Learn Electric Guitar

Technorati Tags: electric guitar, learning guitar

I have been playing guitar for a while now – my entire adult life actually.  I think I first started hacking away at it in 1994.  But, as the truism goes, “you never stop learning”.  And there are a few things about playing the electric guitar that the past year has really underlined for me, and I think they’re worth sharing.

There’s nothing quite like playing live

2010 was a year where I started regularly playing shows again.  After a couple of years just teaching and the occasional fill-in gig, in February I joined a hard rock band playing original songs, and we’ve done bar gigs every couple of weeks.  This has been an amazing amount of fun – I’d forgotten just how rewarding it can be to pump out a good set with some amazing musicians to an appreciative crowd.   It’s also done wonders for my playing.  Musicians often remark that “a gig is worth ten rehearsals”, and it’s true.  A rehearsal is probably worth ten sessions of bedroom playing as well.  Being put on the spot in front of an audience and only having one chance to get it right really hones your chops like nothing else.  In this band I have to lock in with the rhythm section, play most of the solos, tap the right the pedal at the right time, and I do a lot of the vocal parts as well.  It’s a lot to coordinate, and you only get one chance to get it right (or to cope with the inevitable mistakes and make them sound plausible).  In many ways it’s sink or swim, but when it comes together it’s so much better than just sitting at home with the axe.

Recording can really tighten up your playing

As well as playing live, we’ve recorded a lot of the songs for demos and a promo EP.  Recording yourself playing really puts a microscope on what you actually sound like.  Microphones don’t lie.  Recording can also force you think about things you just take for granted – such as how well your tone works with the other instruments in the band, or whether the music you play is best suited to being lined up to a click track and edited minutely, or whether you want a looser and liver sound for the band.  Recording also poses challenges as to know when a take is good enough, to know when you are overdoing it and the track is becoming sterile or have lost their freshness.  It’s hard to listen to anything with a fresh perspective after you’ve been working on the same 3 minute song for hours on end.  This is something I’m still trying to get a handle on.

There’s no time like the present

So this year has been a great year for getting out there and making things happen.  It’s one thing to learn and teach the instrument, which I’ve doing for a while now, but another again to get back to using the instrument to play or record music for an audience.  For me, this all just underlines the point that if you want to learn to play guitar – whatever it is you want to do with it, whether that is to play shows, write songs, or just jam at home – you really have to just go out there and do it.

If you need some encouragement to get started learning guitar, check out some of the New Year’s Resolutions I wrote about this time last year – they’re just as valid in 2011 as in 2010!

Technorati Tags: 2010, electric guitar, Learn Guitar

A few more questions have come in from the Ask a Question page.

Hi,

I’m interested in learning the electric guitar.  However I am a vegan and I am quite serious about not using any animal products.  Is there anything I have to look out for when shopping for a musical instrument.

Thanks,
C

Electric guitars use very little in the way of animal products, and what they do use can easily be avoided.

In previous centuries, guitars commonly used catgut strings.  Catgut is made from from the intestines of a sheep, goat, pig, horse, donkey, or other large domestic animal.  Contrary to what the name suggests, catgut isn’t actually made from the gut of a cat.  In the 21st century, catgut is still used occasionally in some classical guitars and other instruments, but these days nylon and nickel or steel strings find far more frequent use.  Electric guitars can only be strung with metal strings, because the magnets in an electric guitar pickup will only pick up the vibration of a string if it’s made out of a ferrous material.  You don’t have to worry about your strings being made from animals if you are playing electric.

Guitar fretboards are also commonly inlaid with shellfish – often abalone or mother of pearl.  This is purely decorative, and you should notice no difference in playability or tone just because your guitar has plastic or metal inlays, or no inlays at all.

Guitar accessories can be made out of leather.  High end guitar straps in particular are commonly made out of leather, and while it’s quite easy to find a strap made of other materials, a great deal of those are cheaply made and will eventually break if you are gigging a lot.  Some of the polyester guitar straps are extremely robust – these are the ones that look like seatbelts.

Apart from all of that, there are all the leather jackets, studded leather belts, leather pants and snakeskin cowboy boots that come with being a rocker.  But you can wear whatever you like when you play guitar as far I’m concerned.

Hello,

What guitar did Ronnie James Dio regularly play?

