Archive for: October 2007

When you imagine yourself as a guitar player you probably think of the electric guitar. It looks really cool posing with one and they make great sounds.
But is it so cool you want to spend days investigating which is the best guitar for a beginner, where to get the best price, what amp to start with, what ancillary stuff you need? Or is it better to get that over with so you can concentrate on playing?
Let’s embark on a journey that will take us flying over the desert of dreary comparison shopping to the grassy meadows of power chords and adoring chicks.
Okay, we are putting together a pack of necessities for the beginner electric guitar player. Your local guitar mart is packed with snazzy looking axes that may or may not love you back when you start caressing their strings, all at varying price ranges. How can a novice figure out which brands are best for which price?
Your Guitar
Okay, grab an electric guitar and look at how it’s made. It is, after all a piece of electronic equipment and should be built to give good service. A well built electric guitar will have the body, neck and fretboard made of wood, not laminate or plastic.
For most novice electric guitar players, the vibrato, or “floating” bridge is the one to get. The other type is the fixed bridge which does not allow you to “bend” notes using the tremolo arm or “whammy-bar”. While we are on the subject, you should be warned that using the whammy bar on a cheap guitar often leads to broken strings, so if you end up with one of these you might want to remove the whammy bar altogether.
And another thing: an electric guitar has twenty-two frets, but some beginner’s models are smaller. Don’t get this unless you’re about ten years old. Stick to the ones with twenty-two frets.
Now we come to the pickups which are little microphones sitting underneath the guitar strings. Pickups close to the bridge give a sharp “twangy” tone, while the pickups closer to the fretboard give a deeper sound.
It’s quite easy to get a guitar with three pickups and a switch that lets you choose which pickups are being used.
As for price, are the guitars at the lower end of the price range inferior to the more expensive ones? Heck no! You’ll get years of musical enjoyment with one of the less expensive models.
Your Amp
The way your new guitar sounds will depend largely on the way your amplifier is put together.
The power of a guitar amplifier is measured in watts. The higher the wattage, the more volume. Start thinking in the five watt vicinity to start with. That’s about the size of your average practice amp.
As for most electronics applications electric guitars’ tubes have been replaced by transistors many years ago. But most guitar players use electric guitars with tube amplifiers because they have a better sound quality. You may be able to get your hands on a practice amp with the option of using a vacuum tube, but if you can’t, don’t worry you should apply your time and energy to learning your instrument right now.
Your Guitar Effects
There is no “pure” electric guitar sound. It is all altered to some degree. The different ways the guitar sound can be changed is called “effects”. Effects like distortion, reverberation, and equalization give the guitarist more creative control over the sound. Some amplifiers have distortion built in because it is the most popular electric guitar effect. Generally speaking the more effects that are built into the amplifier, the better but if you’re not to into a whole lot of effects just stick to what you really need.
Okay, that’s a brief rundown on what you need to begin a career as an electric guitar player, and if you see loads of practice lying around in the guitar store, pick up as much as you can afford.

Technorati Tags: electric guitar, electric guitar player, guitar amplifier, Guitar Effects

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While Tommy Emmanuel has never had formal music training, his natural musicianship and prodigious playing ability has won him fans from all over the world. As well as being a guitar master, he’s also a professional percussionist, and has been known to play percussion parts on the body of his guitar. 1994 saw Tommy as a member of the John Farnham Band. Australian music veteran John Farnham invited him to play guitar next to Stuart Fraser from Noiseworks for the Concert For Rwanda.
In July 1999, at the 15th Annual Chet Atkins Appreciation Society Convention, Chet presented Tommy with a Certified Guitar Player award, an honour bestowed on only two other guitarists (besides Atkins himself) - “In Recognition Of His Contributions To The Art Of Fingerpicking”.
Tommy Emmanuel Totally Explained

Technorati Tags: Tommy Emmanuel, John Farnham, Noiseworks, Chet Atkins

Beginner guitar players are often devastated by mistakes. Here’s some quotes from seasoned guitarists on how you can learn from your mistakes:
“The worst reason I sucked was because I twisted in my lazy own ethic with a rock ethic that had been established by Bob Dylan. The Dylan ethic placed songwriting high above all other facets of the process in creating musical recordings. I decided that the only thing that mattered was the songwriting, just so that I didn’t have to learn the other facets, such as being a better musician. That attitude held me back for two decades, in the sense that I didn’t start to pay attention to my playing until the late nineties. Before that it was just sloppy chord changes that you wouldn’t want to hear recordings of.”
http://www.tangentsunset.com/guitar.htm

“Stringing along with dead strings. Yes, change your strings before that important recording session and no, adding compression to increase sustain is not a suitable substitute. With new strings, your axe will sound brighter, notes will sustain longer, and tuning will be more consistent. Don’t just boil your strings – go ahead and splurge, spend the bucks, and re-string.”
http://www.harmony-central.com/articles/tips/guitar_recording_mistakes/

“When you are forming a chord it’s really important to visualize where each finger is going to move to, and how it’s going to happen. I guarantee you will speed up your chord changes if you follow these simple steps: Look at where your fingers are now, visualize where they need to be and figure out the shortest distance you need to move them in order to form the new chord. Sometimes you won’t have to move half your fingers because they’ll be used in the other chord. Keep looking for these ways to speed up your playing”
http://www.instantguitarist.com/blog/learn-guitar-chords-top-10-mistakes/

“First of all, mistakes have a special place in my heart, because I am a mistake. I don’t want to get too personal, here, but my birth was not planned by the people who made me. I wasn’t supposed to be conceived. I wasn’t supposed to happen. But I did, and most people are pretty happy how this “mistake” turned out.
But what about mistakes in music? How are we supposed to look at them in a way that helps our playing? Let me ask you this: have you ever made a mistake that introduced a new sound to you? Haven’t there been times when you wanted to play a particular chord but ended up playing another, and the unexpected sound made you say, “Oh, wow! That was cool! Let’s do that again!” ”
http://www.guitarnoise.com/article.php?id=275

Technorati Tags: songwriting, change your strings, chord changes, ways to speed up your playing, mistakes in music