I came across an article the other day called Beatles Guitar Chords – A Great Way to Teach Yourself Guitar.  I found it to be a pretty interesting read.  Here’s a little bit of it.

Learning The Beatles guitar chords is an excellent way to teach yourself guitar. Love them or hate them, the music of the The Beatles has endured and stayed relevant for more than 40 years for a very good reason.

Their early sound tipped conventional music of the time on its head and the The Beatles’ style continued to evolve throughout their careers. While known for their faultless vocal harmonies, the musical ideas and techniques that the The Beatles used were filled with color and were the envy of many a rival. This is the reason that their music remains relevant today.

When learning any instrument it can be difficult to stay motivated long enough to improve beyond beginner level. I taught myself guitar as a teenager by listening and playing along with the music I enjoyed. For me, the music of the The Beatles opened up a whole new world of ideas and techniques, and of course The Beatles guitar chords have been reused by musicians ever since. Playing along with The Beatles songs absolutely took my guitar playing ability to a new level and years later I can still discover something new as I play along with some of my favourite albums.

To read the rest of the article, click HERE

It actually made me think back to how I learned how to play guitar.

I’m not disagreeing with the article… playing along with the Beatles would be a great way to learn to play.  I am, though, going to take it a step further and say that playing along with ANY of your favorites would be a great way to learn to play.

When I was first learning the guitar, I was into bands like Green Day (before they got pouty and over-political) Everclear, and Soundgarden.  I learned a lot about playing the guitar by putting a CD player right next to my guitar amp and strumming along to the best of my ability.  It taught me how to switch chords quickly, and it taught me about playing to a rhythm.

But not only that… it made learning fun.  I was trying to get good enough to play songs that I enjoyed playing.

I also used the same idea to learn to play the bass, and a couple years later, even the drums and the piano.  My favorite musicians taught me how to play rock music.

Maybe playing along with your favorite CDs will give you a boost in the right direction.

I play several instruments, but I will always consider myself a “guitar player”.  I’m always on the search for better ways to fill out my sound when I’m playing guitar, and for ways to create sounds that are different from typical three-note chords.

Because of this, I have really grown to love open chords.

I found an article on the web on this topic, and I thought I’d share it with you guys.  It’s called “10 Ways To Play The Most Beautiful Open Chords”.  Here’s an excerpt:

A great way to make your chord progressions and songs sound awesome is to use open chord shapes.I always love to use these chords to add some flavor to my chord progressions. One of my favorite chords is Fsus2.

That chord has got the whole package for me. It’s sounds beautiful, gentle, tight, cool and rough at the same time.

When you move an open chord up the neck the name of the chord changes and the chord gets extended with 1 or 2 notes. This way you can get beautiful sounds.

While you can play barre chords at every fret on the fingerboard, open chords can only be played at certain frets. If you play them at the right frets they sound amazing, if you don’t… well they just sound terrible. So be careful.

The rest of the article goes on to explain how to play different open chord movable shapes.  If you’re a guitar player, you should definitely check it out.

To read the rest of the article, click HERE.

In March of 2002 I bought a Behringer V-Amp.  At that point I had never really seriously used any kind of amp modeler before, other than just playing around with them at music stores here and there, and trying out Jim’s on one recording that our band Force That Binds had done.  The night I got it, I planted myself in front of whatever small digital recorder I was using at the time (I think it was the now defunct Boss BR-532) and seeing what kinds of crazy sounds I could come up with.

Obviously it was the more standard sounds that I would find more useful on an every day basis (I still use the V-amp for most of my guitar recording), but what I really wanted to do was check out some of the wilder stuff.

I spent most of the evening trying out the crazy over-phased or over-flanged sounds, and I discovered something kind of cool.

Sometimes the effects that you’re playing with can inspire a song just because of the way they sound.

I ended up creating a very simple instrumental piece just because of what the effects brought into my mind.

The song is called State Of Mind.

The point of this isn’t to show off how “great” the song is, because I know that it’s a very simple and straightforward piece.  The idea that you should take away, however, is that sometimes fooling around with effects that you might never use on a regular basis can lead to song ideas.

Be willing to listen for the inspiration.

Here’s just a quick little video for you today showing off some creative musicianship.

This lady not only plays the guitar upside down, she’s so incredibly casual about it, too… almost like she barely knows she’s doing it!  I love it!

Most of us tend to think about vocal parts in a straight forward way.  If you write rock or country music, you think about adding singing parts.  If you write rap music, you think about adding rapping.

But what if there were more directions you could take with your music?  I don’t mean on every song… or even for a whole song… but what if you could come up with some things that were slightly outside the box to make your songs more interesting?

Other thoughts to consider about vocal parts

-Effects can be our friends as we’re trying to be creative. Vocals that sound bland on their own might sound cool with delays, distortion, phasing, wah effects, choruses, vibrato, tremelo, etc, etc, etc.  How about running them through a VST effect?  Or artificially doubling them?  Or time stretching them?  Or artificially changing their pitch?  Any tweak like that can change the texture and feel of the vocals, and might give you an interesting sound.

-Turning vocals backwards can lead to interesting things. Turning them backwards and adding reverb or delay, then turning them back to the original way can lead to cool creepy effects.  That effect is called Reverse Reverb.  You’ve probably heard it done on snare drums back in the 80s.

-Try recording reversed vocals that will make sense when they’re reversed. Meaning…. Let’s say you wanted to say the phrase “It’s time to rock”.  Record yourself saying the phrase.  Turn it backwards.  Try to “say it” backwards the best you can, learning all the different sounds as if they are new words.  Record yourself again, this time trying to say the “new words”.  When you flip the new recording backwards, hopefully it’ll sound a lot like the original phrase…. but it will create a unique effect.

