May 2013
1 post
April 2013
1 post
March 2013
5 posts
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February 2013
1 post
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January 2013
7 posts
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How To Learn The Guitar Fretboard And Become A... →
A common challenge that many musicians face is a lack of ability to be expressive and creative in their guitar playing. To make the problem even more painful, you have no doubt also heard the common prediction that it is impossible to improve your level of musical creativity beyond what your natural talent enables you to do. On the surface, the chances of overcoming this problem may seem very low...
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Hello to all!
And welcome to our first Guitar...
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How to Maximize Your Income from Guitar Teaching →
If you are like most guitar teachers, you are struggling to earn enough money in your guitar teaching business. This can cause a lot of frustration because you will often feel as if you are putting out a lot of effort, only to receive very little in return.
This situation often discourages most guitar teachers from doing more to grow their business and they become very pessimistic toward making a...
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Taste, Tone, and Technique – Open for Discussion →
You never know what kind of questions and discussions are going to pop up on the Guitar Noise Forum pages. This one was posted over the past weekend.
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Making the Least of Resolutions →
So, how are your New Year’s resolutions for 2013 coming along? Since today is just January 2, hopefully the answer will be “great so far!” or “haven’t started yet because yesterday was a holiday!” Depending on which answer is yours, you have either managed to get through one day while keeping your resolution or are about to start the first day of a “new” you.
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December 2012
7 posts
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27 (or so) for 2013 →
When Paul suggested I might write up some kind of retrospective look at the various articles, lessons, interviews and reviews that have been done on Guitar Noise, I honestly didn’t think all that much about it until I began to realize how much of my life is here. And about how much this website has reached into my everyday life. So as I look back to pick out some lessons that I think may be worth...
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Get all the Guitar Noise Podcasts for free
We have a little Christmas gift for everybody. Somebody asked us if there was an easy way to download every single podcast on our site. The answer is yes. If you sign up for the free service Dropbox here http://db.tt/t8g5ahb you can get all the files from our shared folder. If you already use Dropbox here is the link to the folderhttps://www.dropbox.com/sh/futao7znzccisgm/xmK2aUn5MN We hope you...
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How To Improve Your Upstroke Picking →
Beginning guitar players often start out picking all notes using only a downstroke picking motion. This lesson will help you develop the other half of the picking equation – upstrokes – and show you the best way to get a better sound, increase your speed and improve your timing.
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What are the first songs you should learn to play... →
Here are ten relatively simple songs for beginners to learn on guitar, complete with chords, tabs, step-by-step instruction, and audio examples as well. These lessons also explain useful things about the music, so when you learn the featured song, you’ll also pick up some tricks to use when playing other songs.
October 2012
2 posts
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Root Notes and Slash Chords →
As you’ll read time and time again here in the various lessons at Guitar Noise, you may not need to know any music theory to be a guitarist, but even knowing one or two little things will help you and your playing improve immensely. Simply being aware of the “root note” of any given chord, for example, can make your playing a lot less muddy. Plus, it will give you a head start when it comes to...
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5 Steps To Overcoming Any Guitar Challenge →
Have you ever struggled with improving a certain aspect of your guitar playing? If you said “yes”, then you are no doubt aware of the frustration that comes from feeling like your guitar practicing is simply not having the effect that you want. When most guitarists face this situation in their playing, they usually either decide to abandon trying to learn guitar entirely or keep trying to get...
September 2012
2 posts
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A Simple And Unconventional Way To Improve Your... →
One of the most fulfilling abilities to have as a guitarist is the ability to play highly expressive guitar solos. However, most guitar players have a very hard time coming up with creative and fresh ideas to add into their guitar soloing style. At one point or another, almost everyone experiences the frustration of recycling the same guitar solo material fhrom all the solos that you have listened...
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How To Jump Start A Career In Music With Your Own... →
The key to starting a career in music and becoming successful is finding a great mentor who has already reached the highest level of success in the music industry. In most cases, simply being around someone in the music business who knows a lot more than you is highly beneficial. That said, if you are able to not only be “around” someone like this, but also receive direct advice from him about...
