Here’s whats going on:

1. Most importantly, I’ve married my wonderful wife Liz in March. Best day of my life! All of our closest friends and family were there, beautiful ceremony, followed by a honeymoon in Boston. Real honeymoon to someplace warm is coming soon. I’ve put some photos up on our wedding website.
2. I’m no longer teaching private guitar lessons. I’ve made a lot of good friends over the past several years and will miss all of my students. I hope you all never stop playing.
3. One of my longest running students was kind enough to photocopy all of our old lessons and give them to me. It gives me plenty of guitar goodness to post here and it is somewhat of a journal of mine which I can look though to see what I was playing and when. The nicest thing about this is that I’d transcribed most of a song that I wrote for my wife to play at the wedding.
4. Another good part of marriage is that my brother-in-law is a sound/recording/mixing professional who is going to record the aforementioned song. I’ll put that up here as soon as it’s polished.
5. This summer I’m working as a research programmer building a system to provide test case minimization for satellite software. Its all in LISP and is really exciting.

So I’m keeping busy, but will get some old lesson material up soon and semi-regularly.

I don’t actively seek the opportunity to contribute such knowledge unless specifically queried about such facts. I got the hint when my fiancee gave me a Rock Snob’s Dictionary for Christmas a few years back. The question “Who co-wrote, recorded, and played guitar on Chris Cornell’s first solo album?” rarely comes up in daily life, let’s just say I like to know, you know?

I really did like the sound of Chris Cornell’s “Euphoria Morning”. After reading the liner notes I discovered that Alain Johannes of Eleven had a lot to do that sound. It appeared he carried a lot of creative weight on the recording/mixing side and the writing/playing side as well. Alain has also worked with another of my favorite groups, Queens of the Stone Age, and recorded and toured for Lullabies to Paralyze.

Here’s a clip of Johannes from his tour supporting Euphoria Morning. I like the “space guitar” sound he gets by using a lot of effects and wide intervallic stretches. Sounds like he’s using some type of synth as well. Different and creative. While it seems Alain is happiest using his talent to play a supporting role in the efforts of others, I’d really like to hear him record a solo album in the near future.

I have a ton or live and studio stuff we’ve done in the past on my hard drive. This particular performance was recorded about 5 years ago. I wrote the song, “Forbidden Fruit Jam”, towards the end of my real woodshedding years. BONUS: It’s an instrumental so you won’t hear me trying to sing!

Listening to this is like taking a ride in a time machine. I was living with my band mates at this point in my life, probably still had a pony tail(a rock and roll requirement), and I probably had a mid-term the next morning. My guitar is panned hard left and my good friend Ez is blazing through the right speaker. You can hear I was having a problem with my input jack towards the middle of the song as I was always too cheap to replace them right away I dropped a few notes here and there but over all I’m still pretty happy with the way I was playing.(especially between 3:10 and 3:25)

The point to all of this is to encourage everyone to record themselves or their band as much as possible. It’s always nice to listen backwards once in a while, even if it occasionally makes you cringe!

If an idea comes to you and it isn’t quite fitting into 4/4, or you notice that your foot (because you tap your foot when you practice) is in the air instead of hitting the ground at the end of the riff, then it’s probably in an odd time. Get to know how it works first and then count it out. The riff below is one example of how to use an odd time somewhat naturally. When you listen to it, you may or may not notice that it’s in 7/4.

Download audio file (a pulloffs.mp3)

The descending notes on the 2nd string are optional. After the D on the 3rd fret I play a C on the 1st fret and then a C# on the second fret (to make an A major). I’m also using pull-offs wherever I can.

Try to come up with a few different ideas in odd time-signatures. You can start by adding or subtracting a beat from something you already know. If you do in fact want to get nerdy about it, try playing it against something that’s in 4/4 time. You’ll notice that it syncs up at the LCM of beats between the two different time signatures. 3/4 and 4/4 will sync up in 12 beats(LCM of 3 and 4) which is 3 measures of 4/4 and 4 measures of 3/4.

