Read back issues of Acoustic Guitar Notes

Posted on | | 2 Comments

Acoustic Guitar Notes (formerly AG Wire) is a free ”opt-in” e-newsletter delivered right to your e-mailbox every month. Acoustic Guitar Notes is packed with music news, gear tips, and information about giveaways, latest books, upcoming features in Acoustic Guitar magazine, and hot spots on the Web.
A few of the subjects covered are:
Flying with your guitar, links to on-line guitar galleries, bass jokes, tips on humidifying your instrument, links to guitar instruction sites, guitar myths debunked, links to cool Web radio sites, news about the upcoming Vintage Guitars book, a gig-from-hell story, yet more guitar myths debunked, shocking news about pickguards, a great story about some red-hot guitar playing, and some vital news about Spinal Tap, the Fab Four, Dylan, R.E.M. and Gillian Welch, more guitar myths about straps, strings, and air pressure, a great gig story, an interview with Jewel, The Complete Acoustic Guitar Method Series, A New History of the Lute, Guitar Talk gatherings, Chris Isaak and Vicente Amigo in AG; news about recordings by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton and Janis Ian; discovering your own alternate tunings, and more.
Acoustic Guitar Notes

Technorati Tags: Acoustic Guitar, Acoustic Guitar magazine, guitar instruction sites, Vintage Guitars

Category: Acoustic Guitar Lessons, Free Guitar Lessons

Guitar Instruction Books

Posted on | | 3 Comments

There are instruction books for all kinds of guitar playing. The way the instruction is given varies between the different genres with the teaching of music theory for guitar remaining much the same for all styles.

A classical guitar instruction book will take the student from theory straight into simple pieces, graduating to more complex guitar music without learning chord shapes or improvisation. A jazz instruction book, on the other hand, will be chockablock with exotic guitar chords and scales. A rock or blues guitar instruction book will take you through such stepping stones to improvisation as the pentatonic scales and the CAGED chord system.

For the purpose of this article we will assume you are a complete beginner who wants to dip his toe in the cold and forbidding waters of guitar playing to eventually discover the warm currents of musical satisfaction.

Beyond Bedroom Guitar by Spencer Westwood is an introduction to guitar that immediately leads the student to a certain way of looking at guitar playing. This book is aimed at the medium or advanced guitarist and the beginner guitarist who has got to the stage of being able to strum a few chords. The guitar instruction is based on changing the way we approach learning in general and contains some techniques derived from the field of self-hypnosis. If you want your guitar instruction to be a life-changing experience, give this book a read.

The Only Basic Guitar Instruction Book You’ll Ever Need by Jack Wilkins and Peter Rubie starts at choosing your first guitar and moves to tuning and holding the guitar and guitar music theory. We then move onto some songs and chords plus basic fingerpicking. The book’s structure alternates between theory and practical guitar work, taking us into more advanced ideas and techniques as we practice what we have learnt from the previous chapters.

Guitar Lesson World: The Book by Patrick MacFarlane is compiled by the founder of guitarlessonworld.com which has been giving us free guitar lessons since 1996. The book is inexpensive and comprehensive and is backed up by audio files that you can find on the website. The only snag is that it is very much based in theory, so if you would rather learn chords and songs without the whys and wherefores, you should probably give it a miss.

Each of the three guitar instruction books I have listed in this article stand out for its unique approach to teaching guitar. They are aimed at guitar students who have already found a serious commitment in themselves to learning how to play guitar. If you are looking for something simpler or for a particular genre, there are many books that will get you started.

If you are interested in what you can find in guitar instruction books, take a look at Google Books search results for guitar instruction books

Category: Free Guitar Lessons, Guitar For Beginners

Slow Down Music Software

Posted on | | 6 Comments

I have already mentioned a paid guitar course this week so normally I would avoid plugging another product. But the thing is this product is about slowing down music so you can learn to play it. This is a matter that is very dear to my heart because next if your cannot read sheet music and you do not have tabs available for the song you want to learn, slowing it down is by far the best way to do it. The program is called Song Surgeonand it lets you loop a song or section of a song that you have downloaded from the net or ripped from a CD, slow it down without changing the pitch so that you can decipher the music you want to learn.

Here are a couple of testimonials:

I purchased your Song Sugeon 2.0 this evening
and just wanted to let you know what a fantastic
tool this is. I own and have been using a variable
tempo/constant pitch phrase recorder for some time
now but Song Surgeon makes this device obsolete.
I put Song Surgeon to work tonight, quickly downloaded
a T-Bone Walker song I had been working on, looped the
lead part and in no time had it down. What an easy tool
to work with. I like being able to adjust the loop ends
“on the fly”. And to be able to save the loop for later
reference is great. This is the best purchase I’ve made in
a while. Keep up the good work.

