison

Using the major scale, 20 of the 49 possibilities create some dissonance. If you’re playing random notes you’ve got about a 40% chance of adding some spice through dissonance. Also notice that two asterisks only appear when one or both of the notes is F or B. Let’s knock out these notes and see what happens:

	C	D	E	G	A
C	Unison	M2*	M3	P5	m6*
D	m7*	Unison	M2*	P4	P5
E	m6*	m7*	Unison	m3	P4
G	P4	P5	M6	Unison	M2*
A	m3	P4	P5	m7*	Unison

Now only 8 of the 25 possible combinations results in dissonance – a 13% chance of adding spice. And not one of the notes results in a combination that will always be dissonant.

A dissonance in music needs to be ‘resolved’ to feel fulfilled. A beginning improviser, whose command of the instrument (and his or her ears) isn’t fully developed is playing more or less at random. If you have a 40% chance of playing a dissonance, you have a 60% chance of resolving it by accident – maybe not in the best method, but at least following it by a consonance. And 40% x 40% = 16% of the time what you’re playing won’t be immediately resolved.

If we use the pentatonic scale, 87% of our notes are already consonant. The 13% that aren’t will be followed (again, at random) by notes that resolve 87% of the time. 13% x 13% = less than a 2% chance that you’ll be dragging out the dissonance. The pentatonic scale is practically built for poke & pray soloing – 98.3% of the time you’ll sound like you know what you’re doing, even if it’s completely random. And you will never face a harsh dissonance of a tritone or minor 2nd! Add just a little bit of experience and the success ratio quickly becomes 100%. You may not sound like the greatest soloist – because you’re not taking the biggest chances – but you’ll sound like a competent improviser.

All this is great in theory… but let’s start putting it under your fingers. Put on a backing track in a MAJOR key, and put your fingers into minor pentatonic position 1 three frets below your key note – if your backing track is in B, you’ll be playing in G# minor. Go ahead and solo, but end your solo on the SECOND note of the minor pentatonic scale – the B note on the 6th string (7th or 19th fret), the 3rd string (4th or 16th fret), or the 1st string (7th or 19th fret). You’ll find that no notes were difficult to work with, and the end result sounded anywhere from a little bland to really good.

Ok, I’m done with that digression, although we’ll return to the concept of modality in a later section. But it wasn’t completely a digression, because we’re about to apply it.

We’ll start by looking at the most basic minor scale, the natural (or “pure”) minor. This is the scale that uses exactly the same notes as the major scale. The natural minor scale is created by starting from the 6th degree (or note) of the major scale – if you’re working in C major, the relative natural minor will be C major notes starting from A: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A. You can use the SAME fingerings we reviewed for the major scale, but you’ll be treating a different note as the tonic, or ‘home base’.

Because the notes are the same as the major scale, the fingerings are also the same. All we do is make a different note the focal point of the melody, and we’ve shifted from the major to the relative natural minor scale.

One quick note about the focal point – it’s incredibly difficult to set ‘rules’ that determine which tone will be the tonic. Some folks will tell you it’s the last note of a melody (often true, but not always), the note used most frequently (sometimes true, but usually not), or the first note (rarely true unless the soloist is a beginner). But a melody will always feel like it has come to a resting point when the tonic is reached… so determining the tonic is sort of like defining pornography: you know it when you see/hear it.

Get a backing track in A minor, and use one of the C major fingerings over it… but focus your attention on the A notes. If you’re using the fifth position fingering, it’ll look like this:

5-(7)-(8)
5-6-8
5-7
5-7-9
5-7-8
5-7-8

When you solo over the progression, you might notice a couple of notes are harder to work with. In particular, the G note (4th string 5th fret or 2nd string 8th fret) may clash with the dominant chord. Understanding why that happens requires another brief detour into harmony.

Earlier I explored the harmony created by two notes of the major scale sounded simultaneously. Those two sounds create intervals. If we add a THIRD sound to the mix, we get a chord.

There are several different systems of harmony out there, but most music makes use of “tertian” harmony, building chords in thirds. The simplest chords contain only three notes, and they’re called “triads”. What that means is that whatever note we start with in chord construction, the chord will consist of every other note – if you start from C, you’ll skip over D and use E (the third note of the C scale). Skipping over F gets you to G, and the combination C-E-G creates a C major chord.

Different chords have different formulas; the major chord works out to 1-3-5 against the major scale. A minor chord uses the b3 – C minor is C-Eb-G. There are two other common triads, the diminished (1-b3-b5) and the augmented (1-3-#5).

We don’t typically use random chords in constructing a progression. Instead, we use chords that belong to the same key. That means if we’re in C major, we’ll usually use only chords that have notes from the C major scale. Building chords in thirds using only C major scale tones gives us the following:

C-E-G (C major, 1-3-5)
D-F-A (D minor, because a D major scale has F# in it, so F is a b3; we always use the major scale of the chord root to figure out the chord’s formula)
E-G-B (E minor, since E major has G#)
F-A-C (F major)
G-B-D (G major)
A-C-E (A minor, because A major has C#)
B-D-F (B diminished, because a B major scale has both D# and F#)

These chords will sound perfectly acceptable together, and many simple songs are made from various combinations. But we do want a little spice in our music, so we sometimes harmonize chords in four notes. Without getting into chord theory too much, a chord that has the seventh note of it’s root scale is a “maj7” (major 7th) chord; a chord that has the b7 of its major scale is a “7th” (or “dominant 7th) chord. We can combine these terms – a minor chord with a b7 is a m7 chord; a minor chord with the natural 7th will be a m/maj7 – that’s kind of rare, because it’s pretty dissonant, but the labeling of chords is consistent.

Harmonizing the C major scale in four parts gives us these additional chords:

C-E-G-B (Cmaj7)
D-F-A-C (Dm7)
E-G-B-D (Em7)
F-A-C-E (Fmaj7)
G-B-D-F (G7)
A-C-E-G (Am7)
B-D-F-A (Bm7b5)

With these additional chords, there are three that have a “tension” – they sound like they have to move somewhere. These chords are the B diminished, the G7, and the Bm7b5.

Most music makes use of tension/release: building excitement, then letting the listener back down. One of the most common ways to do that is through a V7-I cadence, moving from G7 to C.

Since the notes of the natural minor scale are exactly the same as that of the major scale, we end up with exactly the same chords – except they’ll appear on different scale degrees. If we use a G7 to build tension in the key of C, we can get a satisfying C-F-G7-C chord progression, or I-IV-V7-I. Applying exactly the same logic to the A natural minor scale, we’d get a progression of Am-Dm-Em7-Am.

There’s nothing wrong with that progression, but it lacks the excitement of the dominant 7th chord. So hundreds of years ago, composers began altering the minor scale – they wanted an E7 chord to create tension that resolves to Am.

Since a dominant 7th chord is 1-3-5-b7 against the major scale, E7 will be E-G#-B-D. Raising the G note to G# creates the desired harmony, so replacing G with G# in an A natural minor creates a scale called the A harmonic minor.

Using the A natural minor fingering above as our base, we can get the A harmonic minor fingering below:

5-(7)-(8)
5-6-9
5-7
6-7-9
5-7-8
5-7-8

Just as we did with the major scale, we can find alternate fingerings for the notes you have to stretch for. This scale becomes a lot more finger-friendly if we shift to fourth position when we get to the third string:

4-5-(7)
5-6
4-5-7
6-7
5-7-8
5-7-8

There was one big problem with this scale: singers hated it. The harmonic minor scale uses an augmented second interval between the 6th and 7th notes (from F-G# in Am), and that’s a difficult interval to sing accurately. Singers prefer to use half steps – one fret on the guitar – or whole steps (two frets).

One solution is to raise the 6th note of the minor scale. That creates a whole step between the 6th and 7th notes, and the distance from the 5th note to the 6th changes from a half step to a whole step… still very singable. Our A minor scale would now be A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#-A, or 1-2-b3-4-5-6-7.

This scale wasn’t used very much, because it’s so close to the major scale. In fact, it’s the major scale with only one note changed – so if the melody spends much time away from the third note, it starts to sound major. Composers quickly discarded it (in favor of the scale we’ll look at in a moment) – but this scale did find a resurgence in jazz, where it’s called the “jazz minor” or the “bebop minor”. Folks from Berklee call it the “real melodic minor”, but folks from Berklee often have their own names for things!

Using fifth and fourth positions again, this minor scale can be fingered like this – the shift is now on the 4th string:

4-5-(7)
4-5-7
4-5-7
4-6-7
5-7
5-7-8

The solution classical music composers found to the problem of both creating the desired harmony and keeping the singers happy was unusual: they created a hybrid scale. This is one area where pedagogy (how things are taught) differs a bit from actual practice; here’s the pedagogy part:

Going up, the scale raises the 6th and 7th notes, creating the right harmony and keeping the singers happy. But going down, it will be the same as the natural minor scale, giving a minor sound to melodies that don’t touch on the flatted third for a while. In a minor, it will look like this:

A-B-C-D-E-F#-G#-A-G-F-E-D-C-B-A
 (going up)        (going down)

Because the direction of the melody determines which pitches will be used for the 6th and 7th notes, this is called the melodic minor scale. You’ve already got the fingerings – it’s the jazz minor going up, and the natural minor going down.

In practice this scale doesn’t always work the way it’s taught. Composers and improvisers can use the natural minor part going up and the jazz minor part down – they simply try to avoid that hard to sing interval. In either direction, melodies will sometimes use all the notes, treating the one from the ‘wrong’ direction as a passing tone. As we’ll see, minor scales are incredibly flexible.

There are still more minor scales to come: I’ll cover the Dorian and Phrygian in the next section about modes, and a few others like the Gypsy minor in the final part, exotic scales.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website, http://mwmusicacademy.com/, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from today through January 7.

Random Thoughts

Looking back over 2011 I find myself remembering all sorts of musical moments that I had the good fortune to be a part of. Personally, I’m not one who worries about recordings or videos. I’m simply there to enjoy the music and to be in the moment. But it’s fortunate that, from time to time, some of my friend come up with some tangible memento of a song or two. About a month ago, I got to play with Nick Torres, Greg Nease, Jeff Brownstein, Helena Bouchez, John Mazzeo, Glen Polson and Karen Berger at a show in Pennington, New Jersey and Nick managed to make a passable recording of our cover of “Everybody’s Talking” which I present for your enjoyment. Appropriately, everybody is talking!

I hope that 2012 gives each of you the opportunity to make and share your music with your family, friends and the rest of the world.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 17 – December 15, 2011

David Hodge — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 10:37:15 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #17 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the last issue of Guitar Noise News for 2011. The next issue of your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com – comes out on New Year’s Day.

So let me take a moment to wish all of you, as well as your families and friends a safe and joyful holiday season, for whichever holidays you celebrate!

As you read last time out, our latest song lesson to return to the pages of Guitar Noise is “Hey There, Delilah,” which joins our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” (each with all the music, tablature and lyrics) – back on our “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons page. Again, and always, we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And speaking of both Alfred Music and the Guitar Noise song lessons, Paul and I are also pleased to announce that Alfred has contracted me to write a book of song lessons in the Guitar Noise style.The title is tentatively “Songs Made Simple” and the first book will have between twenty and twenty-five song lessons in it as well as an audio CD with the various musical examples from the book. The full table of contents is still being decided but as soon as it is, we’ll make sure you know all about it! If all goes according to schedule, this book should be out sometime during the summer of 2012. Also (again if all goes well) we’re hoping that this book is the first of a series of such books. Again, we’ll definitely keep you posted on all the latest about it.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

It’s been just over ten years since George Harrison passed away.We’re celebrating his life and music all through the month of December as our featured artist. Read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas! We’ve always prided ourselves when it comes to the incredibly diverse selection in our “Easy Christmas Songs for Guitar” lessons. So it’s a bit of a no-brainer to feature these terrific tutorials as the Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for December. Stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner. That will take you to some fun and easy lessons that will get you in the holiday spirit in no time! Plus you’ll have a great time impressing your friends and family.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Scales – Parts 1 and 2
by Tom Serb

Believe it or not, scales are your friend. There is no reason scales should scare or confuse guitar players and with Tom’s help we’re going prove that. Part 1 covers the Minor Pentatonic Scale and the Blues Scale is the subject of Part 2.

How To Play Guitar Standing Up
by David Hodge

Most people tend to play their guitars really low because it looks really cool. It’s actually a lot harder to play well that way. So what is good posture? David gives some sane and simple advice in this Q & A.

The Music Margin: Why Technique Equals Musicality
by Jamie Andreas

To allow your musical feeling to emerge and give life to the notes you play, you must have the technique required to produce those notes in the first place.Jamie Andreas discusses the “music margin” and gives some excellent advice sure to help you with becoming more musical with your guitar.

HOW NOT TO BE CREATIVE
by Gerald Kickstein

Gerald Klickstein, author of “The Musician’s Way,” offers up this very creative discussion on how to not be creative! Great advice, as always, from Jerry!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 4

The Major Scale

Now we’ll get into the grand-daddy of music theory, the major scale.

The major scale is important to theory, because it’s the yardstick by which we measure all other scales… when I’ve said that the minor pentatonic is 1-b3-4-5-b7, I’ve meant that those are the pitches compared to the major scale.

