Monthly Archives: January 2010

You Know You’re a Musician When:

Posted on by
3

You realize that the cheers from the audience after a particularly
difficult passage are for a sports play on the big screen TV over the
bar, and that in fact, no one is listening to you.

When the gig you drove 200 miles for to make $100, and had to pay for a
hotel room, is later referred to as your “summer tour”.

When your most sincere, heartfelt comments are made by people that are
drunk and who won’t remember you in the morning.

When you are repeatedly told that the lead singer who can’t read,
never practices and has been singing for only six months is “The strongest
part of the band”, primarily because she has big tits.

When you are pleased that the pay for the gig, when looked at hourly
from the time you leave your house to when you return meets minimum
wage.

When someone comes up to you to tell you how much they love your
playing, because they didn’t think anyone played those things anymore.

You get to the gig to find out that nothing is comped, and you’re
charged $10 to park.

When someone seeks you out to complement your playing as the “best sax
player they have ever heard”, and you’re the trumpet player.

When you realize that a small piece of equipment- such as a wireless
mike you need- will take months of weekly gigs to pay for.

When you have to add $30 or $40 out of your pocket to find a sub, cause
no one will cover you for what you are paid.

You aren’t offended when all of the young wedding guests leave after
the second set to dance to the DJ at a club down the street.

When you are told that you must play until the very end of when you
were contracted for, when your only audience is the bartender, and
you’re being paid 40 or 50 bucks for the night.

When the bandleader or club owner wants to pay you in food or drinks,
and you have $100,000 in school loans to pay off for that music degree.

When the guy collecting money at the door for the band’s performance
makes twice over the course of the evening what you do as one of the
band members..

When as a member of a blues band you no longer even pretend to smile
when asked to play “Free Bird”.

When you know that other musicians who routinely claim they don’t work
for less than $100 a night only work a few times a year.

You notice that all of the musicians playing the better functions to
young audiences are mid 40′s + and balding, because young musicians
that read don’t exist anymore.

When people who are drunk tell you that what you are doing is
absolutely great and the best thing thing they have ever seen or heard,
but refuse to pay more than $5 at the door.

When someone calling the cops for noise is a good thing. You get to go
home early and you still get paid.

When you realize that asking women out that you meet on gigs doesn’t
work, for now they know you’re a musician.

When you get invited to play the same gig the following year, which
means that you don’t have tear down after this year’s gig.

When you have, for several years, been paid the same amount for a gig,
but are afraid to say anything about it for fear that you might lose
the gig.

When you spend more on the bar tab than you get paid for the gig.

When you finally have to resort to playing Proud Mary in order to get
the audience dancing.

Some Tips to Learn and Remember About Bass Guitar for Beginners

Posted on by
9

Many people consider the bass guitar to be the “soul instrument” of music. It gives a song life, and if you can learn to play, you can impress your family and friends! So don’t waste any time, and learn to how play bass guitar.

Many people are more into electric and acoustic guitars because they’re more pleasing to the ears, but if you want to feel some real “beat” inside your chest, go with a bass guitar! You need to learn a song’s foundation if you truly want to play. If the foundation is thrown off, you won’t be able to master anything.

As compared to other guitars, bass guitars have less and thicker strings. Advanced players say that the bass is easy to play, but it takes a lot of talent and work to master it. Beginner bass guitar lessons are usually easy enough to learn, but you will have to put in a lot of hard work and dedication if you want to master it. Aside from the string differences, bass guitars also have larger bodies. Most of them are made from maple wood and rose, and only contain four strings.

Another thing you need to understand is that the bass guitar isn’t oriented. Other guitars really are chord oriented, but not the bass. If you play chords using a bass guitar, it can dominate over other guitars. You need to play constantly so that you can feel the power. Once you’ve learned how to play a bass guitar, you’ll find that it’s a lot easier to learn than acoustic or electric guitars.

Here are some helpful hints that you can go by when learning how to play bass:

1.    Always be aware of the beat coming from the music you’re playing. Feel it, even. You see, bass guitars are a lot like drums, only in guitar form. They can give any song timing and depth, so make sure you feel it all in your chest.

2.    As with other guitars, bass guitars need to be tuned. But, the tones are obviously deeper because the strings are fewer and thicker. Thus, you need to learn how to hit single notes—and often—as this is essential when learning how to play.

3.    Proper finger placement is extremely important. A note’s wholeness is determined on how your fingers are placed on the fret board. For a holistic approach, you should practice playing the guitar also.

