Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Radio & Music >

Sequel to the guitar advice thread: Help me Rock..

Page: 1(2)

18:31 / 19.07.02

Eh voila: Line 6 Bass POD for £239 from Digital Village, who I reckon are pretty good.

18:57 / 19.07.02

Get "Neverminmd" Guitar tab edition same for "Definitely Maybe" Both good tunes, both teach "rockin' out" basic VERY well, both fairly simple (relative). And all goodwilled.

And no offense to meme bugggerer but smels like teen spirit aint too hard, couple of power cords, bit of fingering on samll e and 'yer there, solo aside.

Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero

19:23 / 19.07.02

You know, you could just take a guitar class at a local community college and learn to read music.

[retreats from boos and thrown garbage]

Okay! Okay! Whatever. But it'll help a lot, I promise.

20:17 / 20.07.02

I can read music. My major problem is I don't know why it fits in with the fret. And can people tell me if I should be plucking certain stings with certain fingers, if I really have to use my little finger on the fret board and just where the fuck my right thumb goes?!

And do the ends of my fingers stop going purple and my little finger limp soon? Cos that bit totally blows...

23:45 / 20.07.02

excellent! digital village have a website! thanks for the link, paleface.

incidentally, could I just take a moment to mention that the Sound On Sound readers ads are a total godsend when you're trying to scrape some kit together?

and as for Smells Like Teen Spirit being easy- well yeah, if you just mean playing the chords. But in terms of playing the song... well, let's just say I've seen it murdered in public enough to know that it isn't as easy as it looks. It's a Zen thing. Or possibly a smack thing.

08:43 / 21.07.02

Yes. SOS reader ads good - lots of them, free to post online, and because it's a specialist mag it's far less dodgy and you're less likely to be ripped off than buying from say, ebay or Loot. Almost all my gear came from SOS ads.

Though DV have a website, it's always worth ringing them up - they've now got a policy, as this months SOS demonstrates, of not pricing stuff in magazine adverts. Because they say they'll pricematch; the website lists what they'd reckon is right, but if you can prove it's cheaper, they'll sell it to you cheaper. Which is good of them.

17:56 / 21.07.02

Can someone give me scales and so forth and other technical things to point me in the right direction (it'll be Tuesday before I can get a book about it, which seems near, ture, but I wanna get started NOW!) because playing Hey ove rna d over again is all very well but I get the feeling it won't help me one jot in the long run.

And crabbing is driving me up the fucking wall.

Nelson Evergreen

00:57 / 22.07.02

I can't play bass 'correctly' at all, so you shouldn't listen to anything I say.

My right thumb has always felt perfectly at home on the E string, with forefinger and index finger whoring themselves around the others. Jazz musicians express horror at such deviance, along with wonderment at how creamy and fluid it can sound. Of course, it's standard fingering if you're playing a six string guitar, but you don't see many bass types employing it; only Paul McCartney springs tweely to mind. Maybe it's an unconscious thing that happens with people who learnt on six strings before moving to four. And maybe it's a dreadful way to play if you're starting on the bass from scratch..?

07:59 / 22.07.02

Actually, Nelson, that's how I started, because my very first 'bass' was an acoustic guitar with the top two strings removed, and the rest detuned an octave, so I played it with that kind of fingerstyle. And it does sound groovy. Always worth knowing all the techniques though... thumb/fingers, two finger, pick, etc, etc...

Nelson Evergreen

22:33 / 22.07.02

...violin bow, teeth, and so on. Yeah, definitely. Oh lord, I can feel a recommendation coming on: James Jamerson, Motown's in-house session bassist; played on loads of the hits but the sound quality of the time doesn't always do him proud. Not so on Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On"... apart from the fact that it's a fantastic record in itself, the album's worth listening to purely for Jamerson's bass playing, which is an example to us all from start to finish, and funky as fuck to boot. Marvin gave him an even bigger high five than God in the sleevenotes. Anyone who wants to play bass should give this guy a listen.