-You don’t have to stay serious in everything you do. A funny song is just as much “music” as a serious song.  Be willing to get crazy from time to time.  It’s a GREAT way to get your mind thinking outside the box.

-Not everything has to make sense. Obviously if you wrote “jibberish” in everything that we did, it would get tiresome, but for artistic purposes if it gets us going we should go for it.  I mean, rock n roll spent the better part of a decade singing stuff about girls named “Rama Lama Ding Dong“, or singing “Wop Bop a Loo Bop“. Even Kid Rock got famous by singing “Bawitabade bang de dang diggy diggy diggy said the diggy said up jump the diggy”.  And I’ve never understood a word of any Bush song.

-Sample Yourself! Have you ever recorded other vocalists doing other songs?  Have you recorded yourself doing other songs?  Sample them!  Have you ever shot video at a birthday party, holiday, or just hanging out with friends?  Sample the audio!  See what you can reuse in new and creative ways.

-Mix It Up! You don’t have to stick with traditional arrangements when it comes to writing lyrics.  Perhaps we want to write a song that has a guitar melody for the verses, then some kind of vocals for the choruses and bridge.  Maybe you want to write a song that is just a vocal verse, a musical bridge, then the song ends.  You can’t let traditional styles hold us back.

A while back me and Jim (James Blair who has some articles published on this site) came up with a huge list of random ideas to provide inspiration for new songs, riffs, etc.  We ended up with 50 of these random ideas, so I thought I’d share them with you.  I’m going to break them up into 5 different groups of 10.  The next 5 parts will start following  (one at a time) over the course of the next several days.

50 Ideas For Coming Up With New Musical Ideas

1. Try writing in different time signatures.  Write in 5/4 or 11/4 or something like that.  Maybe even take some time to set up some drum loops in some odd signatures before hand so that you have something to work with.

2. Try switching time signatures in songs.  For example:   5/4 in the verse, 7/4 in the chorus

3. Try switching tempos in the middle of a song.  For example:  Take a fast song with fast verses and fast choruses, and make the bridge 30 bpm slower.

4. Try switching time signatures AND tempo.  My dad has a song that the chorus and the first half of the verse is a slow ¾  song, but the second half of the verse is a fast 4/4 section, and it sounds pretty cool.

5. Step outside your comfort zone.  For example, try writing a heavy sounding rock song, but don’t use any guitars.  Force yourself to make a dark heavy sound with only keys and drums.

6. Try mixing up genres.  Dark rock guitars with a choir of vocals.  Country music with techno vocal samples.  Iowegian Death Polka.  Surf Lounge Punk Funk.

7. Write about everything.  Write a song about your dog.  Write a song about an old TV show.  Write a song about a character in a book.  Write about a super hero.

8. Try to put nontraditional sounds in a traditional song.  Write a rock song, but use a ukulele for the main riff with all the other traditional rock instruments.

9. Write often and write a lot.  Try to write 5 1-minute songs in one night, all with vocals of some kind.  Try to do that 3 days in a row. Make them all very different.

10. Stretch yourself by writing stretched out songs.  Try writing an 8 minute song with lots of interesting parts.

…stay tuned for parts 2 through 5

Recently I’ve been interested in playing around with guitar sounds.  I linked to a couple YouTube videos about making your guitar sound like a Sitar:  One for ACOUSTIC guitar, and one for ELECTRIC guitar

Today we’ll look at a video that offers an easy way to make your guitar sound like a banjo.

…And as a bonus, he shows how to get a cool Church Bell effect as well!

Don’t always be so quick to ignore mistakes that you make when you are playing music.  Sometimes those mistakes can lead to something that you’ll end up liking when you’re finished.

I’ll give you an example.

My wife is a piano player, and a much better one than me.  A couple summers ago she decided she wanted to take some lessons to learn a different style, just as an addition to her musical tool box.  The style she was learning was a chord-based technique, but she was learning to walk through chords in a more arpeggiated fashion than what she usually does.

I learn most of my musical technique really from looking over the shoulders of others.  That’s how I’ve picked up most of my guitar technique, most of my bass playing technique, and almost all of my piano playing and drumming technique.  With my wife taking lessons I saw an opportunity for myself to learn some new things as well.  I would occasionally sit in the room with her as she practiced, and she would show me what she was working on any time she started a new song.

One day when she wasn’t around I decided to try the technique myself.  I got my hands in the wrong position and hit some wrong notes, but I loved the sound of what I did.  It was a mistake, but that mistake inspired me to write a song

Here’s  the song if you’re interested.  It’s not elaborate by any means, but I love how it turned out.

This song is called “A New Beginning”

So, if you’re playing something new and you make a mistake, don’t ignore that mistake right away.  You might end up stumbling across something that inspires a new song.

NOTE:  This is something that I wrote a little over a year ago regarding getting started with writing music with BHP.  At the time we had just began an official “schedule” of writing, and had just recently decided to become a permanent songwriting trio.  We were just starting our batch of songs that became our CD called “The Door“, and we had just come off finishing a disc for the 2009 RPM Challenge called “Fallen They Be“.   I think the topic I talked about in this article will be of some interest to the readers of this blog.

•March 18, 2009

A couple days ago  I showed you a video on how to make your acoustic guitar sound like a sitar.

Here’s a video about a different technique used to make your ELECTRIC guitar sound like a sitar.