This is the item where I talk about improving my guitar playing. I'm actually a bass player, these days playing with the Nick Strange Trio. I've been dabbling in guitar for years, although this year I actually have a reason to put some work into it. Every year, the martial arts school I train at (http://www.a2amas.com) puts on a big banquet with demos, entertainment, etc. We usually have a band made up of students, except last year when we suffered with karaoke. Strange statistical anomaly: No guitar players last year. Plenty of drummers and bass players, but no real guitarists. So this year I took on the task of working up my guitar playing so we could have a band. Quite change; three years in a row I was the bass player.13 responses total.
Beyond just learning how to actually operate a guitar, you need some songs to play! A good resource for tablature (little fretboard graphics of the chords) is at http://www.olga.net (OnLine Guitar Archive). I've found a few useful songs there, although there's more that I didn't find or that was just a bare skeleton of the guitar part. I've also gotten one of those little digital multi-effects units with all the usual sounds (distortion, echos, etc) which also has a "phrase trainer", a short (14 seconds?) digital audio memory which can trap a sample of audio from a tune I'm working on and play it back at different pitches and speeds. Quite useful for figuring out a guitar lick, in fact much more useful than I thought.
switch to banjo.
tabcrawler.com is also a very good tab site, scott. I fiddle arround on it myself. sitting in front of a computer with napster<or equivalent> and tabcrawler is really all ne needs to play just about anything.
don't you fret... ;-)
"just about everything" does not include Adrian Legg.
boy what a conversation killer that was. Adrian Legg is god tho.
Actually it looked like tabcrawler had all the same stuff as olga.net, but in a much more obnoxious (popups, etc) format. I've been trying out various distortion/overdrive pedals, but my conclusion is that what I have now will sound a lot better after more practicing. :) I've also been practicing.
My personal current guitar hell stems from the fact that I am at the point that in order to grow as a musician, I need to comprehend and master the circle of fifths. It's hard. People get their doctorates in the circle of fifths. I'm going to start a circle of fifths item. Beh.
mxtabs.net is a great tablature site for guitar, bass, and drums. Through it you can also link to musicianforums.com which is very helpful for asking people things about your instrument you want to know
Ok, you guitar guys: Does moisture affect nylon strings? I was arguing with someone last night, whose guitar kept going out of tune. He said "Too much moisture in the air." The guitar itself had been on the sailboat for a couple days, so I don't think it was the guitar itself. He said the moisture was getting into the strings. I said "Huh?" Why was the guitar with metal strings staying in tune, and the nylon strings going out of tune on a humid July evening on a sailboat?
If the strings are at all porous then they could be affected by moisture (by the mass of the water molecules, actually). But I'd believe the wooden guitar is a more likely culprit.
That was my point: I don't think a bit of monofilament can actually absorb water.
resp:11 More than likely, yes. Many flat-top guitars with steel strings have rods in the necks to retard warping, and it may have been more resistant than the nylon-strung one, especially if such a nylon- strung one was a classical. Strings can stay out of tune if they've gone false, i.e. they're worn out. Copper-wound bass nylons strings (4, 5, 6) are more prone to this and you can buy sets packaged in counts of 9 (3 extra basses).
You have several choices: