Hi Lex! I hope you enjoyed reading this article? Hi Rob. Great article and fun reading. When do you plan on releasing chapter 2, as the 1st was already along time ago?
I really loved your wrating. Hey Ribeiro! Its been quite a challenge for me to find time to get content published regularly. Keep an eye out for my newsletter sign up so you can be notified as soon as new content is available! I look forward to new updates and will talk about this site with my Facebook group. Talk soon! Thanks for your kind words. Can I ask what Facebook group you are referring to? Your email address will not be published. Learning Guitar at 50 and Over.
Looper Pedal Round up. Pioneering players and the birth of the electric guitar. By Rob Cox 8 min read 8 Comments. Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on pinterest. Share on whatsapp. These changes, for good or bad, inevitably inspired their playing. Trapped in the Big Bands. Jimmie Lunceford and his Orchestra. Shoegaze bands are more of an assault, a wall of sound, while there is more empty space in dream pop—allowing more room for melody and counter-melody, whether on vocals, keyboards, or guitars.
In the summer of , Damon and Naomi and I started jamming together as Galaxie , and I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they were enrolled in graduate school. In Boston, all the bands sounded heavier than us; there were hardcore bands, and others playing a mix of metal and punk that was not yet called grunge.
They probably knew what they were doing, while we were making it up as we went along. That fall, we played some nervous local gigs, and in February, with a half-dozen half-written songs, we drove down to New York to record with producer Mark Kramer at his studio in Tribeca. Our little three-piece band now sounded huge. Our new cassette got us signed to a fledgling Boston label named Aurora Records. It was all D. We signed with Rough Trade Records. In September , they brought us to London for a prestigious gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
We were terrified. They had seen impressive American bands like Dinosaur Jr. Galaxie was a pretty different live experience; people had to strain to make out what we were doing. We toured England with the Sundays, who had something we did not: a couple of beautiful, infectious pop songs that were bona fide radio hits. They were a special live band, the musicians standing in a line across the stage. With percussion and keyboard tracks running off an Akai sequencer, everything was perfect, ethereal and shimmering, and they did not make mistakes.
The melody was generated interactively by both hands. He had found a use for the technique of tapping — or two-handed hammer-ons and pull-offs as he preferred to call it -- within a wider context where it provided textural variety without being the only sonic event in the composition. He continued to write compositions that combined multiple techniques. From his frequent tours in Texas, Reed had started hearing about a singer-songwriter named Lyle Lovett.
They became friends, and he helped get Reed his first major label deal. His first release for the label in -- Instrument Landing — debuted Frequent Flyer, Fifteen Year Reunion and other tunes in his new two-handed style.
His contract with MCA — which after the first album was moved over to Capital EMI -- called for an album a year, so he immediately began work on a follow-up album. From his teenage classroom days drumming on books and desktops during idle moments, Reed had always noticed the diverse drum sounds that could be made beating on random objects. The body of an acoustic guitar offered an especially rich source of drum sounds. Depending on where and how you hit it, you could create sounds and textures that imitated — to an extraordinary degree — the sounds of a drum kit and other percussion instruments.
The sounds he discovered and named included kick drum with the right hand , rim shot with the the right hand , high hat played by striking the left hand on the neck, hand clap played by striking the side of the guitar above the neck with the left hand, left-hand conga, right-hand conga and left and right-hand bongo hits.
The problem was, there was no way to access those sounds playing the guitar conventionally without abandoning the functions each hand was responsible for — the left hand fretting strings on the neck and the right hand picking, strumming etc. With his developing two-handed skills — and with a desire to create innovative new material for the next album -- Reed gave himself a challenge: Find a way to incorporate an integrated drum groove into a solo guitar composition.
In other words, find a way to play drums and guitar at the same time. He figured out quickly that, in order for a drum groove to exist in a solo guitar context,, the music would have to begin with the drums, not the strings. The strings would have to be negotiated around the drums, not the other way around.. Before dismissing the idea as impossible, he decided to try it. He already knew that his two-handed hammer-ons and pull-offs enabled him to "fly a sound in" wherever it was needed, with whichever hand was available.
So he played a cycling drum groove with his left hand and negotiated a melody with his right hand and the left hand when it was available in between drum beats. It worked the experiment would become the basis of the tune Drums on the album Blue Vertigo. Once reconciled to the seemingly awkward playing position, he realised he could exploit the left hand's position over the neck to hammer the bass strings of the guitar and hold down bass grooves in between drum beats on the upper bout — which he did later in compositions like Tribes and Blasting Cap.
And if this were not enough, using tunings like CGDGGD and CGDGAD he discovered he was also able to play beautiful jazz chords "upside-down" over the top of the neck by barring groups of strings with his first finger and pinky. The idea of this powerful new capability of turning a guitar into an orchestra with integrated percussion -- not to mention the way it looked -- made him laugh.
In he introduced the latest advances in his integrated percussive style on his second major label album, Blue Vertigo , in tunes like Drums and Slap Funk. The style incorporated many techniques — some of which he invented -- including neck and body percussion sounds, slap-harmonics, bar-hammer slides and slide-pulls, chunks, whunks, left and right-handed hammer-ons and pull-offs, strumming and fingerpicking.