Thanks,
D

Dio wasn’t really known as a guitarist, although a video documentary once showed that he did use a guitar to write songs with (skip to 1:59 of this video)

He also played bass guitar in his first band The Vegas Kings, way back in 1957.  Apart from that, when playing in Rainbow the guitarist Ritchie Blackmore used a Fender Stratocaster, while Black Sabbath and Heaven and Hell guitarist Tony Iommi played a Gibson SG.

In his solo band Dio, guitarist Vivian Campbell used a Gibson Les Paul, a Jackson Soloist, and a BC Rich ST.  Craig Goldy used a BC Rich Warlock, and various Jackson and Ibanez superstrats.  Tracy G used custom built guitars (I am unable to find out what).  Doug Aldrich played a Gibson Les Paul and a Fender Stratocaster.

Technorati Tags: craig goldy, dio, doug aldrich, guitar inlays, guitar straps, leather, ritchie blackmore, tony iommi, Tracy G, vegan, vivian campbell

“You never stop learning”, that’s the message Joe Bonamassa had for electric guitar players everywhere, in a recent interview with the East Anglian Daily Times. Having played over 200 gigs in the past year, in a performing career that stretches back 21 years to when he opened for BB King as a 12 year old, Bonamassa says he is always learning and always getting better:

“‘Always,’ he insists. ‘I’ve got better just this week, playing with these guys. It’s a challenge. There’s always something to learn; a new riff, a new pocket; the notes you play, the notes you don’t play.’”

Read the rest of the interview with Joe Bonamassa here.

Joe Bonamassa, having played guitar since the age of 4, knows a thing or two about blues guitar.  A succesful solo artist in his own right, he has recently teamed up with ex-Deep Purple and Black Sabbath singer and bassist Glenn Hughes, drummer Jason Bonham and ex-KISS, Alice Cooper, Yngwie Malmsteen, Alice in Chains, Planet X, Dream Theater and Billy Idol keyboardist Derek Sherinian, to form the supergroup Black Country Communion, who have released their first album Black Country only last September.

A blues/rock guitarist rather than a strict blues guitarist, Joe has stated many times that he takes his influence more from the British reinterpretation of the blues rather than from the original American players.  Following solidly in the footsteps of players like Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Paul Kossoff, Joe is often hailed as the hottest young sensation in blues guitar – a comment that seems to lack a bit of context given his 29 years spent learning his instrument, the 21 years spent performing, the 9 solo albums, and a music industry that frequently manufactures idols from musicians half his age.  His virtuoso alternate picking technique is often combined with more traditional bends and a preference for using the guitar’s volume and tone controls to shape his tone, rather than relying on a large pedalboard.  He is an accomplished player and singer, and his interviews are worthwhile reading for anyone playing blues guitar.

Technorati Tags: Interview, Joe Bonamassa, learning electric guitar

A reader has written in with a great question: “Hi, my boyfriend has just started learning to play guitar, and likes your blog.  Christmas time is coming up, and I really want to give him something guitar related.  He has very quickly become obsessed with the instrument.  However, I am not sure what to get him.  What would be the best/most useful gift?”

So, what do you get for a guitarist?

Really, it depends on who the guitarist is, and how much you want to spend.

At the bottom end of the scale, some strings or a packet of guitar picks make for inexpensive christmas gifts.  The great thing about buying consumables like strings or picks is that guitarists always need more of them periodically, as they get worn out with age and use.  However, make sure you get the right size!  Strings comes in different gauges, and if you try to put on a gauge of string that the guitar is not set up for then it will perform poorly.  Picks also come in different materials and thicknesses – the right one is largely a matter of personal preference.

Slightly more expensive are items like electronic tuners, guitar straps, and practice amplifiers.  If a guitarist doesn’t have one of these, then they can make a great gift.  Effects pedals also start at some pretty low prices, and while an effects pedal rarely helps guitarists improve their technique, they can be an awful lot of fun to use.  Gig-worthy effects pedals in metal cases and with true bypass circuitry tend to be in the low three figures, getting slightly more expensive for boutique and highly sought-after units.

If you really want to splash out, you can get a whole new guitar or amplifier.  Even these need not be super expensive.  Something like an Ibanez acoustic guitar or an Epiphone valve amplifier can clock in at the low three figures.  Of course, guitars and amplifiers can easily come to thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.