To understand the structure of the major scale, we first need to look at the spacing between the letter names. Not all letter names are the same distance apart. The letters B and C are just one fret apart, and the letters E and F are one fret apart – all the other letters are separated by two frets. That leaves one fret in between the other letters… a fret between A and B, C and D, D and E, F and G, and one between G and A.

We can think of an ‘in between’ fret as a letter name that has been inflected, or changed a little bit. The Second fret of the first string can be thought of as a little bit higher than F (F-sharp, or F#), but it can also be seen as a little bit lower than G (G-flat, or Gb). As a result, each of these in-between pitches have two names.

The two names are called “enharmonic”, which means they’re written differently, but they sound the same. Some guitarists will tell you this means the names are interchangeable, but they’re not.

The major scale is our first diatonic (through-the-tones, or seven note) major scale. That means it’s going to have exactly one of each letter name.

To illustrate that, I’ll use the A major scale. We’ll need one of each letter name: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.

The pattern of the major scale is whole step (two frets), whole step, half step (one fret), whole step, whole step, whole step, and half step. So if we started on the open fifth string, we’d get this:

----------------------
----------------------
----------------------
----------------------
-0-2-4-5-7-9-11-12
----------------------

The open string is A, and two frets above it will be B. Our next scale pitch is two frets higher than that – on one of the ‘in between’ notes… it’s either C# or Db. The pitch after that falls one fret higher, on D.

If we call the scale note Db, we’ll end up with TWO D notes (one flat, one ‘natural’, or unchanged). Because our major scale is diatonic, we MUST call this note C# in the context of the scale.

After D, we go up two frets to E, and then we have to go up two frets again – to the pitch between F and G. Since we haven’t used the letter F yet, this note must be F#. Two frets higher than that must be G#, because we’ve already used A as our starting point.

That means our A major scale spelling will be A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#-A. When we’re looking at any scale or chord with an A root, that’s our yardstick for comparison: anything containing C natural will have a b3 – which means it will be ‘minor’.

The next thing to realize about our major scale is that we’ll have to play three notes on most of the strings because of the way the notes are spaced. Unlike the simple pentatonic scales, this means we’ll have a LOT more fingering choices!

Only two fingerings will put all the major scale notes underneath your fingers. One is the major scale with the root on the 6th string under your 2nd finger – here’s the C major scale in that fingering:

-7- 8-(10)-
-8-10-
-7-9-10-
-7-9-10-
-7-8-10-
-(7)-8-10-

The notes I’ve marked in parenthesis lie above or below the scale root – they’re part of the scale, but they’re not part of a complete octave in this fingering. That means when you’re using the scale to improvise, these notes are available… but when you’re practicing the scale, you want to start and end with a C note; otherwise it won’t sound like C major, and you want to get your ears used to the sound of the notes in relation to ‘home base’. That’s going to be important later on when we look at the modes of the major scale.

The other fingering that puts all the notes under your fingers starts with the root under your fourth finger on the 5th string. In C major, that’s in 12th position:

-(12)-(13)-(15)-
-12-13-(15)-
-12-14-
-12-14-15-
-(12)-(14)-15-
-(12)-(13)-(15)-

Many other fingerings are possible, and there are variations of these fingerings. For example, if you start with the root under your fourth finger on the 6th string (in the key of C, that’s in fifth position) you’ll find you have to stretch for one note – in the key of C, there’s a B note that’s not right under your fingers. You can get it by stretching or shifting on the fourth string, like this:

-5-7-8-
-5-6-8-
-5-7-
-5-7-9-
-5-7-8-
-(5)-(7)-8-

Or by stretching or shifting on the third string, like this:

-5-7-8-
-5-6-8-
-4-5-7-
-5-7-
-5-7-8-
-(5)-(7)-8-

These choices actually create three different fingerings of the major scale in this position! In the first, you’ll hit the B by stretching your fourth finger to the 9th fret; in the second, you’ll stretch to reach the B on the 4th fret… and because you’re stretching, you’ll return to position by also playing the C with your first finger, playing the 3rd string notes with a 1-1-3 fingering… or you can shift to fourth position for the 3rd string, playing those notes with a 1-2-4 fingering, and returning to fifth position for the 2nd string notes.

Because we have so many choices, guitarists take one of two approaches to learn the major scale. Option 1 is to memorize just a few fingering patterns (typically four to six) that let you get all the major scale notes on the fretboard. Option 2 is to learn the spellings of the major scale in each key, and the name of each note on the fretboard. In my opinion, while option 1 is ‘faster’, option 2 is better for two reasons: first, because you won’t be locked into ‘box’ playing when you’re improvising you’ll be able to find easier fingerings for many passages; second, learning the spellings and note locations will be a great help when you’re dealing with other things, like complex chord structures.

On to some of the other useful fingerings – if you put the root under the second finger on the 5th string, you’ll reach for two notes, the fourth note of the scale on the 1st and 6th strings. In the key of C, you’ll be in second position:

-(1)-(3)-(5)-
-(3)-(5)-
-2-4-5-
-2-3-5-
-(2)-3-5-
-(1)-(3)-(5)-

Scales can also be started with the first finger, and many guitarists use these for a reason I’ll get into shortly. With the root on the 6th string, our first note is on the 8th fret in C; you can think of this as eighth position or ninth – the difference is what notes your second finger plays. In 8th position, your second finger will get the 9th fret, and you’ll stretch for the 12th fret notes… in 9th position, your second finger will get the 10th fret, and it’s the first finger that’s doing the stretching. Here’s C major again:

-8-(10)-(12)-
-8-10-12-
-9-10-
-9-10-12-
-8-10-12-
-8-10-12-

Just to add one more variation, the G note on the 8th fret of the second string is also found on the 12th fret of the 3rd string, so you could do this instead – if you’re keeping track, that means you have four possible ways to finger the scale in this position:

-8-(10)-(12)-
-10-12-
-9-10-12-
-9-10-12-
-8-10-12-
-8-10-12-

Starting from a 5th string root, we can also do C major in 3rd position, which looks like this:

-(3)-(5)-(7)-
-(3)-(5)-(6)-
-4-5-
-3-5-7-
-3-5-7-
-(3)-(5)-(7)-

Or like this:

-(3)-(5)-(7)-
-(5)-(6)-
-4-5-(7)-
-3-5-7-
-3-5-7-
-(3)-(5)-(7)-

The reason these fingerings are widely used in spite of the stretching involved is because they start with a first finger root, and put three notes on almost every string. When you have three notes on a string, you can use economy picking – playing the first note down, the second one up, the third note down… and continuing the downstroke to the next string. If you’re going down the scale, you can reverse this, playing the highest note on each string with an upstroke.

Economy picking conserves motion, allowing you to play a bit faster. If we combine these scale forms with a shift of position on the second string, you can get a quick scale run that spans almost 2-1/2 octaves:

-10-12-13-
-10-12-13-
-9-10-12-
-9-10-12-
-8-10-12-
-8-10-12-

There are even more possible fingerings – the ones that start with your third finger on a scale root. But as these require even more stretching, they’re seldom used. If you’ve got the inclination to try them (and I play them sometimes as finger stretching exercises), apply what you’ve learned so far to the fretboard.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy at their website as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from today through Christmas Day.

Random Thoughts

Paul and I got an email the other day from Amanda Nable, who works with the “Sparks of Life” program at New York Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New You. They are looking for volunteer musicians to spread the joy of music to their patients in their various pediatric, physical rehabilitation, geriatric and oncology units. They are very flexible in terms of scheduling and more than willing to work with you to help them brighten the days of their patients. It can be a once-in-a-while gig or a regular ongoing one depending on your schedule.

If you live in the Brooklyn area and are willing to help by sharing your talent, please give Amanda a call at (718)780-5397, extension 105, or email her at abn9006@nyp.org.

Here’s hoping we can get some of our New York Guitar Noise community members hooked up with Amanda’s program and bring some music to people truly in need of it throughout 2012 and beyond.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 16 – December 1, 2011

David Hodge — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:29:19 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #16 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. Today is December 1 and it won’t be long before 2011 is over. It’s been quite a year and all of us at Guitar Noise would like to offer all our readers the best wishes for a safe and joyful holiday season, whichever holidays you’re celebrating this month!

By now hopefully all of you know that Paul has negotiated successfully with Alfred Music to purchase the rights to some of their songs for our song lessons here at Guitar Noise.One by one, we’re bringing back some of our old song lessons and we’ll also be adding brand new ones as well!

This month we’re pleased to announce the return of “Hey There, Delilah” to the pages of Guitar Noise. This particular lesson has been a runaway favorite with our readers since it made its debut just a few years ago and we’re thrilled to have it back.

“Hey There, Delilah” joins our three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” – each with all the music, tablature and lyrics. And again we’d like to thank Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.And, as always, we hope you enjoy all our Guitar Noise song lessons and also find them educational, entertaining and inspirational.

Just in case you’re interested, rumor has it that a certain horse (who chooses to go nameless) will be our next lesson subject, which should pop up online right around the start of the upcoming New Year.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas! We’ve always prided ourselves when it comes to the incredibly diverse selection in our “Easy Christmas Songs for Guitar” lessons. So it’s a bit of a no-brainer to feature these terrific tutorials as the Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for December. Stop by the Guitar Noise home page and click on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the page, just below the blue banner.That will take you to some fun and easy lessons that will get you in the holiday spirit in no time! Plus you’ll have a great time impressing your friends and family.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Revisiting The Capo – Parts 2 and 3
by David Hodge

Why do we acknowledge that using a capo changes the chords we play but continue calling them by their open position names? What are the real chords? Pars 2 and 3 in our series “Revisiting the Capo” addresses some of the confusion that transposing a song invariably causes humble guitar players.

How Do You Play “Double Stop Rock?”
by David Hodge

This little exercise from David’s “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Rock Guitar” has proved to be quite a fun and popular little piece. In this little “Q and A” session, he discussed how to best go about playing different types of double stops on the guitar.

What Is Dissonance?
by David Hodge

What do people mean by “dissonance” and other such terms when talking about chord changes? As David explains, not everyone hears the same sorts of dissonance.

Hey There Delilah
by David Hodge

Here’s a great example of how a simple pop song can help you to build up some solid technique in using partial chords, playing with finger-style or pick, and making some interesting chord changes on the fly. And to top it off, it’s even got some very easy (and short!) walking bass lines. Not to mention it’s a great work out for your basic rhythm!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’re continuing a terrific series from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb concerning just about every scale you could ever think of:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 3

The Hexatonic Scale

Hexatonic scales are any scales that have six notes; the blues scale was actually your first hexatonic scale. But now we’ll try a different note: the 6th of the major scale.

This pitch is located one fret below the b7, or two frets above the 5. The hexatonic scale has been widely used in rock, in solos ranging from Jimmy Page’s “Stairway to Heaven” solo to Carlos Santana’s work on “Black Magic Woman”. Many guitarists incorrectly identify this particular hexatonic scale as the Dorian scale – we’ll look at the differences soon.

Going back to our first minor pentatonic fingering, here’s the hexatonic scale with the addition of 6 – we have two possibilities:

 | R  |  |   | b3 |
 | 5  |  | 6 | b7 |
 | b3 |  | 4 |
 | b7 |  | R |
 | 4  |  | 5 |    | 6 |
 | R  |  |   | b3 |

 |   | R  |  |   | b3 |
 |   | 5  |  | 6 | b7 |
 |   | b3 |  | 4 |
 | 6 | b7 |  | R |
 |   | 4  |  | 5 |
 |   | R  |  |   | b3 |

The second fingering only has one practical fingering:

 |   | b3 |   | 4  |
 | 6 | b7 |   | R  |
 | 4 |    | 5 |    |
 | R |    |   | b3 |
 | 5 |    | 6 | b7 |
 |   | b3 |   | 4  |

And that’s also the case with the third fingering:

 |   | 4  |   | 5  |    | 6 |
 |   | R  |   |    | b3 |   |
 | 5 |    | 6 | b7 |    |   |
 |   | b3 |   | 4  |    |   |
 | 6 | b7 |   | R  |    |   |
 |   | 4  |   | 5  |    |   |

In theory, the fourth fingering could have a couple, but in practice only one is easy:

 |   | 5  |    | 6 | b7 |
 |   |    | b3 |   | 4  |
 | 6 | b7 |    | R |    |
 |   | 4  |    | 5 |    |
 |   | R  |    |   | b3 |
 |   | 5  |    | 6 | b7 |

And it’s the same with the fifth fingering:

 |   | b7 |   | R  |
 |   | 4  |   | 5  |
 | R |    |   | b3 |
 | 5 |    | 6 | b7 |
 |   | b3 |   | 4  |
 | 6 | b7 |   | R  |

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy (like their recent purchase of a Deagan marimba!) at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from today through December 10.

Random Thoughts

This time of year tends to be one of reflection and those reflections often lead to resolutions to start out the upcoming year. Invariably putting more practice time into one’s schedule turns up as either a lament or a resolution – often both.

It’s certainly not too early to be thinking that way, but I’d like to suggest that you don’t have to wait until an event like New Year’s Day to do so. Let’s face it, we’re all for getting in more practice or improving ourselves in some way – eating better, exercising more, practicing more (“more” in some cases meaning “more than I do now,” with “now” often meaning “not at all!”) – but we’re all also great at starting off our new found resolve with a conditional clause. Does this sound familiar:

“I’m going to practice more starting January 1″

“Wait. January 1 is a Sunday and I’ll probably be too tired because of the New Year’s Eve party. I’ll start on Monday. Great way to begin the week!”