4.    All your fingers on both hands should be strong. You should have strength in order to learn how to play the bass guitar.

When kept in mind, these tips will help you a great deal with your lessons. Whether you take private lessons or use a guide book or DVD course, these tips can be handy.

Buy yourself a bass guitar now and get started with playing the instrument. Remember, if you can play the right way, this instrument’s sound will give any song a lot of depth and even soul. This will make things easier if you ever want to learn how to play electric guitar or acoustic.

Start your guitar lessons right now and discover everything that the bass can do and what it has to offer!

So, You Want to Learn How to Play Rock Guitar Solos? Read This First!

Posted on by
Reply
rock guitar solos 217x300 So, You Want to Learn How to Play Rock Guitar Solos? Read This First!

Rock guitar solo

Guitars are not straight-forward and simple. They are eccentric and flashy. People want to learn how to play rock guitar solosin order to stand out.

To do that, one must first learn how to play a rock guitar solos in various rock styles—or at least in their favorite style.

Think for a moment of an average band. Sure, it can be hard to match the charisma of a lead singer, but the guitarist is always close behind in popularity. Ladies tend to go for guitarists because the guitar is awesome and hot! Typically, guys love being the guitarist because they love the solo.

It’s absolutely true! All guys like to daydream about showing off on stage to play a rock guitar solo for five minutes! It’s practically encrypted into every guy’s DNA. It can be awesome. Even as the rest of the band continues to play, they are only playing second fiddle in the amazing creativity and presence of the lead guitarist.

If you are longing to play a rock guitar solo, this guide will break it all down to you in simplest form.

What’s Required to Play Rock Guitar Solos

Guitar solos require precise technique, so much of it you can’t learn from one source. When you play solo, it all comes out naturally. In fact, playing a guitar solo is the closest you can get to “improve” jazz or blues.

Obviously, a lot of preparation goes into learning how to conquer rock guitar solos.
To begin with, you must first learn to play at an advanced or expert level. Sadly, no beginner can learn how to play solo within just a few weeks. It’s not that easy. In fact, many solo don’t look difficult, but there’s no way one can play them without complex bends, “pull-offs”, “hammer-ons”, and other expert techniques. You can learn these techniques rather quickly, but it’s more advisable to learn all the basics first.

Once you learn all the fundamentals, then the advanced techniques become much easier. If you’re interested in learning how to play a rock guitar solo, you need to look into “pull-offs” and “hammer-ons”, because you will need to use these 2 techniques often.

Now, you’ll probably run into some complications. For instance, the frets are much closer at the bottom third than they are at the top of the neck. The margin for error is much higher. This is especially true if you have long or thick fingers. Playing a rock guitar solo will really test the speed of your fingers and picking technique. Don’t think about attempting a solo until you are an expert with strumming and shifting through the strings with ease.

The guitar solo masters will really change the tempo on just a beat and can shift from a slow solo to a frantic pace back and forth easily. However, guitar solos do take time to learn, and are generally not for beginners.

With that said, learning how to play a guitar solo can be a wonderful way to expand your horizons, so teach yourself some scales especially the pentatonic scale and get familiar with a key or two, and that should get you started.

Guitar Chords Diagrams Help Make Playing Guitar Chords Easy!

Posted on by
Reply

You need to develop a good understanding of how to read and use diagrams if you want to learn to play guitar chords. Whether you’re an absolute beginner or a bit experienced, the easiest path to becoming a pro guitar player is by learning some simple chords. That way, you can apply them to learning to play the rhythm part of songs. Guitar chord diagrams will help you to do just that!

So, what is a chord diagram?

A guitar chord diagram is basically a visual representation of a single chord, which is often referred to as a “chord box”. It’s essentially a rectangle shaped box that shows you how to play a specific chord. It represents the fretboard on the guitar, and shows you precisely where your fingers need to go in order to form a chord. Needless to say, it can help make it playing guitar chords easier. It’s truly amazing just how a small package can present so much information!

How to read a guitar chord diagram.

There are a dozen or so different formats and styles, but all guitar chord diagrams have these common features:

·    There are 6 lines that symbolize the strings on a guitar. Depending on the format of the box, the strings either run across the page horizontally or up and down the page vertically.

·    When looking at a vertical diagram, the string on the left side represents the low “E” string, and the one on the right is the high “E” (the thinnest string).