The focus was no longer the guitar, but the music you could make using the guitar as a source of sounds. The acoustic guitar had become a toolbox of orchestral sounds for composing music -- only one of which was the sound of the strings.
While being signed to a major label meant growing a more mainstream audience, as well as the valuable experience of writing, recording and producing his own projects, the demanding release schedule and lack of support for his releases from the label led to Reed feeling that he was losing control over his work. The first two albums Instrument Landing and Blue Vertigo had received little or no promotion from the label.
For his third project, Halfway Home , Reed seized the opportunity of an increased recording budget to branch out. He composed multi-instrumental arrangements on several tunes and hired Minneapolis-based musicians to realize his ideas -- saxophonist David Eiland Prince , percussionist Marc Anderson Steve Tibbetts , drummer Gordie Knutson Steve Miller Band , bassist Enrique Tousaint and cellist Michelle Kinney, as well as two female vocalists for background vocals.
He also used a guitar synthesizer on many of the tracks. While the album was an artistic success and included tracks that were designed to be commercial-radio friendly, the label once again fell flat on promoting it.
Feeling dejected by the lack of support for Halfway Home and the two previous projects, Reed returned to his artistic core and submitted a solo guitar album for his fourth project. The project was called BorderTowns.
It was his most innovative yet.. Meanwhile the label had hired an executive producer -- Charlie Lico, the ex-manager of jazz-fusion guitar legend Larry Carlton -- to oversee the release. Ironically, Lico asked Reed if he would be willing to work with a producer and some session players to expand the commercial potential of the project,. After absorbing the disappointment of not seeing the project released as a solo guitar album, Reed agreed.
He was flown to L. The album received the first significant major-market airplay Reed had ever received in the first months of release -- reaching 11 on the Gavin Report New Adult Contemporary chart and 8 on the MAC Report New Adult Contemporary chart -- as well as stellar reviews from the music press.
He appeared on Nashville television talk shows. It was the first time -- after three ignored projects -- that the label had delivered a proper, promoted release of his music. Four months after its release, sales of Border Towns were deemed unsatisfactory by label, executives and he was dropped in the spring of The five intense, creative, learning-filled years he had dedicated to the major-label record contract had come to an abrupt end.
Emotionally devastated, he would have to start over. Frets can be worn down by a lot of use. This isn't uncommon, and can cause a string to be stopped at an imperfect place, though these errors are quite small.
Fret wear usually just causes strings to buzz or rattle a little. The neck angle can be wrong. This can easily be caused by string tension, and can cause various intonation problems. It may mean that to prevent rattling or buzzing of the strings, the action has to be higher than it optimally should be. This causes sharping when the strings are pressed down, since they stretch a little, especially toward the middle of the string where it is highest above the fretboard.
Correcting the neck angle of a guitar is called a "neck reset" and can be a quite expensive repair on some brands and models. A number of leading brands of guitar pioneered by Taylor Guitars make the necks easy to remove and adjust to solve this chronic guitar problem.
It is likely that his guitar went out of tune because it had a larger quantity of wood than the mandolin or fiddle, making it more susceptible to environmental changes than a smaller mandolin or violin. Changes in the environment can put you out of tune. Your instrument might sit for weeks at home where it stabilizes, having absorbed a certain amount of moisture. When you take it outside, in a car, and in and out of a heated or cooled building, it can take quite some time to settle down.
When sunlight, stage lighting, air currents and various thermal and humidity changes impact an instrument, the hardwood, softwood, bone, metal, seashell and plastic parts of the instrument, tuners and strings themselves will expand, contract and absorb moisture differently, causing all manner of tuning problems. When I play a concert, I try to let my instruments sit as long as possible in the place where they are going to be played before I tune them. Often I will get to a gig, and notice that my autoharp with 36 strings is out of tune.
If I tune it right away, it will almost certainly go out of tune again by showtime, and I am usually better off if I wait until right before show time to tune it, after it has adjusted somewhat.
I prefer not to tune in the backstage or "green room" because it usually has a different climate than the stage. Playing in sunlight or in front of a heat source like a fire can wreak havoc with tuning. The front of the instrument or even of the strings may be in the sun or heat with the back in the shade, or even worse, there may be intermittent lighting or heating that causes non-stop fluctuations, such as what happens as clouds pass by.
Hot and wet environments can cause wood to swell and expand, while cool and dry environments cause wood to shrink. Because the different materials that make up our instruments and strings respond differently to environmental factors, the results can be unpredictable, and it is not a simple matter of knowing that a particular thing happens on a particular kind of weather day. Theaters sometimes are cold when the audience arrives, since each audience member generates about watts of heat. People also constantly exhale moisture, so a concert room may get significantly warmer and moister over the course of a 2 or 3-hour concert.
Again this is not a recipe for perfect tuning. The same thing happens to a smaller degree when even slight air movements from heating and cooling systems are present. Performing outdoors on a windy day can be very problematic as the sound is blown around, and I have had awful experiences trying to hear properly when even a small fan is blowing on me.