Taking a slightly different tack, some sort of instructional material can be a great idea, especially for new guitarists.  There are hundreds of different books, DVDs, magazines and downloadable courses available.  Some of them are featured on this site.  The best one to buy often depends on the style of guitar that the gift-recipient is most enthusiastic to learn, and where they want to go with their guitar playing.

Technorati Tags: acoustic guitar, gifts

Since our last post by Dr. Matt Warnock I have had a handful of people asking if they can contribute a guest post to this blog.

The answer is: Yes, I am interested in guest posts!

However, I do have a few guidelines about what kind of posts I will accept.

Topic

This is a guitar blog – specifically it’s about learning to play guitar.  So I’m most interested in publishing posts that teach the reader something about playing guitar.  That doesn’t just have to be theory or exercises.  Understanding equipment, or the history of the guitar, or practical tips for playing in bands, or any other topics useful for readers are quite welcome.  I do sometimes venture away from education and into news, but for the most part I try to focus on teaching with this blog, and those are the guest posts I’ll be the most likely to accept.

Guest posts don’t have to be restricted to objective fact.  Music is ultimately a subjective experience, so if you want to use a guest post to present some sort of opinion about what makes for good or bad guitar playing then that’s fine.

Posts completely unrelated to learning guitar will be rejected outright.

Links

I understand that the main reason people are interested in writing guest posts is to promote their own site.  If you have something useful, interesting and relevant to the readers, that’s all fair enough.  I won’t link to non guitar related sites – I have received a couple of posts that are ostensibly about playing guitar but are really just to promote credit card sites – posts that link to sites like that I’m not very interested in publishing.

I don’t have a problem with linking to commercial websites – so long as the page you are linking to has freely available content that is useful to the readers and immediately relevant to the topic you’re discussing.  Please don’t link straight to ecommerce sites or to anything spammy.

I won’t publish guest posts that are just full of links.  I don’t have any hard and fast rules about how many links to include, or how many words per link – just please be sensible and use your judgement.

Author

Please tell me who you are when asking to make a guest post.  I don’t need to know your life story – just a little bit about yourself, how long you have been playing guitar, your background with the instrument etc.  I am not going to insist that everyone be some sort of degree qualified player, or a professional music educator – even if you’re a raw beginner then that’s cool, so long as you have something useful or interesting to say.  I have gotten some unsolicited guest posts that appear to have been written by people who have never actually played guitar in their life, and I don’t really see any point to publishing that sort of stuff.

Use the contact form on this blog to inquire further about writing a guest post.

Technorati Tags: guest post, learning electric guitar

Hey everyone, not long ago I contacted Dr. Matt Warnock about writing a guest post for us here at the Learn Electric Guitar blog.  Matt is a professional performer and guitar teacher, writing for Guitar International magazine and teaching at Western Illinois University.  I asked him if he could write something about improvising over a 12 bar blues in the key of A, and he graciously agreed to.  His words follow from here:

—

As a guitar teacher I find that the vast majority of students that come to me looking for help with their playing have learned the basics of the blues (the chords and minor blues scale), but have hit a wall with where to go next in their playing. Since this is such a common problem, don’t feel frustrated if you find yourself in this same situation, many other guitarists have walked in your shoes countless times before.

With myriad options on where to go next with your blues soloing, it’s hard to know which approach will work best and be the right choice to build your guitar technique. One of the most interesting, and easy to learn, concepts that can really lift your blues playing to the next level is the addition of arpeggios to your improvisational vocabulary. In particular with the blues, the 13th arpeggio is a great place to start when expanding beyond the realm of blues scales and into unchartered musical territory.

So, let’s dig in on some 13th arpeggios over an A blues, starting with basic fingerings, then mixing it with the blues scale and finally putting it into practice with a few practice exercises and familiar riffs.

The 13th Arpeggio

Here is how the 13th arpeggio looks on the top four strings for each chord in the A blues, A7, D7 and E7.

Example 1

With the arpeggio under our fingers for each chord, let’s look at how this new fingering relates to the traditional minor blues scale, again on the top four strings. Notice that two of the notes overlap between the two fingerings, the root (A) and the fifth (E), which can act as pivot notes between these two different sounds when soloing over an A blues.

Scale-Arpeggio Mixture

Example 2

To help get this new sound into our ears and under our fingers, here is a little exercise we can add to our practice routine. It’s fairly simple, play the arpeggio up and then play down the blues scale. By doing so back to back you can really hear how the major sound of the arpeggio and the minor sound of the scale contrast in a playing situation.