“Wait. Monday will be the first day back at work after the holiday weekend. It’s going to be a zoo and I’ll be lucky to get anything done, let alone have any spare time. What about Tuesday? Who starts a new routine on a Tuesday?”

And before you know it a good week or month or even a season is gone by and you’ve not made a move to change your practice habits.

You can, of course, avoid this by starting right here and now. Think of the month of December as a trial run to work out all the kinks and snarls of scheduling. Practicing for improving your practice, if you will!

Remember that life is always going to throw things your way and you have to be flexible and adapt to whatever may happen. You probably won’t get practice time every single day, but you could be making a mental log of what available times you actually do have. If you start to objective look at your goals and plan for them now, and even move on to the next step of working on them, you’ll hit 2012 already working on your resolutions. That will certainly put you in a great mindset to keep your resolutions going in the first part of the New Year.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 15 – November 15, 2011

David Hodge — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:21:07 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #15 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the November 15 issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. Can you believe there are only two more newsletters between now and the one for January 1, 2012?

I know that this was our lead story last time out, but it truly bears repeating:

Our big news is that Paul has negotiated successfully with Alfred Music to purchase the rights to some of their songs for our song lessons here at Guitar Noise. Little by little, we’ll be bringing back some of our old song lessons, as well as brand new ones! This has been a long time coming and we can’t thank you enough for both your patience and your support.

We’ve chosen three R.E.M. song lessons – “Man on the Moon,” “Losing My Religion” and “Driver Eight” – to help us celebrate being able to bring back the music and tablature into our Guitar Noise lessons and we also do so to commemorate this great band who’ve recently decided to part ways. And we hope you will join us in thanking Alfred Music Publishing for working with us in order to bring copyrighted material back into our song lessons.

And as we bring some of these old lessons back, we’re going to try to tidy them up a bit. We hope you enjoy them and find them educational, entertaining and inspirational.

You can also read Paul’s “formal announcement” on the Guitar Noise site right here: The Return of Easy Songs for Beginners.

By the bye, “Hey There Delilah” will be the next lesson posted and that should occur right around the first of December. We should even have a few more announcements that may interest you by then.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Chuck Berry turned eighty-five last month. We’re giving him a belated birthday celebration by naming him the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of November Read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page: http://www.guitarnoise.com/artists/

Topic Of The Month

With the holidays coming up sooner than we’d like, it made sense to choose “Buying a Guitar” as November’s Guitar Noise Topic of the Month. We’ve had quite a few articles over the year dealing with the topic, ranging from going into the music store for the very first time to buying used instruments to making sure you’ve thought about your guitar’s shape when it comes to making a purchase. You’ll find all there and more by visiting the Guitar Noise home page and clicking on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the middle of the home page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

When Do You Change Chords?
by David Hodge

Chord changes in songs are always a matter of timing. So when you’re looking at a chord sheet with lyrics how do you know when to change chords?

On Becoming A Musician
by Tom Serb

How do you go from being an amateur musician to a professional musician? Practice is important but the real key is in developing a sense of musicianship.

How Do You Find Time To Play and LEARN The Guitar?
by David Hodge

When you’re busy you not only have to make time to learn guitar, you also have to ensure you’re making the best of your time. But how do you make time?

A Practical Guide To Shopping For The Guitarists In Your Life
Gifts for Less than $30
by David Hodge

Buying a gift for a guitarist doesn’t have to break your budget! Here are a lot of gift ideas for the musician in your life – all under $30!

Revisiting The Capo – Part 1
by David Hodge

When you find yourself playing with a lot of other guitar players somebody’s going to have to slap on a capo. But how do you know which fret to put it on?

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’ve another great bit of advice from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 2

The Blues Scale

Almost all of the other scales we use can be seen as the pentatonic scale with the addition of one or more notes. This has led to teaching methods based on five scale positions (like the CAGED system that you might have heard of), but I think that’s limiting. As we add notes to the scale, we’ll end up with MORE than two notes on some strings, which opens up a lot more fingering possibilities. But for the next couple of scales we’ll keep things simple, and look at only five fingerings.

Blues is a traditional music that uses the pentatonic scale with additions. Many blues tunes use a number of additions to the pentatonic scale, but a lot of blues tunes add just one note – the b5 of the major scale, often called the “blue note”. That gives us a scale formula of 1-b3-4-b5-5-b7.

Looking at our first pentatonic fingering, here’s the scale you’ve learned:

 | 8  |    |    | 11 |
 | 8  |    |    | 11 |
 | 8  |    | 10 |
 | 8  |    | 10 |
 | 8  |    | 10 |
 | 8  |    |    | 11 |

Here’s the same scale with the addition of the “blue note”:

 | 8  |    |    | 11 |
 | 8  |    |    | 11 |
 | 8  |    | 10 | 11 |
 | 8  |    | 10 |
 | 8  | 9  | 10 |
 | 8  |    |    | 11 |

When we take this scale into the next fingering, we have a problem: not all of the note fit under your fingers. This is a lot like the situation we encountered in the minor pentatonic scale’s 3rd fingering, where we have to shift on one string. But now, because of the layout of the guitar’s tuning, we have a couple of different options…

We can add the ‘blue note’ by reaching back:

      |    | 11 |    | 13 |
      |    | 11 |    | 13 |
      | 10 | 11 | 12 |    |
      | 10 |    |    | 13 |
 | 9 || 10 |    |    | 13 |
      |    | 11 |    | 13 |

Or we can add the blue note by stretching forward:

 |    | 11 |    | 13 |
 |    | 11 |    | 13 |
 | 10 | 11 | 12 |    |
 | 10 |    |    | 13 |
 | 10 |    |    | 13 |
 |    | 11 |    | 13 | 14 |

Because we’ve got a couple of options, we now have more than five scale fingerings. The trick to unlocking the possibilities lies in learning which note is which in the scale fingerings.

Our first minor pentatonic scale fingering looks like this, in terms of the notes we’re playing compared to the major scale:

 | R  |    |    | b3 |
 | 5  |    |    | b7 |
 | b3 |    | 4  |
 | b7 |    | R  |
 | 4  |    | 5  |
 | R  |    |    | b3 |

“R” designates the root note (the tonic) of the scale; each additional pitch is now designated by its position in the major scale. The ‘blue note’ is the b5 of the major scale, which is one half step (one fret) below the 5… or one half step above the 4. Applying this to minor pentatonic fingering 1, we get this:

 | R  |    |    | b3 |
 | 5  |    |    | b7 |
 | b3 |    | 4  | b5 |
 | b7 |    | R  |
 | 4  | b5 | 5  |
 | R  |    |    | b3 |

Now let’s look at minor pentatonic fingering 2:

 |    | b3 |    | 4  |
 |    | b7 |    | R  |
 | 4  |    | 5  |    |
 | R  |    |    | b3 |
 | 5  |    |    | b7 |
 |    | b3 |    | 4  |

We can add the blue note by going one half step below the 5:

   |    | b3 |   | 4  |
   |    | b7 |   | R  |
   | 4  | b5 | 5 |    |
   | R  |    |   | b3 |
 b5| 5  |    |   | b7 |
   |    | b3 |   | 4  |

or by going one half step above the 4:

 |    | b3 |    | 4  | b5 |
 |    | b7 |    | R  |
 | 4  | b5 | 5  |    |
 | R  |    |    | b3 |
 | 5  |    |    | b7 |
 |    | b3 |    | 4  | b5 |

Changing the third minor pentatonic fingering is easy:

 |    | 4  | b5 |  5 |    |
 |    | R  |    |    | b3 |
 | 5  |    |    | b7 |    |
 |    | b3 |    | 4  | b5 |
 |    | b7 |    | R  |    |
 |    | 4  | b5 |  5 |    |

The fourth leads to two fingerings, one moving back:

 | b5 | 5  |    |   | b7 |
 |    |    | b3 |   | 4  |
 |    | b7 |    | R |    |
 |    | 4  | b5 | 5 |    |
 |    | R  |    |   | b3 |
 | b5 | 5  |    |   | b7 |

And one moving forward:

 | 5  |    |   | b7 |
 |    | b3 |   | 4  | b5 |
 | b7 |    | R |    |
 | 4  | b5 | 5 |    |
 | R  |    |   | b3 |
 | 5  |    |   | b7 |

The fifth position also leads to two different fingerings:

 |   | b7 |    | R  |
 |   | 4  | b5 | 5  |
 | R |    |    | b3 |    |
 | 5 |    |    | b7 |    |
 |   | b3 |    | 4  | b5 |
 |   | b7 |    | R  |    |

 |    |   | b7 |    | R  |
 |    |   | 4  | b5 | 5  |
 |    | R |    |    | b3 |
 | b5 | 5 |    |    | b7 |
 |    |   | b3 |    | 4  |
 |    |   | b7 |    | R  |

As you work with incorporating the b5 into your fingerings, you’ll see how being able to view it as the b5 (one fret below the 5) or as the #4 (one fret above the 4) will help your mastery of the fretboard.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy (like their recent purchase of a Deagan marimba!) at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from October 12 through October 22.

Random Thoughts

This may be a little early, particularly since Thanksgiving hasn’t even gotten here in the States yet (although it made it to Canada last month!). Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot of late and, knowing that I’d written something about it ages ago that I couldn’t do a better job of writing now, I went and got it out of our newsletter archives. This would have been written close to Christmas 2003, a very shall we say thoughtful time in my life as I was about to leave Chicago with a truck filled with close to thirty years of living there and drive to Massachusetts,where I had no job and knew no one save the woman I would be living with. Sometimes that still seems like just yesterday, Of course, sometimes it also seems like the dinosaurs were still stomping around and keeping us up nights…

Christmas is upon us this week and this newsletter is a little short owing to all of the things going on in my life, but I’d like to tell you something about Christmas that has always bothered me. It’s how people say “if only every day was like Christmas” without thinking that making that particular wish come true is actually very easy.

Last August, the Riverside Jam was held in Chicago. Many of my students were very keen on participating and I’d like to tell you of one in particular.

On Saturday night of the weekend-long event, we’d rented a bar and were playing several sets. Each set was geared to either a specific musical genre or skill level; participants selected (in advance) which set or sets they wanted to play in.

The student in question opted to take part in what we called the “beginners” set. It was mostly straightforward rock and roll songs – the idea being to keep things as simple as possible. We played things like Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, Wooly Bully, Jump Jive and Wail, Wild Night and CCR’s Midnight Special.

Long after the show, he made it a point to thank me not only for being able to take part in the Jam but also for having to learn songs that he’d never played before and probably would never have learned otherwise. For the performance he had come up with several simple leads for many of the numbers and the beginners’ group probably got more compliments than any of the others. To him, the greatest part of the night was finding out how much other people enjoyed hearing him play. And, he admitted, they probably wouldn’t have heard him play if they weren’t interested in the songs in the first place.

So what’s all this got to do with Christmas? Well, depending on how you look at things, this holiday (and all the holidays at this time of year) are either about getting or giving. We like to think it’s more about the giving…

When we play music, we often exclusively play things that interest us. This is what brings us happiness. But part of any musician’s joy is a shared emotion involving an audience. So guess what happens when you learn a song for someone else?

Think about how wonderful a gift that is. Caring enough about someone in order to learn and play music especially for them. The beauty of music is that you can make anything incredible personal. Your performance, whether in front of a group of people or on a tape or CD or just between you and one good friend, is an ultimate expression of what life is all about.

When you give gifts like this, here is what you get: the spirit of the holidays each time you play. In other words, Christmas, or whatever you choose to celebrate, can happen every single day of your life. It’s all in your hands.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 14 – November 1, 2011

David Hodge — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:39:28 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #14 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Spotlight on the SSG
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the November 1 issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

I’m writing this on October 28 and we’ve got snow three inches of snow or so that’s covered the ground all day. And it’s not even Halloween yet! Speaking of which, do try to have a safe and fun Halloween if you’re out and about.

And as we bring some of these old lessons back, we’re going to try to tidy them up a bit. We hope you enjoy them and find them educational, entertaining and inspirational.

Spotlight on the SSG

Last Sunday, October 30, the Sunday Songwriters’ Group finished its tenth year. It’s an incredible achievement and a testimony to Nick Torres and Ryan Spencer, who came up with the idea back in the early autumn of 2001. And a great deal of credit has to go to both Bob Mothers, who ran the SSG for four years and to Vic Lewis who’s also done more than his far sharing of keeping the SSG up and running.

But as much as the Sunday Songwriters’ Group has its founders and leaders to thank for its continued success, that’s nothing compared to the accolades we have for every single person who has contributed to the SSG over the past ten years, whether by sharing the song lyrics and music one has written or by offering up candid, constructive and encouraging observations on each other’s work. This cooperative and friendly support has resulted in hundreds of songs begin written and has also hopefully helped many would-be songwriters become songwriters as well as helped songwriters become better songwriters.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Easy Songs For Beginners

Man on the Moon – R.E.M.

Man on the Moon by R.E.M. is a beautiful song that beginners can easily learn to play. We’ll also add some nice touches for a solo arrangement.

Losing My Religion – R.E.M.