Oh, and Rizla: I'm on leave from The Rock at present, so can't really offer any advice, but feel free to drop me a line if you get around to your 'Acid Campfire' phase anytime soon.

15:17 / 30.07.02

Assuming this is our all purpose muso-to-beginner advice thread, can anyone recommend some good guitar tab websites?

I mean, I've checked all the big one's Yahoo came up with and got myself a load of Ramones and some Husker Du to practice, but I can't find anything much in the way of Smog or Bikini Kill..

17:33 / 30.07.02

Hmn.

Remember, in the world of guitar tab, nothing beats page after page of nu-metal tabs, all beginning with the immortal line "DROP D TUNING!".

mxtabs isn't too bad; other than that, look for fan-sites rather than catch-all tab sites; for instance, Sweet Adeline has probably the best Elliott Smith tabs around. The OLGA archive, which is pretty damn big, can be accessed through Harmony Central; click "Tablature" and have a browse - it's quite big. I recommend getting your files from the NL (Netherlands) server, incidentally.

Does that help?

08:39 / 19.05.07

Bumpin' this.

C'mon you guitar players, come out of the shadows. There's gotta be a couple of dozen guitar players around, surely, so I thought this could do with being brought back from the dead. With the amount of creative people around, I thought a guitar thread would be something seen around here quite a bit more too...

So in an effort to start the thread moving again : I've been playing on and off for 10 years now, and have just been re-inspired to start spending more time playing so I can consider myself actually able to play the instrument. I've never had any lessons so it's been mainly tabs, playing by ear, playing my own tunes and being inspired by other guitar players I've met, and I'm mainly practising solo's and learning to find the right notes for each string, so I can know where to jump to if I want to move up and down the guitar better. It looks like it's finally starting to come together too, so that's cool. As with most things, it seems to be about being inspired enough to actually do it in the firstplace, and the time and effort you're willing to put into it that decides on how well things go, then once you get into it and can riff around better, it no longer feels like a chore practising, so things get a lot cooler. In fact they get fucking immensely cooler if you stick at it long enough and progress, obviously.

As for inspiration, well......there's been a lot of bands that have inspired me over the years, but to look for what makes me play in the way I do at the moment, I'd say bands like The Melvins, Mudhoney, QOTSA, Soundgarden, Primal Scream, Slayer, NIN, Tool, Black Flag, The Vines, Meshuggah, Pantera, Muse and The Sex Pistols sums up a decent part of it. The Arctic Monkeys influenced me recently aswell, by making me like their tunes so much that I started playing again, and that was a huge help.

So that's me done, what about you! Having fun with it? Are you self-taught or did you/do you have lessons? Are you stuck with anything in particular at the moment, or are you in a band, doing gigs, and riffing like there's no tomorrow? And of course : what type of music do you like playing, and what inspires you?

09:58 / 19.05.07

I am fairly mortified to see this thread resurrected, and upon reading my five-years-ago self badmouthing Teenage Fanclub's guitar sound even in passing. Or indeed for inadvertantly comparing my adolescent thrashing around on a cheapo strat copy with the Fanclub's chordic invocations of Thee Cosmic Perfection.

I hereby volunteer to cut my arms off and live in a lake, so as to guarantee that an electric guitar will never again come into contact with my irredeemably pagan, knuckleheaded self.

10:26 / 19.05.07

Woops. Maybe I should've started a new one? I thought I'd get 'we alreddeh have teh threds for this' if I did, so I did a thread necro instead. I could always start a new one and let this sink if needed though.

Dark side of the Moonfrog1

09:05 / 20.05.07

I can't believe this thread got to two pages and nobody suggested "turning it up to 11!"

That saddens me...

10:40 / 20.05.07

I've been playing for 8 months now. Been learning on my dad's old, busted up Palmer acoustic-electric that he found gathering dust in his attic. The things an absolute bitch to play; it has a lot of action (I think that's what it's called) i.e. its strings are far too far away from the fretboard to be comfortable, and its neck seems really bulky. As a result playing lots of barre chords on the cantankerous old beast gives me hand cramps pretty quick.