Example 3

Here is the same exercise but reversed, so you play the scale descending followed by the arpeggio ascending.

Example 4

Traditional Licks and Riffs Using 13th Arpeggios

Now that you have the scale and arpeggio under your fingers, and in your ears, you can start to improvise with this new sound over an A blues. To help you get started, here are two famous licks from the blues tradition that use the 13th arpeggio. Example 5 is a single-line lick while Example 6 uses double stops, which will add a bit of sonic variety to your vocabulary.

*Note: For space we’ve explored these exercises over an A7 chord, but don’t forget to practice it over both D7 and E7 as well.

Example 5

Example 6

With this new sound under your fingers try and find as many places and moments to insert it into your blues soloing. As with any concept, you don’t want to overdo it, which might make this fresh approach sound stale and out of place. Instead, try playing 8 bars of blues scales licks, then use the 13 arpeggio in the last four bars, or a similar ratio of familiar vs. new sounds.

So, how does this arpeggio sound and feel to you? Let us know in the comments below.

Technorati Tags: arpeggios, Blues, Blues Guitar, improvising

Yesterday I wrote a little article about how to learn the electric guitar without immediately blowing all your money.  So today I thought I’d take a different tack: stuff you can buy if you’re really on a mission to spend as much money as you can in the shortest time possible.

Jimmy Page’s new autobiography

Jimmy Page, guitarist and bandleader of the great Led Zeppelin, is releasing a new photographic autobiography.  It will retail for £445 – about 685 US dollars.

Titled Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page, this 500 page autobiography will be published by Genesis Publications, and will consist almost entirely of photos, interspersed with a few words in between.

Alessandro Instrument Pro cables

A 20 foot Alessandro Instrument Pro cable costs $1,999.95, which is quite possibly the most expensive instrument cable on the planet.  These are teflon-insulated, with a solid silver core.

While this might seem an extravagant amount to pay for instrument cable, guitarists have nothing on audiophiles when it comes to spending enormous amounts of money on cables.  A 12 foot length of the Pear Cable Corporation‘s ANJOU speaker cable retails for $7,250, while Audioquest Everest speaker cables can cost $21,000 – more than some people spend on a brand new car.  Despite the enormous price tage, some experiments have purported to show that most people can’t tell the difference between expensive cable, and some unwound coathangers soldered together.

An original Trainwreck Express

The late Ken Fischer started Trainwreck guitar amplifiers in 1981.  These single-channel, non-master volume amplifiers offered a unique tone, with incredible response to changes in touch and pick attack.  Unfortunately, just as these amplifiers came to be most sought after, Ken was beset with chronic illnesses that made him too frail to meet the demand.  And so, the price of these original Trainwreck amplifiers has soared.

There are lots of replicas, clones and “Trainwreck inspired” amplifiers available, and some of them very good, but an original Ken Fischer Trainwreck Express is very hard to come by indeed.  The ones for sale at Ultra Sound Amp Sales cost $35,000 and even more.

Technorati Tags: amplifiers, Instrument Cables, Trainwreck Express

As guitarists we are continually presented with new things to spend our money on.  Some of them are exactly what we need, others are a great idea for someone else, other items still are a total waste of money.  Being constantly shown new bits and pieces to play or to plug into, it’s very easy to get caught up with dreams of the next “must have” item, that final piece of the puzzle that will at last make you sound exactly how you’d like.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome

The problem of always needing that next new guitar, guitar amplifier, speaker cabinet, boutique pedal, effects rack, attenuator, premium cable or other accessory is so widespread that guitarists have a name for the problem: GAS, or Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting, possessing or acquiring new equipment.  You can’t play guitar without a guitar!  And having an amp to plug it into.  And sometimes getting a new guitar or amp can go a long way to helping you create the sounds you really want.

Serious GAS goes beyond a sensible desire for a genuinely useful piece of equipment.  It can cause you to eat unhealthy quantities of Ramen noodles and Kraft Easy Mac, can distress your Significant Other, and can leave your wallet feeling permanently light.

But worse than these things – well, worse from my perspective anyway – is that GAS can trick you into thinking that what you really need to do to start creating the sounds you want is to obtain that next new thing.  This can be a great excuse not to practice!  Of course, without working on your fingers, your ears, and on that gunk that you find between them, you probably won’t get to whereever it is you’d like to go.  But once you have trained your mind to focus on the next piece of gear, it can be all too easy to shift that focus to yet something else when your last purchase doesn’t do everything that you needed it to.  It could be that what you really need doesn’t involve buying anything, just getting some good old guitar practice!