·    There are lines running along the string lines at a right angle. These represent the frets. This is an important thing to remember when taking your guitar chords lessons.
·    Dots are placed on the grid to show which strings need to be pressed on which fret in order to play the chord.
While this is just basic information on a chord diagram, it can still be enough to teach you how to form and play a guitar chord. The greatest part is that you do not need to even know how to read standard music, or even guitar tablature, to read a chord diagram!
Here are some more features of guitar chord diagrams that feature even more important info:
·    On the top part of the box there is a thick line representing the end of the neck—the nut.
·    An “x” symbol on top of the nut line means, “Don’t play this string!”
·    An o” symbol above the nut line means that the string is played open (not fingered).
·    Numbers 1-4 under the box (usually on the dots) indicate the finger you must use on that string. One is for the index finger, and four is the little finger.
·  A bar or line running across more than one string indicates a “barre chord”, which means one finger has to press more than one string.

To understand easy to learn guitar chords here are some tips on reading the diagrams:

·    Make use of guitar chord diagrams, as they are the single most powerful resource for learning the guitar!

·    Individual chord diagrams can be combined together to form charts. These are a simple means to learn basic chords, families of chords, sequences, and songs.

·    Check into online resources and tools, such as The Guitar Players Toolbox, to help you learn about diagrams and charts. You will find out about all the easiest guitar chords to learn!

Good luck and play well!

What you need To Know about Guitar Tabs

Posted on by
Reply

In the simplest terms, a guitar tab is a word that is used to describe a musical notation, which may contain either numbers or letters and explains to the musician where to place his/her fingers on the instrument. Guitar tabs consist of multiple lines and is often called a ‘staff notation.’ These lines, which are present in guitar tabs, each represent one of the guitar strings.

 

New musicians often find guitar tabs to be especially baffling in that the strings are written backwards. The highest string is found at the top of the guitar tabs, which is often difficult to learn since most people would expect that guitar tabs would be written from top to bottom instead of the other way around. In actuality, guitar tabs are written from the highest to lowest and the numbers on each line represent the guitar fret. In order to understand guitar tabs, all beginning guitarists need to learn string placement and how to correctly read frets.

 

Generally written in standard format, guitar tabs may slightly vary depending on the sheet music publisher. Even still, guitar tabs are easier to read than learning staff notation. Because of it’s visual representation, beginning musicians are often more comfortable reading guitar tabs than any other kind of music.

 

When learning the guitar, musicians will become familiar with the instrument and how it works. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, including private instruction, informational reference books and videos. In some cases, classroom lessons may even be used to help better equip the musician to learn guitar and how to read guitar tabs. As the musician becomes familiar with the terms used to describe a guitar, including the neck, fret, string, chord, etc., they will also begin to easily read guitar tabs.

 

In the beginning, guitar tabs can be intimidating. Multiple lines and letters, numbers or other symbols may seem quite confusing. With practicing, a guitar tab will be as easy to understand as the links found on a website. Few musicians can play by ear without first learning a song via sheet music, which is why reading guitar tabs is the first step that a guitarist must take before learning how to play.

 

If you need further information on finding a guitar instructor, check the local yellow page listing or stop by your local high school or college and ask the music director for a recommendation.

Tips for drummers – Why didn’t you get the Gig

Posted on by
Reply

Have you been auditioning for different bands and not getting the gig? Musicians are very critical of the other musicians they play with, even though they will probably not be brutally honest about what they see and hear. We don’t want to hurt your feelings so we might say something nice and then never see you again.  I have auditioned many, many musicians who never got a call back.  Here are some the most important aspects of an audition – mistakes musicians have made when auditioning for one of my bands:

 

1)  Skill – can you keep up – learn to play the drums

 

I have auditioned many guys thought they could play but couldn’t keep proper time or didn’t know what chord changes were going on, got lost in every song – just couldn’t keep up musically.

 

2)  Listening – are you paying attention?

 

I have played with a few really skilled musicians who paid absolutely no attention to what was going on around them. It was like they had spent years practicing by themselves in their bedroom. They could play amazing things but what they played made no sense in the context of the band.  The notes you play should complement what everybody else is doing and the song should work as a whole.

 

3)  Personality – are you a nice person?

 

This is a big deal – I have played some shows with great players who live their life a sentence or two from a punch in the face.  Remember when you were a kid and folks told you “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”  I have met many great musicians who desperately need to revisit that concept. They were so full of negativity that it was really difficult to be in the same room with them for very long.

You can Improve Your Guitar Playing

Posted on by
3

What grooves you? Why do you want to improve?

 

Regardless of your intentions – whether to get started playing, learn a few licks of your favorite tunes, or want to expand your repertoire to include blues, funk, or rock and roll music, on your way to recording yourself, there are resources out there that can help you.