In our beginner arrangement of R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion you can play the guitar, mandolin and bass parts all on a solo acoustic guitar. Sounds great.

Driver Eight – R.E.M.

This is a fun and easy to way to play the REM song Driver 8. We’re also going to learn a few new tricks like incorporating riffs into strumming.

Determining The Key Of A Song
by David Hodge

Figuring out what key a song is in is something guitarists usually do if they are playing music with others. How can you tell what key a song is in? David gives you some tips in this three parts mini-series.

Where Do I Begin…
by David Hodge

This is easily one of the most common questions we get: What order should I read the lessons in? Well, that really depends on who is asking the question.

Book Review: “Travis Picking” By Andrew DuBrock
by David Hodge

Andrew DuBrock’s latest guitar tutorial book, “Travis Picking” does an excellent job teaching not only the basics of Travis picking but the intermediate and advanced techniques, too.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’ve another great bit of advice from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Scales – Part 1

In this series I’m going to show you what scales are, and how to use them. Since members of Guitar Noise are guitarists, we’ll start off with the “guitar friendliest” scale, and move from there to the other ones that are the most musically useful (the major and minor scales).

After that, we’ll look at what modes are – and how to use them – and wrap up with some of the more unusual scales used in different types of music.

The Minor Pentatonic Scale

The most commonly used scale for guitarists is the minor pentatonic scale. A few definitions before we start playing it, because these terms will come up again: “scale” comes from the Latin word for “ladder”, and it’s used to describe any sequence of tones that rise or fall through one octave. (An “octave” is the distance from any pitch and the next pitch with the same name – like the distance from fifth string, third fret C to second string, first fret C.). “Pentatonic” comes from the Greek words “pente”, which means five, and “tonikos”, or tone; pentatonic scales are any scales with five different notes in the octave. And “minor” is a term applied to any scale or chord that contains the major scale’s third note lowered by a half step – a C major scale is the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C; any C based chord or scale that has Eb in can be considered minor.

What makes scales sound different from each other isn’t just the notes in the scale – it’s also the relationship of the sounds to each other. In most melodies, scales, and chord progressions, there’s going to be one pitch that sounds final… like you’ve arrived at the end of the musical journey. That pitch is called the “tonic”, and it’s the note that names the scale: A C minor pentatonic has C as it’s home base, while an Eb major pentatonic (which contains exactly the same pitches, as we’ll see later on) has Eb the tonic.

When we analyze the makeup of a scale to see what makes it different from other scales, music theorists compare them to the major scale – the building block of almost all music theory. Later on in this series we’ll look at what makes up a major scale; for right now, we’ll just say that the minor pentatonic scale has the formula 1-b3-4-5-b7, which means a C minor pentatonic scale has the notes C, Eb, F, G, and Bb.

If we start from the C note on the eighth fret of the sixth string, we’ll find the easiest way to finger this scale is C, then Eb on the 11th fret of the 6th string, F on the 8th fret of the 5th string, G on the 10th fret of the 5th string, Bb on the 8th fret of the 4th string, and C again at the 10th fret of the 4th string. Those notes make up the entire scale, but we can keep going through the next octave and get this fingering:

| 8 | | | 11 |
| 8 | | | 11 |
| 8 | | 10 |
| 8 | | 10 |
| 8 | | 10 |
| 8 | | | 11 |

A brief note about fingering: although there are some guitarists, even a few famous ones, who use just two fingers for these scales, I’d advise you to learn them in strict position (fingering 1-4, 1-3, 1-3, 1-3, 1-4, 1-4 for the one just shown. Avoiding unnecessary shifts of position will help you visualize the fretboard; once you can “see” the notes that belong to this scale, feel free to use whatever shifts and stretches you’d like.

Notice there are just two notes on each string. That’s because of the scale structure, and the way the guitar is tuned… and it gives us a huge advantage over other instruments in using this scale. Since each string will have only two notes, one of them must be the lowest note on the sixth string – and as a result, there will be only five possible fingerings, one beginning with each scale note.

To put it another way, if you’re playing the C pentatonic scale in 8th position, you’re playing 10th fret notes on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th strings, and 11th fret notes on the other three strings.

If you want to move your hand up to the 10th position, you can play those same notes using the first and second fingers; we can complete the next scale fingering by filling in the pitches C, Eb, F, G, and Bb that we can reach from the 10th position:

| | 11 | | 13 |
| | 11 | | 13 |
| 10 | | 12| |
| 10 | | | 13 |
| 10 | | | 13 |
| | 11 | | 13 |

We can continue moving up the fretboard to the 11th position and get this fingering… which is actually the one I teach last in lessons, because it’s the only one that involves a shift of position:

| | 13 | | 15 | |
| | 13 | | | 16 |
| 12 | | | 15 | |
| | 13 | | 15 | |
| | 13 | | 15 | |
| | 13 | | 15 | |

You can also play that fingering one octave lower, in open position. But when learning scales, I find it best to stick to “closed” fingerings (no open strings) until you’ve mastered the positions. If you can’t reach the 16th fret on your guitar, no problem – just practice these fingerings in a different key. In the key of F, the first fingering will be at the first position, the second fingering in third position, and this fingering will be in 5th position.

Now I’m going to drop an octave – notes on the 15th fret are an octave higher than the notes on the 3rd fret, so this fourth fingering pattern will begin with the G (the fourth note of the C minor pentatonic scale) at the third fret:

| 3 | | | 6 |
| | 4 | | 6 |
| 3 | | 5 | |
| 3 | | 5 | |
| 3 | | | 6 |
| 3 | | | 6 |

There’s one thing I want you to notice about this fingering: it’s the same as fingering 1, but with two notes moved up a fret – the higher note on the 5th string, and the lower note on the 2nd string. The reason why that happens is important in music theory, but it’s beyond the score of this lesson – I’ll talk about it at some point in the future.

Finally, our last fingering begins with the fifth note of the scale – Bb if you’re in the key of C. We end up with this:

| | 6 | | 8 |
| | 6 | | 8 |
| 5 | | | 8 |
| 5 | | | 8 |
| | 6 | | 8 |
| | 6 | | 8 |

Notice two things about this fingering: first, it’s the only fingering that’s perfectly symmetrical, with the two ‘outside’ strings fingered 2-4, and the two central ‘inside’ strings fingered 1-4. Second, I want you to notice that there is a note on the 8th fret of every string… just as there was in our first position.

This means we’ve come full circle, and have now identified every possible fretboard position of the notes in this scale. A complete view of the C minor pentatonic will look like this:

( fingering 3) (fingering 5) (fingering 2) (fingering 4)

| 1 | | 3 | | | 6 | | 8 | | | 11 | | 13 | | 15 | | | 18 | |
| 1 | | | 4 | | 6 | | 8 | | | 11 | | 13 | | | 16 | | 18 | |
0 | | | 3 | | 5 | | | 8 | | 10 | | 12 | | | 15 | | 17 | | |
| 1 | | 3 | | 5 | | | 8 | | 10 | | | 13 | | 15 | | 17 | | |
| 1 | | 3 | | | 6 | | 8 | | 10 | | | 13 | | 15 | | | 18 | |
| 1 | | 3 | | | 6 | | 8 | | | 11 | | 13 | | 15 | | | 18 | |
(fingering 4) (fingering 1) (fingering 3)

Depending on your guitar, you might be able to keep going for another position, or even two.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy (like their recent purchase of a Deagan marimba!) at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from October 26 through November 5.

Random Thoughts

Between getting the green light to get back to work on the Guitar Noise song lessons and the start of Year 10 of the Sunday Songwriter’s Group,not to mention spending the better part of the last fifteen months working with Nashville songwriter Casey Kelly on “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Art of Songwriting,” it’s no surprise that songwriting has been on my mind a lot of late.

There are a lot of reasons why people write songs – but usually it all comes down to communicating with someone about something. Maybe the something is the someone. That happens quite a bit.Songs, like conversations with friends or like books or movies or even paintings and photos, give you a shared connection with both the songwriter and everyone else who’s heard to song. That’s a lot of power.

Like any trade or art form, there are all sorts of songwriters. There’s the casual enthusiast who writes for his or her own enjoyment as well as the seasoned veteran who gets commissioned to ply his or her craft. You’ve got the songwriter who is into writing more as a way to validate his own life, making everything about the song draw your attention to him. And you’ve got the songwriter who makes you see the world in entirely new ways without even noticing that it was a song that made you do so.

Over the past ten years I have had the honor and the pure pleasure of watching music being created before my eyes and ears at the Sunday Songwriters’ Group. People from all over the world (some I’ve met as a result of becoming involved with their music) have become part of my life with their melodies, harmonies and rhythms. I can’t thank you all enough for making the world a better and brighter place. I eagerly look forward to hearing more!

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 13 – October 15, 2011

David Hodge — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 13:30:50 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #11 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and greetings to all! Welcome to the October 15 issue of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

It seems to be my lot to start out these newsletters with wishes of safety and health for people from just about every corner of the earth lately. Today, I’m sending my thoughts and heart to our friends and almost the entire country of Thailand, who are in the midst of flooding so bad that two thirds of the country is thought to be under floodwater and the forecast is that some places may not even begin to recover for the next two months.

As always, I hope you keep these people in your hearts and thoughts.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Great musicians are always exploring and expanding and Carlos Santana is certainly a testament to that! And that’s just one of the reasons why he’s the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of October Read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

We’re highlighting our “Practicing” lessons as our Guitar Noise Topic of the Month of October. With all the great guitar teachers we have contributing to this website – folks like Tom Serb, Tom Hess, Alan Green, Jamie Andreas, Nick Minnion, Paul Andrews and more – you can find a lot of great lessons full of tips on making your practice as productive as possible.

Visit the Guitar Noise home page and check out all the lessons and articles you’ll find about practicing by clicking on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the middle of the home page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Language Based Soloing
by Tom Serb

Tom’s great essay on how to start out playing lead guitar is up for all to read at Guitar Noise. You can find it at the following URLs:

Tutorial Tip: Making The A Major Chord
by David Hodge

Some guitarists actually have a lot of trouble with the A major chord. It looks like it should be easy enough, but that’s exactly where the problem lies.

Holding Your Guitar
by David Hodge

How you hold your guitar can make a big difference on how quickly you make progress learning to play. David gives you a few tips to help you out.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

This month, we’ve another great bit of advice from long time Guitar Noise contributor Tom Serb:

On Becoming a Musician

There’s a noticeable difference in skill level between the average amateur musician and the average professional. That’s obvious to even the casual listener. But if you’re an aspiring musician, the trouble is getting from here to there – and I’ve seen a lot of musicians waste a great deal of time heading down a path that seems correct: focusing only on technical skills.

Technical skills are important. The average professional musician will make fewer mistakes than the average amateur. The pro will be able to handle more difficult fingerings, play faster, and so on. The pro puts a lot more time into practice and performance rehearsal. These differences are obvious.

This leads the average aspiring musician to focus exclusively on their practice time. Putting in more time (and putting more into your time in terms of focus, practice organization, etc.) will probably make you a better technician. You might even become so good that you can make a living at playing. But that won’t necessarily make you a better musician.

Musicianship is the big picture – the total package, the creation of the entire musical experience. Technical ability is the toolbox we use for creating our big picture. The brush strokes of a sign painter might be just as precise as those of Rembrandt… but that technical ability won’t help the sign painter become a great artist without adding a few extra ingredients. Someone who has the big picture can be a great artist without having extreme technical ability – in the art world, a parallel might be Grandma Moses or Jackson Pollack. Their works don’t show the technical ability of many others, but that didn’t keep their art from rising above the pack.

I’m going to look at three and a half of the non-technical skills that great musical artists develop. Maybe you can use these musings as a road map for your own advancement.

1. Great musicians listen deeply.

There’s a lot going on in music. There’s the timing, the choice of notes, the relationship of pitches in a melody to each other, the interaction of pitches to create harmony, and the distribution of that harmony across instruments. There are variations in dynamics and phrasing that make each interpretation of a song slightly different from all the others – even if they’re played by the same group. The result is many layers of complexity, even in simple music.

When you’re listening to music, strive to get the most out of it that you can. When you’re practicing, keep those ears working: listen closely to the sounds you’re making, and how they relate to the techniques you’re using. When you’re playing with others, listen to what they’re doing, and how you’re relating to them. Eventually, you want to develop what pros call “big ears”, the ability to take in and process the big picture as it happens.

2. Great musicians categorize sounds in their minds.

Every rhythm, every scale, every interval, chord voicing, arrangement etc. is different. But they’re made up of the same stuff: sounds happening in time. Great musicians define sound in terms they can use.

For some that means understanding traditional music theory. For others it might be focusing on the ‘color’ they get when tones are distributed in a different way. But no matter how they go about it, great musicians organize their mental toolbox of sounds.

When you hear something that you like, listen to it over and over. Break it down: what makes it different from other things you’ve heard? What makes it similar? Can you apply the difference to another melody, or chord progression?

Great music and great performances break down into the combination of small things that aren’t remarkable in themselves. Becoming a musician isn’t just about adding more tools to your technical toolbox – it’s about taking the tools you already own and understanding exactly what you can do with them.

3. Great musicians use time.

Music is sound occurring as time unfolds. Time is the scaffolding on which we hang everything musical. We can organize everything neatly on that scaffold – with every sound happening in precise, regular time – or we can move those sounds forward or back against the beat.