Some states even have laws requiring a number of cubic feet per minute of air to be circulated through a concert hall, and this can help or hinder performers who are trying to stay in tune.
CAPOS Capos also usually throw guitars out of tune a little, especially by sharping the thicker strings. Unnecessarily over-tightening a capo can push you further out of tune, and possibly prevent you from making smooth tuning adjustments once it is in place. I use a lot of partial capos, and they wreak havoc on a fingerboard, since you are mixing open strings together with strings clamped by the capo.
Capo first, then tune. This was an idea pioneered by Nikolai Tesla, in opposition to Thomas Edison, who favored direct current. Wires carrying the weaker signals from instruments or microphones need to be shielded to prevent interference from much-stronger electric current that is passing through nearby wires and electronic devices. The faint hum of electrical motors and equipment can make musicians crazy, especially when they are trying to tune an electric guitar near an ice machine with a pinball machine and a neon sign nearby.
I have been told that parts of Tokyo were once 55 cycles, and it appears that worldwide now only on the island of Guam is the electric current still running at 55 cycles, so musicians there can tune to the ice machines and neon signs.
This will compromise your situation if you plug into an electronic tuner and may prevent you from getting an accurate reading from your tuner. Instrument pickups that rely on magnets are generally more susceptible to interference problems than the types that use piezo-electric materials. The actual physics of tuning is a surprisingly convoluted subject, since a bystander might just think tuning a few strings to specified pitches is a routine and boring thing.
If you are going to be a musician you should know about them, and they are not part of any music curriculum I am aware of. Buckle your seatbelt. The whole idea of what it means to be "in tune" is much foggier and more imprecise than bystanders might imagine. Measuring and standardizing musical pitch are things we take for granted, as if they are set in stone, and the more you learn about the subject the less certain you may feel.
OVERTONES All vibrating objects emit a series of overtones, generally fainter to our ears than the "fundamental" and the way those overtones are present or not present is what makes various instruments sound different even though they may be playing the same pitch.
What seems to be a simple musical note is almost never that simple, unless it is a tuning fork or an electronically generated sine wave. Many of the overtones are very consonant with the fundamental tone. Many people have some idea that this has to do with those mysterious things that music and math have in common.
Some old cultures got very excited and even religious about the relationship between integers and music. Shorten a vibrating string by half and it raises the pitch an octave; doubling its length lowers it one octave.
Each time you change the vibrating object by a factor of 2, it changes another octave. Reducing the volume of air in a Coke bottle by half when you blow across the opening raises the pitch an octave, and doubling the air volume lowers it an octave. Since A has been defined as cycles per second, the other octaves of A occur at , , 55, They are all producing different octaves of what we call the musical note A.
The octave is present in all musical systems on earth and is the fundamental building block of all music. A guitar spans about 4 octaves in pitch, and a piano close to 8. It is generally called a musical "fifth", an interval Westerners know as do-re-mi-fa- SOL -- the 5th scale of the do-re-mi "major scale.
This is the next most important building block, and I believe it also appears in music of all cultures. When this note occurs in nature, it is a Pythagorean interval, because it is embedded in the note you hear coming from the instrument, generated from the harmonic series of overtones. The next dissonant overtones are 11 and 13, which also have their own reputations. If you then make another note a 5th above that it is a D, and you can then make an A and an E called a " circle of fifths " , and you can generate a whole series of notes this way.
The bad news is that any series of numbers generated by the integer 3 will never yield a note that is commensurate with the powers of 2 that generate the octaves. So if you started with an A at cycles, and started making a series of 5ths, you would keep getting new notes that were not octaves multiples of 2 from your starting point.
What does this mean? Many things will sound great, but some things will sound really sour. The ancient Greeks even knew this, and developed their own tempering systems thousands of years ago, to adjust the sacred integer-based musical pitches to solve problems that arise and make the music work better.
The notes we tune to now are not those created by the hallowed integers that so intrigued the ancient Greeks. Temperings are systems of tuning that are intended to minimize the errors inherent in musical pitches. Guitar students had to learn to tune before there were cheap electronic tuners everywhere, and some techniques were developed to help us get the instrument in tune by tuning one string to a tuning fork and then tuning the other 5 to it with various recipes.
The human ear apparently likes Pythagorean intervals, and they sound "sweet" to us. If you bore holes in a flute using the Pythagorean math, some but not all melodies sound good. But if you start trying to form chords or play in different keys, things start to sound out of tune, and so-called " wolf tones " appear. Over the centuries, various "tempering" systems have evolved, including " just " and " meantone " tempering, which allow various compromises between these opposing forces.
One of J. Bach's most important contributions to music was to celebrate and endorse a new system of tempering called " well-tempered " in which these little errors were better divided over the 12 notes in the Western scale.
He wrote music that changed keys repeatedly and never sounded greatly out of tune, which such music would do if played on an untempered system. His enthusiastic adopting of this system signaled the beginning of the modern era of musical tuning.
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