J. Dillon
Arkansas

I just want to let you know that Song Surgeon is a
program that I have long awaited- not only for myself,
but also for my guitar students. As a guitar teacher,
I have often had to figure out songs that my students
want to learn by listening to a CD they bring me.
After trying Song Surgeon and seeing how simple it is
to use, I know it will make my job a lot faster and
easier. Song Surgeon will also give my students a
great tool they can use to practice along with at home.
Thanks for creating a software program that is sure
to benefit musicians everywhere, whatever their skill
level or instrument of choice might be.

Kathy Unruh
Guitar Instructor

Here is a link to the Song Surgeon sales page so you can hear some samples of what the software can do.

Category: Free Guitar Lessons, Guitar For Beginners

Learning The Guitar Fretboard

Posted on | | 1 Comment

It’s easy to learn the notes on a keyboard instrument because one octave is repeated all the way along. Once you can identify the notes in one octave, you can find them in all the octaves. With the guitar there are no obvious repeated patterns that can help us to locate the notes. So we need to find the patterns that are on the fretboard.

On the guitar we don’t have visual clues like we have on the piano so we need to know the names of the notes that are on the guitar and then work out our own formulas for finding and remembering the notes we need.

The notes on the guitar are A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The six strings on the guitar sound the notes E, A, D, G, B, E. So we have seven notes on six strings. The most obvious way to learn the locations of the notes on the guitar is to count from each of the notes on the open strings. If we look at the letters as an octave the notes go in a set pattern. The notes on the guitar always have a definite distance between them. The distance between the notes A and B, C and D, F and G is two frets. All the other notes go from fret to fret.

The fifth string on the guitar sounds the note A so let’s start with that. The open string is A, B is on the second fret, C is on the third fret, D is on the fifth fret, E is on the seventh fret, F is on the eighth fret and G is on the ninth fret. It might be easier to visualize the octave if I write it out as: A BC D E FG. The extra fret always appears between the same notes.

Now that you know the names of the notes on the open strings you can see that the first and the sixth strings both sound the note E, so once you know the notes on the sixth string, you know them on the first string. You could then proceed to find all the E notes on the other strings, and you will be able to identify the notes as they go up the guitar fretboard because you already know the pattern of distances between the notes.

You can make an exercise of finding all the instances of any note on the guitar. You can see how different the notes sound in there various positions because of the different thicknesses of the guitar strings. The notes found in the spaces between A B, C D, D E and E F are sharps and flats which is a whole other area of study. Basically the note above C is C Sharp (written as C#) or D Flat (written as Db). Here is a guitar fretboard chart diagram that you can download for free, and Guitarsphere has a blank guitar fretboard chart you can download and print out to help you to learn the fretboard or write your own music.

Here is a very helpful video on learning the guitar fretboard:

Here is a simple way to learn the fretboard notes from classical guitar forum.

Technorati Tags: guitar fretboard

Category: Free Guitar Lessons, Guitar For Beginners

Here’s a handy article on muscle memory

Posted on | | 4 Comments

“We Repeat Musical Phrases to Build Muscle Memory – Muscle memory is a mental record of repeated movements that enable us to move with no thought. When Hendrix sings “Castles Made of Sand” while playing all those gorgeous embellishments on his guitar, he’s not thinking much about his playing–his fingers just remember what they’ve played before. Most of his thought is probably going to his singing, making those embellishments sound expressive, and that cute girl in the front row.
Muscles Remember Mistakes – The process of building muscle memory is simple: The body moves, and the mind records the movement. It records with no judgment, like a security camera filming a bank lobby scene or a stenographer typing testimony in a courtroom. So when you perform mistakes, your muscle memory records those movements just as it records correct movements. When you mess up, you might think, “Shoot, that’s the fifth time I hit that wrong note!” but your muscle memory is diligently recording the incorrect movement all the same.
Avoid Mistakes by Simplifying and Slowing Down – When I was practicing “Castles Made of Sand,” I’d try a big musical phrase, and play it as fast as I could. Of course, it sounded like the cat was playing the guitar, and I was digging myself into a hole because my muscle memory was recording all those mistakes. What I should have done was simplify the music by just choosing a couple notes to work on at a time. Once I had those down, I could either try a few different notes, or add a few notes to the notes I’d already learned. Also, I should have slowed down enough to make correct playing easy. This is actually really hard to do–I’m constantly telling my students to slow down. It’s not just impatience, it’s that people don’t realize how slow slow is. Slow is however slow you need to go to play without mistakes. For beginners learning a lick, this could mean one note every three or five seconds. As Jay put it, “The slower you go, the faster you’ll get there.”
Simplifying Also Means Isolating the Skill You’re Learning – Say you’re learning to strum a new song that has a new strum pattern and new chords. Your job is to build muscle memory both with your left hand (fretting the new chords) and your right arm (strumming the new pattern). The problem is, until you build muscle memory, you have to exert all your focus on the skill you’re learning, making sure you don’t make mistakes. So how do you focus on fretting those new chord shapes while making sure you strum correctly? You can’t. So instead, you practice the two skills separately. Fret the new chords and just strum once to make sure they sound good. Repeat. Then practice the strum pattern while fretting just one chord. Repeat. Once you have both skills in your muscle memory, you can practice them together.
Repeat Until You’ve Really Got It – Jay said that it takes between 20 and 80 correct repetitions of a musical phrase–with no mistakes–to build muscle memory. If you make a mistake, simplify or slow down, and then start counting from one again. Whether it takes 20 or 80 depends on your natural aptitude. Eddie Van Halen is probably one of those 20-reps guys. I am closer to being in the 80 club, and proud of it. Go 80’s!
Learning Strum Patterns Is A Little Different – I’ve found that you don’t have to be quite so militant about avoiding mistakes when you’re learning new rhythms, like a new strum pattern. While simplifying and slowing down is helpful, learning rhythms also involved the mysterious process of “getting into the groove.” It demands that you loosen up, stop worrying about sounding bad, and try to feel the music. So don’t worry as much about mistakes. Once you get the strum pattern down, you’ll have plenty of time to obliterate the mistakes from your muscle memory as you strum that pattern over and over and over and over.”
http://www.ezfolk.com/guitar/lessons/how-to-practice-guitar/how-to-practice-guitar.html

Technorati Tags: Muscle Memory, Muscles Remember Mistakes, The slower you go, the faster you’ll get there

Category: Free Guitar Lessons, Guitar For Beginners

Learn To Play House Of The Rising Sun Guitar Chords

Posted on | | 2 Comments

Learning to play the guitar chords for House Of The Rising Sun is easy. If you feel that you do not apply yourself seriously enough to learning the guitar, here is the perfect song for you to learn. House Of The Rising Sun was voted number 122 on the Rolling Stone magazine 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time in 2003. If you learn to play this song, even you just play the intro, people are going to recognise you for the cool dude you really are. This is a song that has been around for about a hundred years or so. It was first recorded in 1933, and recorded again by several country and folk artists over the years until the definitive version of House Of The Rising Sun Was recorded in 1964 by English group, Eric Burdon And The Animals. The song was recorded in one take while the group were on the road in England as a support for Chuck Berry, and the spine tingling intro to the song was played by guitarist Hilton Valentine on a Rickenbacker 330 guitar. Many people say that it was the first time a folk song was recorded by a rock group.

The guitar chords for the song are simple and you can learn the chord sequence in a few minutes, then spend a few years fooling around with arpeggios and strumming patterns and whatnot. So the chords are A minor, C major, D major, F major and E major. To get the feeling of the recording by The Animals just play each chord as an arpeggio like this A minor chord:

E ——————————-
B ——————1————
G ————-2——–2———
D ———2—————-2—–
A –0—————————–
E ——————————–

If you are familiar with the original record you will know that the arpeggio pattern used by Hilton Valentine contains a few more notes but if you are play using a pick you will be able to work out what he is doing. There are video clips of the animals performing the song on YouTube.

Okay, so here is a basic guide to how the chords for House Of The Rising Sun fit in with the lyrics.

Am C D F
There is a house in New Orleans
Am C E
They call the Rising Sun
Am C D F
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
Am E Am
And God I know I’m one

JUST REPEAT THE CHORD SEQUENCE FOR THE REST OF THE VERSES

My mother was a tailor
She sewed my new blue jeans
My father was a gamblin’ man
Down in New Orleans

Now the only thing a gambler needs
Is a suitcase and trunk
And the only time he’s satisfied
Is when he’s on a drunk

Oh mother tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

Well, I got one foot on the platform
The other foot on the train
I’m goin’ back to New Orleans
To wear that ball and chain

Well, there is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God I know I’m one

If you search around the internet you will find some slightly different versions, but I would suggest you use what I have given you here as a basis for your own trademark rendition.

Here’s a YouTube video of The Animals singing House Of The Rising Sun -