The beat is the pulse of music. But the beat is not the music. We can divide up beats in different ways, we can play ahead of (or behind) the pulse of a tune. Great musicians ‘feel the beat’ and exploit the relationship between the pulse and what they do over it.

Any rhythm you can play on a guitar has three basic parts: the attack (when the sound begins), the duration (how long it lasts), and what happens in between. Silence is a huge part of rhythm. Listen deeply to the rhythms you hear, both in music and in everyday life, and categorize them in a way that works for you. Sharpen your sense of musical pulse at every opportunity – there is no substitute for an internal sense of rhythm.

3.5. Many great musicians know where they came from musically.

You’ll hear most musicians talk about their “influences.” For some, it’s just a laundry list of artists they like to listen to. And yes, those artists will influence your playing – because they shape the sound you hear inside your head… and great musicians take that sound in their head and put it out through their instrument, duplicating their vision as closely as possible.

But most of the great musicians I’ve known listen widely as well as deeply. I know a brilliant sax player who spends a lot of time listening to Hendrix. I know a punk guitarist who listens to a lot of Stravinsky. And I know classical musicians who spend time with bluegrass – and vice versa.

Listening widely as well as deeply, and categorizing the sounds they hear, allows these musicians to be deliberately influenced by other sources. A great example would be Paul Simon being influenced by African music (especially Mbaqanga) on the album “Graceland.” These musicians continually seek out and experiment with the unfamiliar, keeping what works for them and discarding the rest.

I hope you’ll find these observations useful in your own development as a musician.

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy (like their recent purchase of a Deagan marimba!) at their website, http://mwmusicacademy.com/, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

And we’re also trying to get more information concerning upcoming shows out to our readers in a timely manner. So every Wednesday we’ll be posting our “Events Horizon” calendar up on the Guitar Noise blog. You can read the one from this past week, which covers from October 12 through October 22.

Random Thoughts

A number of people have been posting on the Guitar Noise Forums of late about their “anniversary dates, meaning how long they’ve been part of the Guitar Noise community. “Bish,” who started it all, has been coming to Guitar Noise for six years this month. And “Nuno,” from Madrid, has been part of the GN community since October 2006. Alan Green’s been on the scene since September 2002.

Some of you with incredibly long memories may remember that we had to totally reset the Guitar Noise Forum in June 2002 – aside from Paul, who’s “officially” listed as joining in May 2002, it looks like a huge virtual tour bus descended on the place around June 15, carrying folks like Nic, Helgi Briem and Dan Lasley, among many others, all eager to sign the electronic guest book.

Naturally, this makes me think that next month, November 11, I’ll be wrapping up my twelfth year here. That’s longer in one specific place than any job I’ve held or place of residence I’ve found myself living. Seems strange in some ways and perfectly as it should be in others.

What I did not realize, though, is how many little bits and pieces I’ve written when it comes to answering emails and forum posts as well as the more than occasional newsletter musing. Part of going through the whole of Guitar Noise has unearthed a number of interesting ramblings that Paul and I feel worth sharing – at least once I’ve tidied them up a bit! So every now and then we’ll pop one up on the Guitar Noise blog, like this one: Why don’t you play the low E string on a C chord?

Some of these may be brand new for quite a few of you, I expect. But whether you’re reading them for the first or the two hundred and eighty-first time, I hope you find them both helpful and enjoyable.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 12 – October 1, 2011

David Hodge — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 21:23:48 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #12 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the month of October! That, of course, means that this is the October 1 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

And I’d like to kick off this month with more of a note than an announcement. Throughout the remainder of 2011, Paul and I will be trying out some new things at Guitar Noise. Some will be fairly obvious, others hopefully not so. For instance, since our “Events Horizon” feature in this newsletter is meant to help generate interest in shows being performed by members of the Guitar Noise community, we’re going to start posting a weekly “Events Horizon” calendar on the Guitar Noise Blog, which will also be picked up on our Facebook page. The idea being that we can make the events more immediate, as opposed to weeks away.

When you think about it, the Internet is becoming more and more of a place where things happen in any given moment and less of a place where one can say,”I think I’m going to sit down and read this and learn something.” That makes what we do best at Guitar Noise, namely teach guitar and music, a little tricky, to say the least! So we are going to try to do our best to integrate both the tutorial world and the “quick hit” Internet mentality that exists today.

Wish us luck!

One thing that won’t change, though, is the quality of the lessons and information that you will get here at Guitar Noise. And you also won’t lose your ability to tell us exactly what you think and what suggestions you might have! As always, feel free to write me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com any time. I look forward to chatting with you.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

We’re highlighting our “Practicing” lessons as our Guitar Noise Topic of the Month of October.With all the great guitar teachers we have contributing to this website – folks like Tom Serb, Tom Hess, Alan Green, Jamie Andreas, Nick Minnion, Paul Andrews and more – you can find a lot of great lessons full of tips on making your practice as productive as possible.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Transcribing – Part 1
by Paul Andrews

A few years ago figuring out songs by ear was the primary way of learning guitar. Let’s see how you can develop your musical ear through transcribing songs.

How To Discover The Best Guitar Learning Material
by Tom Hess

There are lots of guitar tutorials. Tom Hess explains how knowing precisely what you should be practicing will help you get the results that you want.

Ten Ways For Beginner Guitar Players To Improve In A Hurry
by David Hodge

Teaching yourself guitar runs the risk of developing some potentially harmful habits Avoid many common beginners’ mistakes with these helpful tips from David.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re thrilled to have Tom Serb rejoin us for this issue of Guitar Noise News. Here is the first of a two-part piece on “Language Based Soloing” and I hope you both enjoy it and learn from it:

Language-Based Soloing (Part 2)

Now we’ll add two more words. In terms of language acquisition, maybe you can picture “give,” “me,” and “now.” In terms of musical acquisition, the two notes you’re adding are the ones just above and just below your first note, in whatever scale you’re working with.

Before you start to play, imagine the possibilities: give. Give, give, give. Give me! Give now! Give me now! Now give! There are lots of possibilities. Combine them with the nuance of emotion in your mind: pleading, begging, demanding, asking. Is your musical child curious or angry? Hungering or relatively indifferent?

Now go to it with the backing track and your three word vocabulary. See what you can do. See how it feels. Notice how you’re becoming familiar with what the notes are going to sound like over each chord. Become aware of what you hear when you go from the first note to the second, or the first to the third, or the second to the third. Is it different when you reverse the order? How?

After you’ve got three notes down, add the other scale tones one at a time. In a half hour, you can easily go from using one note to using three or four, maybe even five, and being confident about what they’ll sound like.

When that happens, you’ve started soling deliberately. It’s no longer a “poke and pray” situation. You are saying something with music!

I’m a big fan of learning music theory. But theory follows function: some composer did something, and theorists created rules to describe what happened. In English (or any other language), grammar follows usage: people learn to speak first, and then learning grammar helps them speak ‘properly’. If they choose, they can speak ‘improperly’ – doing it for effect. It’s their choice.

But the point here is that they learned to speak before there was ever a distinction between proper and improper speech – you start by learning to say something, and then refine as you gain experience and knowledge. And you learn to speak with meaning by starting with one word.

Try it. I’ve heard students make amazing progress in just one or two lessons with this approach (and they’ve heard it too!) Even if you consider yourself pretty expert at soloing, I think you’ll find the exercise pretty eye opening.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy (like their recent purchase of a Deagan marimba!) at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

Events Horizon

So please feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dates to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. And remember that Guitar Noise News is (usually) sent out on the first and fifteenth of each month. And one needs a few days notice ahead of time, so plan accordingly. For instance, if you’ve got something coming up in the last two weeks of April (that is, after the fifteenth), then write by the tenth or the twelfth.

Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!

The Wishing Well, a fantastic Australian band has hit the shores of America! They’ll be playing tonight, Thursday, September 15 at the European Street Cafe, located at 1704 San Marco Boulevard in Jacksonville, Florida. If you have the chance, please welcome this wonderful band to the United States. You’ll have a great time!

We’d like to wish Tom McLaughlin a belated “Happy Birthday” (it was yesterday) and also pass along that he’s once again playing out tonight, Saturday, October 1 with the Odd Pops at The Irish Legend (8933 S Archer Ave, Willow Springs IL). He’s sitting in with group and will be playing some different styles (Classic Rock, Island, Reggae – think Santana, Matchbox 20, Buffett, etc).The show is from 9:00pm-1:00am. You can check the band out at their site, www.oddpops.com

And an early alert for Lee Hodge and his band Doesn’t Madder – they will be at George’s on the Lake, located at 101 Catawba Avenue in Rhodhiss, North Carolina on Saturday, October 15. Show goes from 8:30PM until midnight.

Finally, you can catch Australian band, The Wishing Well, as they tour America for the first time. They’ll be in the great Southwest this month with a show at the Cowgirl BBQ i Sana Fe,.New Mexico (located on 319 South Guadalupe Street) on Wednesday, October 12 (9PM start) and then in Albuquerque at the Winning Coffee Company on 111 Harvard Drive Southeast for a 9PM show the following night, Thursday, October 13.

Random Thoughts / Email of the Moment

With your permission, I’d like to go into the “mailbag” this month and look at a recent email. Since Paul has posted my old article, “The Underappreciated Art of Using a Capo,” I’ve been getting quite a few notes like this and thought it might be good to share the whole thought process behind transposing:

Hi there,

I’ve just read your articles about using a capo and transposing songs into different keys. However, I’m struggling with this particular song:

http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/o/oasis/dont_look_back_in_anger_acoustic_crd.htm

He’s playing with capo on the 4th fret, but I’m wondering what chords the other guitarist (Gem ;) is playing. I know that he plays the guitar with capo on the 2nd fret.
How do I transpose this song?

Thank you in advance!

Hello and thank you for writing.

There are a couple of ways of figuring out the chords the second guitarist is using. You could either figure out what key the song is in (meaning the chords you’d play without a capo) and work from there or work from the chords you have (for the guitar with the capo on the fourth fret) and figure out how they relate to a guitar with a capo on the second fret.

Whichever way we go, you first want to take a look at the song with the chords you have, namely with the guitar having a capo on the fourth fret. Just listing out the intro and first verse we’ve got this (and I’m simply listing the chords as they appear in each line of the song):

Capo on 4th fret

Intro
G Cadd9 G Cadd9

Verse 1
G G/F# Em7
G/B Cadd9
G/F# G Em7 G/F#
G G/F# Em7
G/B Cadd9
G/F# G Em7 G/F#

It’s pretty safe to assume this song in in the key of G. But with the capo on the second fret, you’ve raised the G two whole steps (four half steps and every fret is a half step) up. So therefore when you play G with the capo on the fourth fret, you’re playing in the key of B.

Now let’s take a moment and imagine if we were playing G on the second fret. Why? Because the difference between a guitar with a capo on the second fret and a guitar with a capo on the fourth fret is two frets, right? So if the guitar with the capo on the second fret was playing without a capo, the guitar with the capo on the fourth fret would have to play with the capo on the second fret in order to be playing the same. as the second guitar. And if you play a G with a capo on the second fret, you’re playing an A because A is one whole step (two half steps) higher than G.

And now let’s assume that the guitar with the capo on the second fret is playing in A. That would make perfect sense because when you play an A with a capo on the second fret it’s B because B is one whole step (two half steps) higher than A. So that totally jives with what we know about the song. The “real” key is B. If we have a capo on the fourth fret we should play in G and if we have a capo on the second fret we should play in A.

Now we look at the chords that we have and raise them all one whole step to put them in the key of A. It would look like this:

Capo on 2nd fret
Intro
A Dadd9 A Dadd9

Verse 1
A A/G# F#m7
A/C# Dadd9
A/G# A F#m7 A/G#
A A/G# F#m7
A/C# Dadd9
A/G# A F#m7 A/G#

I hope this helps. It’s really just a matter of writing it down and thinking it through.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 11 – September 15, 2011

David Hodge — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:42:27 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #11 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Welcome to the September 15 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com.

Hot on the heels of last issue’s news about Todd Mack playing in Taipei and Hong Kong, we are thrilled to get news from Tom Hess, longtime Guitar Noise contributor and highly respected guitar teacher, that he will be doing a world tour shortly with Italian metal band, Rhapsody of Fire. Tom joined Rhapsody of Fire for their summer festival shows in Europe this past summer and now is gearing up to play all over the globe.

You can read a lot more about this news in the Guitar Noise Interview with Tom Hess. Just follow the link in the “New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff” section below. And please join us in offering Tom a big round of congratulations with the upcoming tour. Be sure to check out Rhapsody of Fire should they come to your corner of the world.

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Glen Campbell, who is hitting the road for one final “thank you tour” these last four months of 2011, is the Guitar Noise Featured Artist for the month of September. While many of you may know of Mr. Campbell’s career because of a single song, like “Rhinestone Cowboy,” the fact is that he has always been an incredible and much respected guitarist and musician. Read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

Since September is traditionally the time when people start heading back to school, supposedly for the sake of an education, it seemed like a good idea to make the Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for September reflect the whole learning process. So we’re highlighting our “Strumming for Beginners” lessons this month. And, actually, these are great lessons to highlight at any time because rhythm is at the heart of guitar playing and you can’t spend enough time making your rhythm playing (that is, “playing in rhythm” as opposed to “not lead guitar playing”) as strong as you can.