 

Here are a few ideas that may help you better understand your guitar playing and some solutions you can consider.

 

You can purchase guitar playing videos, either for home or computer watching, that include hand position, strumming technique, rhythm and timing, and finger exercises that take through various type of songs. Essentially these can become a mirror for you in learning to play as you mimic what you’re watching on screen and then reproduce this on your own. With commitment and determination, this can be a good one to go – especially for the visual learner who likes to learn primarily on their own.

 

You can find a community of guitar instructors in your surrounding area who are either private tutors or work through a community college. You’ll want to consider their expertise, the type of students they work best with, their flexibility with your schedule, success stories, and of course their fees, in considering working with them. In taking guitar lessons, you can either do one on one or group – both have their plusses and minuses but either can work for you.

 

Playing partners

Find someone in your local community who plays. You can do this through asking the local junior college, posting online to a resource like craigslist, or asking the guitar shop. The idea is to develop a friendship with someone who is a somewhat better than you who wants the accountability of practicing weekly. What you can provide is the commitment to show up weekly and practice. In return, you can learn from their techniques or methods what works. Of course, you always need to be aware of learning bad habits in situations like these, which is why it’s important to have a foundation in guitar technique before starting.

 

Guitar theory

Related to guitar technique is developing a basis in guitar theory. Chord patterns, minor and major chord progressions, note scales, and overlap with piano and percussion instruments can all give you a basic structure upon which to layer in the knowledge and technique you gain in your guitar playing.

 

Playing guitar can be a wonderful expression of one’s musical and creative talent. And with a commitment to constantly improving, it can provide a lifetime of enjoyment for yourself, friends, and family.

 

Didgeridoo – Quite Possibly the Oldest Instrument in the World

Posted on by
Reply

The didgeridoo is possibly the oldest instrument in the world with many experts believing it to have been played for at least the last 40,000 years. Across the top of Australia Aborigines have been using the didgeridoo at ceremonies for thousands of years, and there are even cave drawings showing the didgeridoo being played that are at least 2,000 years old. Their belief is that the playing of the didgeridoo keeps them in touch with their shamanistic beliefs through the induction of an alpha state.

The traditional Aborigine didgeridoo is made from eucalyptus branches that have been hollowed out by termites. A didgeridoo made in this way can take up to twelve months and a skilled didgeridoo maker will know if a branch is ready just by tapping on it with their fingernails. The branch walls need to be a certain thickness to produce the correct sound and it is the length of the log that determines its key, with longer lengths giving a lower pitch.

The origins of the didgeridoo are told in an Aboriginal legend which starts with three men camping by a log fire on a cold night many many moons ago. Needing more wood for the fire one of the men grabbed a eucalyptus log which he found very light to the touch. Just before throwing it into the fire he noticed that it was covered in termites. His friends were complaining of the cold and insisting that he throw the log onto the fire, but as he did not want to kill the termites he gathered up the ones from the outside and placed them with the rest inside the hollowed out branch. He then put the log to his lips and blew out the termites. The termites blown into the night sky became the stars and the first didgeridoo was created.

Playing a didgeridoo is different to other wind instruments. As you breathe down the didgeridoo you must do so with ‘loose lips’, this creates a vibration as it travels downs the tube. When the vibration exits out of the other end of the tube it does so as an amplified drone. It is somewhat similar to playing a tuba, but the lips are more relaxed. If you are unsure how to create loose lips, think of what it is like to blow a “raspberry”. Once you have mastered the drone, you can practice making other sounds by moving your tongue or cheeks while blowing into the instrument.

Although not necessary, to play the didgeridoo like a real pro you have to learn circular breathing, and this takes practice. You have to inhale air through the nose while simultaneously releasing it from the mouth. Without this skill a player will not be able to produce the favored non-stop sound.

Today termites are not a necessity and a number of other materials have been found to make excellent modern didgeridoos. Very popular at the moment is the bamboo didge whilst teak is known to work a treat with excellent sound quality and even synthetic didgeridoos have became the favored choice by many over the last few years.

If, however, you do put in the effort to learn the didgeridoo then it appears that there may be some unexpected benefits. In a study conducted in Switzerland they looked into what effects playing the didgeridoo may have on the conditions of sleep apnea and snoring. The study following people who are learning to play has found that those mastering the art are, after a few months, experiencing fewer incidences of these conditions. They concluded that the upper airways were being trained to function more efficiently due to the type of breathing that is required to play a didgeridoo.