August 2012
3 posts
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How To Change Between Difficult Chords On Guitar →
Learning to change chords on guitar without hesitations or mistakes is a great skill to have but, unfortunately, many guitarists have a hard time doing this basic and essential part of playing. If you are a guitarist who struggles with playing chords well, you can no doubt relate to the feelings of frustration and disappointment that occur when your guitar playing falls apart while trying to play...
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July 2012
3 posts
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Interview With Guitar Noise Founder Paul Hackett
This post is all about me. I’m Paul Hackett and I officially started Guitar Noise back in 1999. I don’t usually do a lot of interviews, but recently I was contacted by the website Bandmo. They told me they want to interview “the most interesting bloggers/webmasters in the online music world.” How could I say no to flattery like that?
Here’s an excerpt from the...
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How To Get Started Making Your Own Rhythm Guitar... →
Would you like to be able to create your own awesome rhythm guitar riffs? Fact is, most guitarists struggle when trying to come up with ideas for rhythm guitar. This commonly occurs because these guitar players have not invested much time into the “rhythm side” of their guitar playing, instead focusing heavily on lead guitar. In order to gain the ability to create better rhythm guitar riffs, you...
June 2012
7 posts
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Four Things That Kill Your Guitar Playing Progress →
Do you have a hard time improving your guitar playing and wonder how to make your guitar practicing more effective than it is? Perhaps you have tried various things to achieve this goal, such as attempting to practice more or trying to inspire yourself to be more motivated to practice guitar with greater intensity. However you have probably discovered (just as other guitar players have found) that...
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Counterpoint Music Theory - Part 3 by Tom Serb →
In this part of Counterpoint things start getting a bit more complicated. Mainly because our musical choices can back us into corners.
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Tom Yoder – Twisted Circles and the Theory of... →
Twisted Circles and the Theory of Everything is the latest CD from Tom Yoder. The idea behind it is simple and intriguing enough – take a dozen classical pieces and play them on guitar. Not classical guitar pieces, mind you, but full orchestral pieces. And we’re not talking about a single guitar – there’s a guitar serving in place of each orchestral instrument. This is an incredibly ambitious...
May 2012
14 posts
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Which Guitar First? →
Guitar students (or their parents) will often ask which type of guitar to buy. For most beginners, it’s not even a question of brands or manufacturers. It’s whether to get an acoustic or an electric. While I have my personal preferences, I usually bring the question back to them: which guitar is going to make you want to play it? Then we go over the benefits of each.
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A Punk Primer →
by Tom Serb
This week my younger son came over with a rough cut of one of his bands (the Hollywood Nightmares) first CD, which should be released in May or June. They play “punk pop” music – which I’d characterize as tight vocal harmonies over driving guitar based punk progressions (think of the Beach Boys singing Ramones tunes and you’ll be pretty close to their sound).
That got me to thinking...
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Guitar Glossary - Guitar Terms and Definitions
With this glossary of guitar terms you can find the definition to most of the common guitar and music related terms you’ll come across. We’ve added links to lessons and more detailed content for many of the terms. To quickly search this page you can use the CTRL+F function on your keyboard. Please contact us about adding or improving any of these guitar definitions.
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Accent –...
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The Only Theory Lesson You’ll Ever Need – Part 3 →
Learn how to harmonize the major scale and create diatonic chords in the final part of Jim Bowley’s trilogy, “The Only Theory Lesson You’ll Ever Need.”
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How To Make A Lot Of Money In The Music Business →
To make money in the music business, you have to think about music as a business. Tom Hess provides you with insights on how to start making your musical monetary goals come true.
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Counterpoint – Part 2 →
After reading part one, we’ve now got the basic terminology of counterpoint behind us. We now move on to writing counterpoint melodies.
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Counterpoint – Part 1 →
Counterpoint is a style of music where you have multiple instruments doing different things at the same time, adding up to something bigger than its parts.