Visit the Guitar Noise home page and check out all the lessons and articles you’ll find about our topic by clicking on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the middle of the home page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Speed Secrets – Part 5
by Tom Serb

Now that we’ve covered all the basics of speed playing,Tom Serb concludes this series of “Speed Sectrets” with some important practice strategies that you’ll find useful.

Going For The Music: From Guitar Student To Guitar Player
by Jamie Andreas

Jamie Andreas’ offers her secrets to “going for the music,” helping your musical performances channel the very soul of music from you to your listeners.

An Interview With Tom Hess
by David Hodge

In this online interview, Tom Hess discusses how he joined the band Rhapsody of Fire as well as their upcoming album and what it’s like to be part of a world-wide tour.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

We’re thrilled to have Tom Serb rejoin us for this issue of Guitar Noise News. Here is the first of a two-part piece on “Language Based Soloing” and I hope you both enjoy it and learn from it:

Language-Based Soloing (Part 1)

When I teach improvisation to guitarists who’ve never done it before, very few launch right into it naturally. What’s much more common is a student freezing up – some won’t play anything at all; most will do a few notes, or even a few measures and then stop.

When I ask what’s wrong, the answer is always the same: “I don’t know what to do!”

Over the years I’ve been teaching (33 so far, and still having way too much fun to stop!) I’ve developed an approach that solves this problem with almost all students. I can’t take the credit for this – my kids helped me with my homework.

My youngest son now towers over me – he’s got me by a good eight inches in height. But I still remember when he was just a tiny thing, and starting to learn about his world. The thing that really helped my teaching was him learning to talk.

Children start talking by imitating. Momma hold the little one and says “mama” over and over. After ten thousand or so repetitions, the little one gurgles something that might sound a little bit like what she’s saying. Mama’s pleased. The little one notices. “Mama” starts tumbling from the little one’s lips whenever he or she wants someone to fuss over him or her. A linguist is born.

I remember wearing out the grooves in my Led Zeppelin albums, playing them over and over trying to imitate the sounds. Just like our little linguist, I had no idea what Jimmy was actually doing. But I tried and tried to imitate what I thought it sounded like, and every once in a while I’d succeed a bit – at least enough so I’d feel good. Music and language aren’t very different.

Just like Junior, I wasn’t really saying anything. I was just imitating, and not understanding what I was doing. But a lot of good guitarists started soloing just like I did. They imitate what they hear, and eventually internalize the sounds they make. It’s a long process – think about how long it took you to learn to speak, to build up a reasonable vocabulary. Years, right? Maybe you still stop to look up a word now and then (I know I still do, and I’ve been speaking English for quite a while). It’s a long road, and you’re never quite done.

Let’s skip ahead a bit in the child’s development. The big leap comes when he or she starts actually communicating – the point where the child figures out that they can ask for something.

And that starts with one word. It doesn’t even matter what that one word is! Your little one might say “want!” (and point to something), or “give!” (and point to something), or “now!” (and point to something). Whatever word they choose, they’ve communicated. This marks a massive shift in development: they’ve gone from using a word to gain approval to using one word to say something!

Saying something with music is what soloing is all about. When my kids reached that stage, I had one of those “Aha!” moments, and it changed the way I teach.

Think about how most teachers teach soloing: they show you a scale fingering, and say “now play”. I wouldn’t dream of tossing a two year old a dictionary and saying “just put together the words you want”. We’re giving too much information to be truly useful. Our students end up struggling in a ‘poke and pray’ manner, trying to find the combination that works right – and if they do, struggling some more to understand why it was right.

I know you’re not two years old. You might have learned a scale fingering or two (or ten or twenty), but I can assure you that taking the big step back to the very beginning of language acquisition will change the way you solo: you’ll be more deliberate about it, and actually communicate in music.

It starts with one word. In a musical context, that means it starts with one note. Every solo has to start somewhere, right? So start with one note. And stay on that one note. See what you can do with it.

I had an improvisation teacher in college who had me solo over five choruses of the blues using a single note. I hated the exercise. But I also had to admit it made me better. At the time, I thought he was getting me to focus on rhythm alone; it wasn’t until more than ten years later, when my oldest child began to talk, that I realized what he was doing: he was teaching me to speak in music.

One word = one note.

I want you to start by putting on a backing track. You’ll take any note from a scale you know “should” work over the chord progression, and you’ll use that note exclusively. But before you start, I want you to close your eyes and think about how a small child uses one word… they may say “give” (and point) with a soft, trembling, quiet voice and pleading eyes… or they may say “Give!” (and point, and stamp their feet and cry). They may fall sobbing to the floor, repeating “give, give, give….”.

Your note is your “give”, or your “now”, or your “want”, or your “need”, or your “mine”, or whatever other image works. Picture in your mind’s eye how many ways you can use that one word in different ways.

Now play. Wring everything you can out of that one note – rhythm, volume, duration of the sound, timbre (the quality of the tone). I’ll wait.

How did that feel?

I’ll bet you got to know that one note better than you ever have. You’ve explored some of the possibilities. You’ve made it your friend. You now know what that note can do.

–

Be sure to keep up with Tom and the goings-on at the Midwest Music Academy (like their recent purchase of a Deagan marimba!) at their website, as well as their Facebook page.

And if you’re interested in more on soloing, be sure to check out the Guitar Noise Topic Page on Solos. After reading this essay from Tom, you might find our series on “From Scales to Solos,” Part 2 will be particularly helpful in preparing you for the second part of Tom’s series.

Events Horizon

Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!

Tom McLaughlin is playing with his old band, Slightly Offensive, this Saturday, September 17 at Shakers, located at 121 West Stevenson Road in Ottawa, Illinois from 10:00pm-1:30am.

Lee Hodge and his band Doesn’t Madder are going to be in Newton, North Carolina at The Artist’s Cafe (100 North Main Street) this Saturday, September 17. Show goes from 8 PM until midnight. The following weekend they’ll be at the Do Drop In, located at 6224 Highway 421 South in Mountain City, Tennessee. They’re playing both Friday and Saturday (September 23 and 24) and both shows start at 9 PM.

Random Thoughts

One of my younger students came today with an even younger brother who was doing some schoolwork, being putting together old maps, such as those from before Columbus’ voyages. He called them “maps from before we knew everything.” For whatever reason that struck me as hilarious. And not just for the obvious humor.

You see, I can remember knowing everything. Or at least thinking I did. No, that’s not quite right because I would never think that. I don’t think anyone truly does.

But most people certainly go through a phase in life where, while they don’t think they know everything, they assuredly act as if they do. I definitely did. And,truth be told, I was not a good person to be around or be friends with at that time.

Eventually, though (and, again hopefully like most people), I grew out of it. If anything, it seems that one is likely to tailspin in the other direction as one grows older. Meaning, the older you get the more you realize that there’s a universe of things out there that you have no clue about.

Learning and playing music bring that home to me on a daily basis. It seems impossible for a day to go by where I don’t learn something new or discover some music I’ve never heard before or uncover some layer or depth to a song I’ve been listening to for ages. And doing so is thrilling.

But it’s also impossible if you are in the “know everything” mindset. Maybe that’s why we’re supposed to grow out of it – what could be duller than knowing everything? It’s hard not to feel sympathy towards anyone who does, because he or she can’t be surprised or excited or challenged.

If you care about such things, it’s always a good idea to take stock of your mindset from time to time. Have you listened to any new music of late? Gone to see any shows? You should be able to find something worth enjoying (and learning) from any experience. Not only musical but with all your interactions, be they personal or virtual.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 10 – September 1, 2011

David Hodge — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:25:26 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #10 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters Group
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Welcome to the September 1 edition of Guitar Noise News, your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com. Hopefully, we addressed you by name this time out and not by “[Name]” as we did last time. But the fact that we did do that should tip you off to the fact that we are trying to get more up to date by using sophisticated “newsletter software.” In the past, we used to type each one of these twenty-five thousand and change newsletters out individually in order to get all the names straight. Using this sophisticated software should cut down on us being late with the newsletter because it’s just Paul and I typing out all of them. Don’t know if you’re going to believe that or not, especially since this isn’t the April 1 issue, but I figure it’s worth a shot. We’ll see.

The big news for this newsletter comes from Todd Mack, musician, songwriter, producer and founder of Music In Common – producers of FODfest, and local and International school music education programs and various multimedia productions. He’s going to be doing a number of shows and other events in Taipei and Hong Kong between September 8 and 15.

On Thursday, September 8, he’ll be at Bobwundaye playing with Blues Vibrations for an 8:30 show.

On Saturday, September 10, Todd will be at Zhongshan Hall, the last of six speakers of a TED Talks conference. He will discussing his ongoing work of building community through music, which will undoubtedly detail a lot of Music In Common’s work across the globe. The whole event starts at 1:30 PM.

On Sunday, September 11, Todd will be one of the artists taking part at the Daniel Pearl Day Festival at Huashan Grassland in Taipei. This is a free concert that starts at 1:00 PM.

And then it’s on to Hong Kong where Todd will be playing a show on Wednesday, September 14 at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondent’s Club.

You can find out more about these shows (not to mention the rest of Todd’s schedule) at his Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/toddmackmusic

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

Since September is traditionally the time when people start heading back to school, supposedly for the sake of an education, it seemed like a good idea to make the Guitar Noise Topic of the Month for September something to do with Absolute Beginners Lessons, to show our support for those of you getting back into the education mindset.

Visit the Guitar Noise home page and check out all the lessons and articles you’ll find about our topic, whatever it should happen to be called “Strumming for Beginners”, by clicking on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the middle of the home page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Speed Secrets – Part 4
by Tom Serb

In the latest installment of Tom Serb’s series on adding speed to your playing, we’re going to try some more difficult speed drills. If you’ve been following Tom’s lessons on playing fast you’ll like these new more challenging patterns.

Strength In Numbers
by David Hodge

If you’re learning guitar and want the advantages of having a teacher but you’re worried about finances, taking group lessons may be just the thing for you!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

In this issue of Guitar Noise News, we reintroduce you to guitar teacher and Guitar Noise contributor, Paul Andrews, who offers some advice on developing your musical ear through transcribing:

Transcribing – Part 1

For this newsletter I thought I would address a topic that has arisen in numerous lessons of late with my own students and something that I feel needs addressing. This topic is the importance of developing a good musical ear through transcribing songs.

I often have students ask me if they can learn to play their favourite song (which is definitely something I strongly encourage) but they often look back at me horrified when I ask if they have tried working it out themselves. It seems this idea had never crossed their minds!

Go back a few years, though, and working out songs by ear was the primary means of learning to play the guitar. This is how most of our guitar heroes and legends taught themselves how to play. You read over and over again in interviews how they would sit with a vinyl record and play it repeatedly in order to learn the guitar parts they admired. Nowadays Internet tab and artist song books are a student’s first port of call but you can only get so much from a tab. If you want to get the true feel and tone of an artist you have to use your ears. Perhaps even more important is that you will learn to hear parts that aren’t always written out in transcription. There’s nothing stopping you from playing the saxophone part from a song like, for example, “Take Five” except, perhaps, your current lack of confidence in your listening skills.

So what is transcribing?

Transcribing, technically, is writing out a song so that another person (yourself included) can play it from your written notes. But because transcribing is becoming such a rare ability we tend to think of it these days as the art of working out songs through using your ears and also writing it down. But for now we are only looking at working it out at this stage.

It is important to note, though, that there are different levels of transcription. You could be doing something as simple as figuring out the time signature and the chords of a song so that you can strum along to it. Or you could be trying to work out a note-per-note transcription of a single guitar part. Or you could be working all note-per-note transcriptions of all the guitar parts of a single song. Since we’re just getting started, let’s focus on figuring out the chord progressions, okay?

So when do I start trying to transcribe?

As soon as possible, obviously this seems daunting to the beginner guitarist but developing a good musical ear is all about experience, so just give it a try but most importantly keep trying! Start with your favourite song and try to clap along with it, is it 4/4 time? Listen closely to the Bass guitar which often plays the root notes of the guitar chords, try to pick them out along the ‘E’ string and change chords with the guitar.

There are a number of excellent articles here at Guitar Noise that can help you get started. David’s “ear training trilogy” is a good place to begin. The first and, especially, the last lesson of this set are the ones to which you’ll want to direct your attention:

As mentioned, definitely take your time with the last lesson, which goes through figuring out three song examples step by step. And don’t forget that most people who teach have been working songs out by ear for quite a while so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t come to you magically in an instance. Like everything about the guitar (and music), transcription takes practice. But at least now you’ve got something to go on in order to start practicing.

The song is too fast, I can’t keep up.

And, unlike your guitar heroes, you’ve also got a lot of help! There are many computer programs available such as Transcribe! and Amazing Slow Downer which allow you to slow down, loop sections and change the pitch of audio tracks. Plus the digital players in some computers also provide such assistance.

Homework assignment

So now you have an idea of where to start it is time to begin. Have a go at transcribing one or more of the four songs below, in this case “transcribing” meaning “work out the chord progressions, just as David did in “Solving the Puzzle.

To give you a hand, all the songs in question use some or all of the chords G, D, A, C, Em, and B7. All you have to do is work out which ones and in what order.

Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Wonderful Tonight – Eric Clapton
Hot & Cold – Katy Perry
Sweet Child O’Mine – Guns ‘N’ Roses

And don’t be shy about attempting songs not on the list! The more you practice on the better you’ll get at working out songs by ear.

I shall return in a few weeks with the answers but until then good luck and happy listening.

P.S. Extra credit marks for working out the guitar solos!
–

In case you’re not familiar with Paul, he has just recently launched the Online Guitar Academy. There is a 30% off Introductory Offer going on through the month of September, by the way!

And Paul has also recently co-written a method book called “Electric Guitar Playing,” which you can also find at his website. We should be having a review of it here at Guitar Noise sometime in the next month or so.

Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters’ Group

The Guitar Noise community has a great many gifted songwriters as members and Paul and I want you to get acquainted with them. Each month at the Guitar Noise Blog we’ll be posting a song written by a member of the Sunday Songwriters’ Group (or “SSG” for short). Some will be relatively new songs and some will be from the eight years of archives that we have. Most SSG pieces are modest recordings done on the fly, simply meant to give the listener an idea of what the finished piece will hopefully sound like. And usually the heart that goes into any of these SSG songs more than makes up for the lack of recording it in a professional studio.

I’m especially looking forward to this month’s Spotlight because, as of the time I’m writing this, I have no idea who is going to be our featured SSG artist! Vic has got a number of good choices and I’m anxiously awaiting his interview so I can post it up online as soon as it arrives!

And when that happens, you will find all that here.

We hope you enjoy these wonderful songs your fellow Guitar Noise members have put together. And if you’ve got any requests from past years, we’ll try to track them down.

By the way, the Sunday Songwriters’ Group has been a part of Guitar Noise for over eight years now. Writing songs is much like playing an instrument in that you won’t get better without practice, so each week a new “assignment” is posted in the hopes that it will both challenge and inspire the readers to create a new song.

Stop on by the SSG and join in the fun.

Events Horizon

Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!

The Wishing Well, a fantastic Austalian band that’s been playing in Europe for a little more than the past year, makes its first trip to America and will be in Florida during the first half of September. Their first show is Friday, September 9, playing at the Barnacle Historic State Park (3485 Main Highway) in Coconut Grove, Florida. Show starts at 6 PM.

From there, they’ll head to the Dunedin Brewery. located at 937 Douglas Avenue in Dunedin for a 6 PM show on Sunday, September 11.

Then it’s on to Orlando and an 8 PM show on Wednesday, September 14 at the Peacock Room at 1321 North Mills Avenue, followed by an 8:30 PM show the next evening (Thursday, September 15) at the European Street Cafe, located at 1704 San Marco Boulevard in Jacksonville, Florida.

If you have the chance to see this wonderfully energetic band, stop in and give them a listen. You’ll have a great time!

Tom McLaughlin and his new band, Life is Drama will be at Exit 197, which is at 952 West Reynolds Street in Pontiac, Illinois on Saturday, September 10, playing from 10:00pm-1:30am.

Lee Hodge and his band Doesn’t Madder are going to be rocking out in North Carolina the first two weekends of September. Tomorrow, Friday, September 2, they’ll be at George’s on the Lake (101 Catawba Avenue) in Rhodhiss, playing from 8 PM until midnight. Then on Saturday, September 3, they’ve got a 9:30 PM to 1:00 AM show at Horsefeathers Roadhouse, located at 3746 Mount Pleasant Road in Sherrills Ford.

The following weekend they be playing Friday, September 9 at The Alibi, at 819 West Avenue NW in Lenoir and then on Saturday, September 10 they’ll be back at George’s on the Lake again for an 8:30 show.

Random Thoughts

It’s been a bit of a weird month, to say the least, especially this last week which saw the east coast of the United States get hit by both an earthquake and an even more sizable hurricane. Truth be told, we didn’t feel the quake at all where I live and the hurricane had thankfully dwindled considerably in size before it thoroughly soaked our neck of the woods.

But unfortunately, much of the rest of the country didn’t fare so well. Not all that far west of me in the Catskills of New York, and to the north in Vermont, small isolated towns were devastated by flash flooding, while areas in the Carolina, Virginia and other Mid-Atlantic states were also hit hard.

It’s easy to say that these are tough times economically, and saying that natural disasters take no notice of economies is a bit of a cliché, but the truth is that there is almost always a need for assistance somewhere in the world. And while one can’t be constantly giving, being aware of it and treating people as kindly as possible can certainly help. Sometimes life is very much a matter of seeing what you have to spare (and it can be time or simply kindness and a willingness to listen) and offering what you can.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 9 – August 15, 2011

David Hodge — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:28:06 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #9 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters Group
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Don’t look now, but summer (or winter, if you’re south of the border) is rapidly drawing to a close. In just over a month we’ll be celebrating the start of autumn or spring, depending on where you happen to live. In other words, “Hello and welcome to the August 15 edition of Guitar Noise News (your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com)!” Where does the time go?

And speaking about not knowing where the time has flown off to, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Art of Songwriting is now out at bookstores, both online and in the physical world.As mentioned in the last newsletter, this is the first book I’ve co-written, working with Nashville based songwriter, Casey Kelly. Any of you who’ve seen George Strait in concert will be familiar with Casey as his song, “The Cowboy Rides Away,” is usually George’s closing number. Casey has also written hit songs for Kenny Rogers and Dottie West and Tanya Tucker, among many others and he’s also been nominated for Grammy Awards.

We put in a lot of time and effort into this songwriting tutorial and I hope that those of you who might happen to buy it find it worth you while. As always, you can email me with any questions you may have about the book at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Guitar Noise’s Featured Artist for the month of July is Jeff Healey, a remarkable blues-rock artist whose unique style of playing the guitar flat across his lap won him many admirers. Read all about him on the Guitar Noise Profile Page.

Topic of the Month

A lot of people pick up the guitar in order to play and sing songs with other people. Singing is something that anyone can learn to do. Much like learning guitar, it’s a physical activity that you can improve with the right practice.

And there are many articles and lessons here at Guitar Noise to help you get started on singing. These lessons look at singing and playing guitar at the same time. Not only is this something you can do, but with proper practice, you can even learn to do it quite well.

Visit the Guitar Noise home page and check out all the lessons and articles you’ll find about singing (both while playing the guitar and without) by clicking on the latest “Topic of the Month” up at the top of the middle of the home page, just below the blue banner.

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

The Fabulous Flea Market Band Live at the Black Cat
by Nick Torres

Nick Torres reviews Oslo’s The Fabulous Flea Market Band at their August 9 show at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. See GN member Lars Kolberg play trombone!

What’s In A Word
(or “Repetition Bears Repeating”)
by David Hodge

One easy way to improve as a guitarist and musician is to simply change your approach to practicing. Here’s the first step to avoid avoiding practice!

Great Advice From Great Teachers

In this issue of Guitar Noise News, we conclude Tom Serb’s multi-part series on “Speed Secrets:”

Speed Secrets – Part 5

Now that we’ve covered all the basics of speed playing, there are a few practice strategies that I’ve found useful over the years.

First, you’ll need to practice with a metronome. A metronome is a great way to measure your progress, and it helps keep your rhythm honest – you don’t want to become sloppy as the speed increases.

A metronome is useful for two types of drills. The first, which I call ‘laddering’ involves playing with a metronome at a given speed until you can play a drill perfectly. At that point, you’ll increase the speed of the metronome clicks, and start over again. Metronomes come in two basic flavors: mechanical and digital. Mechanical metronomes are basically clocks with a sliding weight that allows you to adjust the speed of the ‘click’ it produces; they typically have divisions ranging from 40bpm (beats per minute) to 208bpm. Digital metronomes, which are available as stand-alone battery or electric units, and as software for computers or iPhones. They can have various whistles and bells – literally. I’ve got one that rings a bell for beat one, and clicks on the other beats in various time signatures. Some will give you other sounds for divisions or subdivisions of a beat, and some will give you the option of a flashing light to accompany the click.

In a laddering drill, you might practice at 60bpm until you have a pattern down solidly, then move to 63, 66, 69, 72, 80, and so on. When you reach the top end of the metronome’s range, just cut the time in half and use subdivisions – eighth notes at 208 are the same speed as 16th notes at 104, so you can start there and move up to 108 and keep building your speed.

The other type of drill is one I call “leaping.” This will build your speed faster than laddering, but there’s a downside: because it forces your speed along, it also risks introducing sloppy behavior. I’d advise doing this leaping strategy only periodically – twice a week at most; the rest of your speed drills should be done with laddering, where you can focus better on your technique.

In a leaping drill, you start by playing at a speed you’re comfortable with. Then adjust the metronome to TWICE that speed and try it again. You won’t be able to keep up. Do your best with it, but just do it ONCE. Then set the metronome to slightly faster than your starting speed – if you started at 80bpm, try it at 84. You might find that you can now play it – in contrast to the frantic pace you were just trying to play, 84 seems a lot slower, even if 80 was your best effort to date. If you can play it properly at 84, leap up to 160 again and try it ONCE. Then try it at 88 – if you succeed, keep repeating until you find the speed where you fall apart.

If you make a mistake at the slower speed, stop! You don’t want to be practicing your mistakes and making them habits! Instead, go back to your original speed (80bpm in this example) and start over.

Finally, keep a log of your progress. Jot down the exercises you did, and the speeds you’ve achieved. That will give you a record of your achievements, and that can help you keep at it when you hit the inevitable plateaus.

Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters’ Group

August, for me anyway, usually signals the annual Riverside Jam – a musical get together that was started back in August 2000 by Dan and Laura Lasley. You can read about that very first one at either of these two articles:

Over the years, I’ve gotten to meet a number of Guitar Noise folks at Riverside Jams, from GN founder, Paul Hackett, to Nick Torres to Tim (“Musenfreund”) Bennett. And the Riverside Jams have also featured some great music written by members of the SSG.

One of those songs, “One By One,” happens to also be one of the very first SSG collaborative effort, with me providing melody and music to a hauntingly poignant lyric that Nick had written as an SSG assignment. This song has probably gotten played at almost every Riverside Jam since 2003 and with good reason. It’s a powerful song that works well both as an individual showcase and as an ensemble piece. And Vic Lewis has managed to talk me into making it the Auguste Spotlight on SSG feature for the month of August. That means you get two interviews – one with Nick and one with myself – as well as a couple of recordings of the song – one as a solo (albeit multi-tracked) SSG demo and one where it gets the full Riverside Jam treatment.

And you can find all that here.

We hope you enjoy these wonderful songs your fellow Guitar Noise members have put together. And if you’ve got any requests from past years, we’ll try to track them down.

Stop on by the SSG and join in the fun.

Events Horizon

So please feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dat es to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. And remember that Guitar Noise News is (usually) sent out on the first and fifteenth of each month. And one needs a few days notice ahead of time, so plan accordingly. For instance, if you’ve got something coming up in the last two weeks of April (that is, after the fifteenth), then write by the tenth or the twelfth.

Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!

Australian band, The Wishing Well wraps up the month of August with a number of gigs in Scotland before crossing the Atlantic for their first shows in the United States. They’ll be at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, playing at Bannerman’s (212 Cowgate in Edinburgh) on Wednesday, August 24, starting at 9 PM. The next night, Thursday, August 24, you can catch them at Hootananny’s, located at 67 Church Street in Inverness. That’s another 9 o’clock show. And they’ll be in Glasgow on Sunday, August 26, playing at the Clutha Vaults on Stockwell Street.

Tom McLaughlin and Life is drama have got two shows this upcoming weekend.This Friday, August 19, they’ll be at Sullivan’s Irish Pub & Eatery (4660 W 147th Street in Midlothian, llinois, between Knox Ave & Kilpatrick Ave.). They’ll play from 10:00pm-1:30am.

And then on Saturday, August 20, catch them at Boobens Bar & Grill (109 East Chippewa Street, Dwight, Illinois). Tom and Life Is Drama play here on a two- month rotation so if you can’t make it this time, try to see them when they come back in October!

And Lee Hodge and Doesn’t Madder have two shows to close out the last weekend of August. On Frday, August 26, they be at Mayo’s Restaurant, located at 321 North Center Street in Statesville, North Carolina from 8:30 until midnight. The next evening, Saturday, August 27, you can hear them at Horsefeathers Roadhouse (3746 Mt. Pleasant Road in Sherrills Ford, NC) from 8:30 to 12:30.

Random Thoughts

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace

Newsletter Vol. 4 # 8 – August 1, 2011

David Hodge — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:19:44 +0000

Greetings,

Welcome to Volume 4, Issue #8 of Guitar Noise News!

In This Issue:

Greetings, News and Announcements
Guitar Noise Featured Artist
Topic of the Month
New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff
Great Advice from Great Teachers
Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters Group
Events Horizon
Random Thoughts

Greetings, News and Announcements

Hello and welcome to the August 1 edition of Guitar Noise News (your free twice-a-month newsletter from Guitar Noise – www.guitarnoise.com).