Understanding “Good Enough”

So your rig isn’t perfect?  Does that mean you should stop practicing until you’ve got it “just right”?  It’s worth stopping to wonder if there even is such a thing.  It certainly might be the case that that must have item that will solve all your problems really isn’t so “must have” after all.

There are a few things that can absolutely ruin a rig.  A guitar with really poor intonation or a poorly-set neck relief can be so bad that it’s unplayable.  And cables that cut out all the time or amplifiers that overheat can be extremely frustrating.

But a lot of the things that they just can’t live with are actually quite workable.  This is especially the case with new guitarists, or guitarists that are new to playing in bands.  I remember an old student of mine, a great player just 17 years old at the time, who was using this awesome little Fender tube amp, a small 15 watt combo with a 12 inch speaker in it.  He was complaining to me that he really needed a new amp he couldn’t afford, because the combo just wasn’t loud enough for the band he was jamming in with his friends.  Now, a  fully cranked 15 watt tube amp isn’t the quietest thing in the world, but having played with really loud drummers myself, I knew what he was talking about.  But instead of telling him that he was right and that he needed to go out and buy a new amp straight away, I just laughed and told him I’d seen a dude do a gig with the same sort of amp to a 600-capacity hall.  How did he get it loud enough?  He just had a microphone placed in front of it, and they ran it through the PA.

So, my friend took the amp to the rehearsal studio, and asked the guy the behind the desk if he could mic the amp up, which turned out not to be a problem at all.  This turned out to be a much better solution than just looking for new gear that he couldn’t really afford – not only was it a much cheaper solution, but he was able to carry his guitar and combo amp with him on the bus, which was important as he neither had a car nor a driver’s licence at the time.  In addition, he was able to turn the amp all the way up to 10, creating a great distorted tone that worked really well for the pop/punk covers his band was jamming on.

The guy has since bought a 4×12 cabinet and a high gain, channel switching amplifier head, which is much more suited to what he does, but there’s no question that borrowing his uncle’s amp was good enough.  And instead of blowing all his money on an amp he didn’t need, he was able to save it and put it towards something really nice.

If there is something you are not doing with your guitar playing right now only because of a particular piece of gear you’re yet to get, try to let it go.  It’s probably not as crucial as you think.

Technorati Tags: GAS, Guitar Acquisition Syndrome, learn the electric guitar, practice

This is a great article on “Cheesy Guitars” about something a little left-field – the history of the electric guitar behind the Iron Curtain.  This article by Iouri Dmitrievski was written in 1986, some five years before the eventual fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It goes into what it was like to build electric guitars back when they didn’t even have proper pictures of the instrument to go from, let alone actual examples of them.  He starts in the mid-60s, when there were no Russian electric guitars at all, and the closest he could get to them was photocopies of posters of Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton.  He then talks about the first factory-made Russian guitars in the late ’60s, and the practice of throwing unplayable but perfectly fixable guitars made out of rare woods into the fire, lest they fall into private ownership.  There is some interesting stuff in there about individual craftsmen being imprisoned for building instruments and earning “non-labor income”, and about the effects of Perestroika on their ability to practice their craft and to build guitars.

If this sounds like it would interest you, have a read of it in full here.

The rest of the site is pretty cool too, if you have an interest in weird, kitschy or obscure guitars.  These are all guitars from behind the Iron Curtain, and they’re not very well known through the rest of the world.  They include plywood “telecaster” guitars that look more like Les Pauls, bizarre shaped double cutaway instruments made of birch, gold painted V-shaped bass guitars, and a few contraptions covered in so many pickups, knobs and toggle switches they look like they could have come from the Russian space program.  There are Russian electric guitars, Belorussian electric guitars, East German electric guitars, Czechoslavakian electric guitars, Bulgarian electric guitars, Ukrainian electric guitars, Armenian electric guitars, Polish electric guitars, Romanian electric guitars, and Hungarian electric guitars.  There are even some old Soviet effects processors on there, along with more articles about guitars behind the Iron Curtain. If that’s the sort of thing that piques your interest then it’s definitely worth browsing around.

Technorati Tags: Electric Guitar history, Russia, Soviet Guitars, weird guitars