Heartwood Guitar Instruction

Looking for a new perspective on learning the guitar? Richard Lloyd (of the 70′s punk band Television) has a great set of lessons and essays on his site, including a fascinating explanation of why the guitar is such a pain to tune. He suggests a tuning technique that I’ve started using with great success. If you’ve got a good ear for tuning, try this:

First tune the bottom E. string to a tuning fork or tuning machine. Next, fret the E. string at the tenth fret. This will give you a D. Tune the D. string to this note by ear. Next, fret the D. string at the fifth fret. Tune the G. string to the D. string at the fifth fret. Now fret the G. string at the second fret. This gives you an A. Tune the A. string from this note. Now fret the A. string at the second fret. Tune the B. string from this note. It will be an octave up. Next, fret the D. string at the second fret. This gives you E. Tune your high E from this. Again this will be an octave.

Voila! Strum the guitar. It should sound considerably more pleasing.

The site also features some guitar lessons designed to build motor skill (i.e. finger exercises) and, occasionally, make you feel like a spineless lemming (i.e. lots of ranting and raving about the evils of imitating other musicians). So what if I want to be able to play “Little Wing” note for note? Still, it’s a sweet site.

Knob twirlers, put your fidgety hands together. Someone’s finally come up with a way for you to tweak the parameters of your stompboxes while you’re playing.

It’s called the 3rd Hand, made by a company called Tone in Progress. It’s a completely mechanical expression pedal that you attach to a knob post on one of your guitar effects pedals via a cable. Rocking your foot on the pedal twirls the knob.

Imagine what you could do with a tremolo pedal–check out this excerpt from the song “Bones” by Radiohead. Hear the tremolo effect on the guitar slow down? That’s Mr. Expensive Effects Dude in the studio’s control room, twirling the tremolo knob while Jonny Greenwood’s busy strumming his guitar. Can’t afford Mr. Expensive Effects Dude? For $110 (a little steep, in my opinion), you can slow that tremolo all by yourself.

Reviews on Harmony Central–all two of them–are mixed. Both reviewers are worried that the rubber band that drives the 3rd Hand’s pulley is wimpy. I’ll let you know how mine turns out.

I’m sure there are people out there who enjoy reading about music theory. I’m sure there are also people out there who like to watch their fingernails grow. I’m going to take a wild guess and assume you fall into neither category.

I mostly taught myself to play guitar, and didn’t pick up much music theory until I started teaching about three years ago. It’s not that I resisted learning it–it’s just that it was never presented to me in the proper way, so of course it was confusing and boring. Articles in my guitar magazines were either too simple or way over my head, and my high school friends who I jammed with were as clueless as I was.

Then a few years ago, I discovered Bruce Emery’s books. These books have taught me so much about both teaching and playing. They present theory and technique in a clear, logical manner, but more importantly, they make me laugh. I have a hard time paying attention to anything if it isn’t making me laugh every two minutes. These books are so entertaining, they’ve achieved the highest honor a work of literature can receive in the Hampton household–a place on the back of the toilet.

It’s called Power Tab Editor, and it’s free. Designed primarily for transcribing music in tablature (with standard music notation above), Power Tab Editor is also very useful for figuring out songs with fast, complicated parts.

Here’s how it works: Download and install the Editor. Then go to Power Tab Archive and search for a song you want to learn. All songs are submitted by everyday guitar fanatics like you and me, but because it takes a certain amount of musical knowledge to write anything resembling music on the Editor, the quality of the submissions tends to be much higher than the kind of stuff you find from a “Blink 182 Guitar Tabs” Google search.

The Editor has controls similar to a music player. Hit the Play button and your computer will play the song using MIDI, illuminating each note or chord as it’s played. Some (OK, all) the charm of the song is lost in the translation to MIDI, but at least you can hear how it’s supposed to be played. For those of us who learn best by ear, Power Tab Editor is invaluable.

Here’s a trick: If the song’s too fast, click the first part of the tablature, go up to “Music Symbols,” and choose “Tempo Marker”. Play with the BPM (beats per minute) until you’ve slowed things down enough.

Also, for those of you who teach or compose guitar music, Power Tab produces a lovely manuscript that you can print or save as a .pdf file. For example, here’s my transcription the guitar solo in The Postal Service’s song “Such Great Heights”:

Whether you’re transcribing your latest masterpiece, or just trying to learn Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me,” you’ll be happy with Power Tab. Ohmygod, I think I’m going to, like, go work on that one now!

Have fun!

Yesterday I ran across the best collection of free, online guitar lesson videos I’ve seen on the web. The lessons are clear, include opportunities to play along with a jam track, and the video quality is excellent. They’re excerpts from Peter Vogl’s DVDs, which are for sale on his site, but there’s nothing left out of the lessons–you can get a lot out of them without paying a dime.

There’s tons to learn–Rock, Blues, Jazz, and Country styles, and there’s plenty for beginners and advanced guitarists.

The only drawback is Mr. Vogl’s incredibly geeky delivery (someone somewhere along the line must have told him to enunciate more, and he took things a bit too far). But the lessons are excellent.

You can find them here:

http://www.freeguitarvideos.com/guitar_lessons.html