I’d like to kick off this newsletter with a note from Lars Kolberg. Lars has been part of the Guitar Noise community for quite some time (I think he started posting regularly on the forums in late 2005 or so) and while he’s not been active of late, he did drop by to let us know about his latest news. He’s been playing in a “punk / bluegrass” band (he’s the tall guy with the trombone, violin and harmonica) called “Flea Market” and it turns out that the band is going to be playing a week of shows here along the East Coast of the US. Here’s a bit of the promotional material:

Flea Market – Norway’s finest Bluegrass punk

“Love songs for lumberjacks, bluegrass for punk rockers, serenades for sailors, drinking songs for desperate nights; love, insanity, murder, natural disaster and three-legged dogs are some of the themes covered in the Flea Market songbook, blending shadows from the Norwegian forest with darkness from the margins of America. When civilization collapses and mankind once again huddles around communal bonfires, the songs of Flea Market will rise up through the night… ”

And this is the complete tour list for “American Splendor Tour 2011:”

August 5 – NYC, NY – Banjo Jim’s
August 6 – Brookyn, NY – Hank’s Saloon
August 7 – Baltimore, MD – Free Farm
August 8 – Philadelphia, PA – The Fire
August 9 – Washington, DC – Black Cat
August 10 – Wilmington, DE – Mojo 13
August 11 – Chapel Hill, NC – The Cave
August 12 – Richmond, VA – The Camel
August 13 – Philadelphia, PA – Raven Lounge

Now, I know I’m an unabashed and chronic sentimentalist, but I cant’ help thinking what a great thing it is for these guys to be doing this small tour of small clubs, far from home and undoubtedly in front of a relatively small handful of strangers. Especially in light of recent events in their home country (Lars is from Oslo, Norway).

And maybe that is the point – that an incredibly intense moment sharing music and dreams can make any evening, any day, any life a lot better. So, if you can, get out to see Flea Market if they happen to be in your neck of the woods. Or just get out of the house and away from the computer and connect with whatever live music you may happen to find close by. At the heart of it all, music is about communication and about sharing emotions with one another. And heaven knows we can all use that whatever chance we can get.

In other news, and I don’t know where the time has gone, but it seems that on Tuesday, August 5,The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Art of Songwriting will be arriving in bookstores, both online and in the physical world. This is the first book I’ve co-written, my partner being the extremely talented (and Grammy nominated) Casey Kelly. Any of you who’ve seen George Strait in concert will be familiar with Casey as his song, “The Cowboy Rides Away,” is usually George’s closing number. Casey has also written hit songs for Kenny Rogers and Dottie West and Tanya Tucker, among many others. We put in a lot of time and effort into this songwriting tutorial and I hope that those of you who might happen to buy it find it worth you while.

As always, you can email me with any questions you may have about the book at dhodgeguitar@aol.com

Guitar Noise Featured Artist

Topic of the Month

New Articles, Lessons, Reviews and Stuff

Owing to a number of summer activities, some of these new articles may not be up online on August 1, try as we might to make that so. If you find one that’s not, don’t panic! Just give us a day or two and you should find it posted up and ready to read!

Making A Living As A Guitar Teacher – Part 3
by Alan Green

Alan has been teaching guitar full-time for two years now. In his latest blog post he reveals more about what he has learned in that time.

Speed Secrets – PART 3
by Tom Serb

There are all sorts of barriers to playing fast. In his latest post Tom shares some practice tips for developing speed in all of your fingers.

Great Advice From Great Teachers

Let’s get back to Tom Serb’s multi-part series on “Speed Secrets:”

Speed Secrets – Part 4

Next we’ll up the difficulty level by changing strings. You’ll do the same exercises, but change strings in a regular pattern, moving right across the fretboard. Here’s a sample drill using fingers 1 and 3 at the fifth fret, changing strings every four beats (each stroke is an eighth note):

-5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-
-----------------5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7-
---------------------------------5-7-5-7-5-7-5-7- etc.

Repeat this drill with each finger combination. Your top speed will be slightly less than it was practicing on a single string, but over time the difference won’t be a noticeable one.

With this much technique development under your belt, you can turn to scale runs. The difference between the simple drills shown above and most scale patterns is the number of notes on a string – if there are three notes, your hand will end up in the wrong place to pick the next note. Here’s a C major scale in 7th position:

----------------------------------7-8-
 ---------------------------8-10------
 --------------------7-9-10----------
 -------------7-9-10-----------------
 ------7-8-10------------------------
 -8-10-------------------------------

Strive for accuracy as you play. Remember everything we’ve covered so far, and focus on keeping your motions as small as possible in both hands, and stay relaxed.

As you played through that exercise, you’ll find your top speed is not as fast as it was with the earlier drills. That’s partly due to more complex fretting hand movements, but it’s also a result of your pick being in the wrong place for the next stroke – if you start with a downstroke, the third note on the fifth string will be a downstroke – which means you’ll now have to move PAST the fourth string in order to maintain alternate picking. We can eliminate this motion through economy picking, but before we get there I’ll digress into string skipping; economy picking takes some effort to develop, and you’ll need string skipping in your bag of tricks to play most solos.

Many solos or runs, or at least some of the more interesting ones, have notes on non-adjacent strings. You’ll need to avoid the string(s) in between, and that presents a couple of new challenges.

When you’re skipping strings, your hands have to cover a greater distance between notes. As a result, your top speed for string skipping will be slightly less than going full out on a scale run, but with practice the difference can become manageable.

To practice string skipping, I like to alternate scale runs with a fixed note, called a pedal point. This example uses a 1st string pedal G note on an open position C scale – the scale note is a down stroke, the first string is always an upstroke:

---3---3---3---3---3---3---3----3---3---3---3---3----
 -------------------------0---1---0---------------------------
 -----------------0---2---------------2---0------------------
 -----0---2---3-------------------------------3---2---0----
 -3----------------------------------------------------------3-
 ----------------------------------------------------------------

For a drill that’s a little tougher, make the skip to an inside string. This exercise is an open G scale against a 2nd string D pedal. Put your third finger on the D note – you’ll need your fourth finger free to hit the F# on the fourth string:

 -
 ---3---3----3----3----3----3---3-
 -----------------------------0------
 -----------------0----2----4--------
 -----0---2----3---------------------
 -3------------------------------------- etc

Ok, back to solving the problem of the pick being out of position for the next note. A faster approach to runs like this is to shift to economy, or directional picking. Here ‘economy’ refers to economy of motion – and ‘directional’ is how you achieve it: if your pick is moving in the direction of the next note you’ll need to play, you simply continue in that direction, playing two notes in a row with the same stroke. I’d advise you not to start working on this until you’re very comfortable with alternate picking – otherwise you’ll find it more confusing, and perhaps counter-productive.

Here’s the same C major scale done with economy picking. The ‘D’ and ‘U’ notations show how your pick is moving:

D U D U D D U D D U D D U D U
 --------------------------------7-8-
 ---------------------------8-10-----
 --------------------7-9-10----------
 -------------7-9-10-----------------
 ------7-8-10------------------------
 -8-10-------------------------------

Finally, we come to sweep picking. Sweep picking is basically a slow-motion strum, with all downstrokes or upstrokes across the strings. If more than one note is sounded on a string, the second (and any additional) notes are sounded by hammer-ons and pull-offs. The trick to sweeping well is deadening the strings that aren’t needed. As this technique requires a bit more explanation, I’d suggest checking out some of the instruction videos available for it on YouTube and other websites – but I’d hold off until you’ve gotten the above techniques down.

–

Don’t forget to keep up with Tom at his school, the Midwest Music Academy, at their website.

Spotlight on the Sunday Songwriters’ Group

And you can find all that here on the blog.

We hope you enjoy these wonderful songs your fellow Guitar Noise members have put together. And if you’ve got any requests from past years, we’ll try to track them down.

Stop on by the SSG and join in the fun..

Events Horizion

So please feel free to email me about whatever gigs you’ve got coming up. Send your gig dat es to dhodgeguitar@aol.com and try to put ‘gig alert’ in the subject header. And remember that Guitar Noise News is (usually) sent out on the first and fifteenth of each month. And one needs a few days notice ahead of time, so plan accordingly. For instance, if you’ve got something coming up in the last two weeks of April (that is, after the fifteenth), then write by the tenth or the twelfth.

Maybe you’ll get to meet some of your Guitar Noise friends at upcoming shows!

Tom Hess is playing with Rhapsody of Fire at a number of festivals in Europe this month. You’ll find him at the Wacken Open Air Festival in Wacken, Germany on Thursday, August 4 and then in Szekesfehervar, Hungary at the Fezen Festival on Saturday, August 6. And the following Friday, August 12, all you lovers of fast metal guitar in England can catch him at Bloodstock, taking place in Derby.

Australian band, The Wishing Well is also starting August with a number of gigs in Germany. They’ll be at the Waschlaus in Potsdam on Tuesday, August 2, and then in Bremen at the Burgerhaus Weserterrassen on Saturday, August 6 for an 8 PM show. From there they go on to the Cafe Live in Alfeld for a show on Sunday, August 7.

And then they, too, are off to England to perform at the Croperdy Folk Festival Fringein Banbury at the Brase Nose Arms on Station Road. That show will be on Friday, August 12.

As mentioned at the start of this newsletter, Lars Kolberg and Flea Market, Norway’s finest punk/bluegrass band, will be making a short summer tour along the East Coast of the United States. And in case you didn’t catch the dates earlier, you can find the band at the following dates, cities and venues:

Friday, August 5 – New York City, NY – Banjo Jim’s
Saturday, August 6 – Brooklyn, NY – Hank’s Saloon
Sunday, August 7 – Baltimore, MD – Free Farm
Monday, August 8 – Philadelphia, PA – The Fire
Tuesday, August 9 – Washington, DC – Black Cat
Wednesday, August 10 – Wilmington, DE – Mojo 13
Thursday, August 11 – Chapel Hill, NC – The Cave
Friday, August 12 – Richmond, VA – The Camel
Saturday, August 13 – Philadelphia, PA – Raven Lounge

I know there are a lot of Guitar Noise folks in the general area of most of these shows so, please, do yourself a favor and get out to one if it’s at all possible. You’ll have a great time and you’ll also get the chance to make some wonderful new friends.

Saturday, August 12 is going to be a busy day as Doug James and his band Southern Roots will be playing a show at the Colonial Heights Moose Lodge (170 Moose Lane in Colonial Heights, VA) starting at 8 PM. They’re always a great live show so catch them if you can.

And Lee Hodge and his band, Doesn’t Madder, will be rocking the houseat the Do Drop In, located at 6224 Highway 421 South in Mountain City, Tennessee this coming Friday and Saturday, August 5th & 6th. Shows start at 9:00pm.

Random Thoughts

And along the lines that opened this newsletter, I’d also like to share an email I got recently:

Hi David,

I think I have probably written you previously along the same lines, in fact, but I believe the work that you do needs to be recognized and lauded, particularly as it applies to some of the messages presented in this month’s newsletter as it pertains to teaching guitar lessons. And let’s face it, there’s an “unwritten” responsibility when taking young, impressionable minds under our wing, and it probably applies even more where music is concerned. Music being that bastion of rebellion and escapism that all of us have felt at one time or another…

David, I do not believe I am speaking out of turn, as I am married to a high school teacher – one of the real good ones, one who will stay up late dreaming of ways of making that difference in one kid’s life, finding a unique way to connect, to reach them, to illuminate the possibilities….and music teachers – even part-timers, knowingly or not – take on this same, critically important responsibility.

Your notes in this month’s edition (from Alan Green) touch on a really big subject that I hope resonates with teachers, students, and potential music teachers alike. Their day is spent not just teaching/learning the notes on the fretboard, but navigating the perils of growing up, and in some cases, a big responsibility, indeed.

Myself, I have had at least three music teachers that have taught me much more than musical theory and practice could provide.

Cheers,

Again it may be the sentimentalist in me, but I can’t help thinking that all of us, whether as guitarists and musicians or as music teachers or simply just as people going through our day to day lives, play a much more active role in the lives of others than we may truly imagine. The smile you happen to give someone who’s not having a good day, the patient acceptance that perhaps you might have to wait longer than you’d planned on, the simple act of truly listening to someone instead of waiting out a chance to speak your opinions on a topic, can mean the world to that person with whom you happen to be sharing that particular time and space. How you act and interact with others is constantly being used, and often repeated, by people you may not even know.

That may seem like a lot of responsibility, but it’s essentially two things – common sense and common courtesy. The sad part of both is that they are the constant joke where the punchline is something along the lines that they are no longer common.

But every little thing you do, pardon the obvious pun, is, or at least can be, magic to someone else. Especially when it comes to teaching and being a role model. Just think about playing guitar. While all of us certainly want to somehow one day be on a playing level remotely close to that of our most revered guitar idols (“remotely close” meaning somewhere in the same general solar system, give or take a couple of several hundreds of thousands of miles), we truly could find ourselves being very happy to reach a level of expertise where we didn’t fret about making mistakes in timing or technique. Achieving the level of someone who’s performing in a band night after night would be huge for most of us.

But all that takes (“all” being quite an understatement) is playing every night. Night after night, day after day, it’s all about showing up and doing whatever it is you’re supposed to do.

Likewise, making the world a better place simply a matter of practice, of showing up every day and doing little beyond treating whomever meet with the same dignity and grace you’d like to be shown. That’s hardly a Herculean task. At least not when one looks at it in these simple terms.

And, for most of us, the world could certainly stand to be a lot simpler.

Until our next newsletter, play well and play often. And for those of you going out and about, my best wishes for safe travel.

And, as always,

Peace