For me, it takes a good deal time to create a post. I’ve just started using Audacity to record my sound examples. It’s a very intuitive and simple piece of open source software. Once I installed LAME to encode my files to mp3 it has worked very well for my purposes.

For those who are wondering(which I’m sure there are thousands of you) I’ve been using a Tascam US-122 interface, a Shure sm57 , myself, and usually a Tacoma DM-10 to bring you the audio samples you’ve so enjoyed. The notation is created first in Finale, exported as a .tiff, resized, and converted to .gif. It is not a quick process.

It seems to work well but I was wondering if any guitar bloggers out there have a faster system for creating a good post?

Onward.

If you like Clutch you may already have this one but if you’ve never heard of them, surf on over to pro-rock.com because you, my friend, are in for a treat. You can also listen to them at Clutch Radio.

After I first scanned the tracklisting and gave it a preliminary listen I wasn’t keen on the fact that they re-recorded and released One Eyed Dollar. Sure the Hammond Organ assimiliates nicely but it doesn’t sound much different than the original version. I can tell you though that by my third consecutive listen of the album (on long solitary road trip(even longer story)) I caught myself playing air guitar to the song’s concert ending. Clutch will make you like their songs even against your own will. Upon reading an explanation of why they re-recorded the song it all makes perfect sense. Now when I hear it, I’m thinking, “Good idea!”

From Beale Street to Oblivion, like the rest of the Clutch catalog, is exciting, inventive, and unique. It follows a path the band has forged since releasing Blast Tyrant and Robot Hive/Exodus. It’s still the classic, riff-oriented Clutch you’ve come to know and love, but their riffs are getting smarter, loopier, and bluesier by the minute.

What I like about Beale Street is the texture and balance they create. The syncopated cyclical verses contrast nicely with driving straight-eighth choruses. It takes you down a winding country road to the driver’s seat in a 110 mph Mac Truck on the highway (downhill, no brakes) . Highlights for me are Child of the City, Rapture of Riddley Walker, When Vegans Attack, and Mr. Shiny Caddylackness. Pick up this album and you’ll hear a rock band in its prime and find yourself checking the rear-view mirror for angry vegan bicyclists before you know it.

guitHelp score: YES.

1. Leave a comment on any post.

Easy huh?

A winner will be selected randomly after 10 comments have been made anywhere on this site. If you’re wondering how to leave a comment look for the word Comment below each post and click it. You can enter up to five times so long as you have something different to say each time. Attempting to cheat by leaving gibberish comments will result in immediate disqualification and is punishable by law.

The prize will be selected from a pile of CD’s that I don’t listen to anymore. Good Luck!

1. You need one of each note in the musical alphabet(A, B, C, D, E, F, and G).
2. The intervals between the notes must follow this pattern in steps:
   whole(2 frets), whole, half(1 fret), whole, whole, whole, half.

So if we start with F we end up with F, G, A, B(flat), C, D, and E. We call it a B flat instead of an A# because of rule 1 and we need a half-step there according to rule 2. We can build a major scale from any note by following these rules.

Playing those notes in that order results in a F Ionian mode. When you start from G and play up an octave (G-A-Bflat-C-D-E-F-G) you have the G Dorian mode. Remember it’s not a G major because you a using the notes in F major. Thus for each of the 7 notes in a major scale you have a corresponding mode. All of the modes built in the key of F are below.

One way to get out of this rut would be to learn more chord voicings. Essentially a Drop 2 chord is formed when you take all of the inversions of a 7th chord on a set of four strings and remove the next to last note and place it in the bass. On the top four strings there are 4 different drop 2 voicings for each 7th chord. These shapes are very useful for helping you move around the neck but can also allow you to play various chords in the same place on the neck by using different shapes. The voicings for all of the chords listed below follow the same pattern from the 4th to the 1st string. Try substituting these into some songs or chord progressions you already know.

• Shape 1: root, 5th, 7th, 3rd
• Shape 2: 3rd, 7th, 5th, root
• Shape 3: 5th, root, 3rd, 7th
• Shape 4: 7th, 3rd, 5th, root

E(dominant)7

Em7

EMaj7