For all that though learning on it has been incredibly beneficial; I bought a new fangled (relatively cheap) Cort acoustic and playing on it is like taking off my shackles; in comparison it feels so light and is a lot easier to make all those bitchy barre 7ths ring true.

I’ve been learning mostly from guitar tabs of songs I like, although these generally sound ok it quite often feels like I’m only making a shabby approximation to the original song’s strumming pattern. For that reason I really like learning fingerpicking tracks because it’s easier to make them sound identical. Anyone got any advice on how to master and mimic another person’s strumming pattern?

Brigade du jour

21:23 / 20.05.07

Turn up to eleven! Better late than never ...

I've been playing for about ten years as well, but haven't yet got much past Oasis, but I will offer two small pieces of advice:

1. Don't worry about your left-hand fingertips hurting like fucking hell - it does pass and you end up with the ability to crush an apple in five seconds.

2. If you're left-handed and play right-handed you'll probably be capable of both wicked scratchy Mayfieldesque and doom-laden Sabbath-style rhythm guitar due to your natural limitations on the fingerstyle front.

07:32 / 21.05.07

All that sitting around in bedrooms 'honing your technique' is all very well and good, but the best way to learn guitar/bass/drums/peruvian-noseflute is thus:

1. find a bunch of other people who want to make a racket

2. meet up in garage/bedrooms/shed/rehearsal-space with some beers

3. turn up to 11.

before you know it, YOUR PLAYING GUITAR!!!!!
After all, hours spent learning modes/hammer-ons/tantric-myxalydian-runs dont mean shit if you cant play in time with other people. Plus its way more fun.

11:46 / 25.05.07

I've been playing for about fourteen/fifteen years now, and I've been regularly gigging for the last six. As you can imagine I've acquired a reasonable degree of competency by now - if I hadn't, it would probably be time to stop.

The most important thing is to PLAY AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. It doesn't matter if the results are any good or not, you're not going to get any better if you don't play. This means playing when you're drunk, playing when you're sick, playing when you are bored at your friend's house and you've spotted a guitar in the corner.......don't be put off jamming either, just because some of the people in the room might appear to be better than you. I know players who can play faster than (insert name of favourite eighties widdler here) but can't improvise to save their life. If you feel at a lose end whilst jamming, just play the simplest riff possible - this will give the other musicians chance to get in the groove and they will love you forever for it.

11:59 / 25.05.07

All that sitting around in bedrooms 'honing your technique' is all very well and good, but the best way to learn guitar/bass/drums/peruvian-noseflute is thus:

1. find a bunch of other people who want to make a racket

2. meet up in garage/bedrooms/shed/rehearsal-space with some beers

3. turn up to 11.

before you know it, YOUR PLAYING GUITAR!!!!!

Yeah, playing guitar REALLY BADLY and completely out of key/time with the others, who can't hear themselves on account of your god-awful cacophony and are probably about to stop proceedings and tell you to go home and get some fucking practice! : D

Seriously though, you do have a point: learning to play well with other people is a BIG part of getting to grips with music, and something that I in particular really wish I'm got some serious practice at earlier on, because it would probably make me suck less.

But on the other hand, turning up to practice/rehearsal without practicing in advance and with no particular idea of what you're gonna do and relying on, like, rock n' roll inspiration maan, will 9 times out of 10 result in REALLY SHITTY MUSIC.

12:08 / 25.05.07

yeah, i know what you mean. Turning up to a rehearsal with no idea probably wouldnt work out very well, but rather than have 'rehearsals' in expensive studios and stuff, just get a bunch of people near to your level who (and this is most important) are into the same stuff as you, go round each others house of an evening, have some beers and start of by learning Louie Louie! just casual like.

12:31 / 25.05.07

Yeah, that's my general plan usually too.

I find "Louie Louie" generally falls down though cos nobody in the world knows the words.

13:29 / 25.05.07

Exactly! even the CIA couldnt decipher those lyrics! so who's gonna tell you you're doing em wrong?

Page: 1(2)