Music Before the Money

I just came across a great site called Guitar Lesson World that gives a great background to anyone interested in learning the guitar.

Years ago we had to hike and bike across town to watch someone play “barre’ chords because we’d never seen them before. And when I learned finger-style guitar from a teacher in Vancouver I taught it to friends and other interested parties. That’s the way it was. You shared what you knew. Well, most of us did. I remember a guy who was taught the guitar to The Beatles’ Blackbird and would not teach it to us. So, we just watched and memorized it because he was vain and wanted to show off his prowess.

Now with YouTube and sites like Guitar Lesson World anyone can learn how to play first-rate with just a click. Can you imaging what this would have done for us in 1965 when we tried to memorize what George Harrison was playing on The Ed Sullivan Show?

So, for those of you who really want to be a guitarist this is a great start. However, no one can take the place of a committed teacher, someone who can set the pace of learning. To be self-taught you have to have self-discipline. In other words you have to possess what 75% of the planet does not have.

So, give it a click: Guitar lesson World.

There are hundreds of eulogies going out to Jeff Healey today and rightly so. The guy was a marvel. Now only did he learn how to play incredible guitar - including Hendrix - he did it while he was blind and on a guitar played on his lap. I know there have been many blind guitarists but his was an incredible feat. Jeff died of cancer yesterday at the age of 41, too young by any standards.

In addition Jeff could sing and write songs. Angel Eyes is still one of the greatest love songs ever written, a song which made him a superstar in Canada. However, it took a Patrick Swayze movie, Road House, to endear him to Americans. No one who ever saw the movie could forget him playing behind a chicken-wire barricade while a brawl was going on below him.

Many people didn’t know he was a great jazz aficionados one of my favorite radio programs was Jeff’s My Kind of Jazz where he interviewed jazz greats and introduced us to selections from his 35,000+ collection of 78 rpm jazz records going back to the rare original acetates. He said on one of his shows that, next to the guitar, the trumpet was his favorite instrument - and he could play that too.

But how did he start? It is said that he taught himself to play at age 4, a year after he lost his sight to retinoblastoma. Sitting with his guitar across his thighs he played more like a virtuoso piano player than a guitarist running his fingers like two spiders along the whole length of the guitar from bridge to machine head. In 1982, the legendary Stevie Ray Vaughn saw him playing in a Toronto club and that was his big break.

He never lived to see the release of his new album, Mess of Blues, which is due out later this month. It will be a welcome addition to my stack.

Before 1952 Gibson - ignoring the great Les Paul - put out only hollow body guitars which, sounded great but were terrible for feedback when the amplifiers were turned up. Les Paul’s signature guitar came out this year Gibson took the fight to Fender’s “slab guitar,” the Telecaster. The problem with the solid body was not a big one, but a quirk that all the solid-bodies had. It didn’t have the warmth of the hollow boy guitars that the jazz and country players loved.

The Gibson ES-335 was a middle ground guitar with a warmer tone than a solid body with little or no feed back. In 1958, in one swoop Gibson grabbed the market for rock, blues, and country. With a double-cutaway it gave greater access to the upper frets. In essence what the engineers did is take a block of wood thinner than the hollow-bodies and sandwich it between the front and back of a hollow body guitar. Thus they called the “Thinline” or “semi-hollow.”

There have been many models of the ES-300 series featuring:

1. Coil Tap pickup switch: to switch from single to double coil.
2. Bigsby tailpiece (in place of the standard Gibson Vibrola trapeze tail vibrato)
3. Stereo
4. Various style of F-holes

I really liked the 12 string version of the ES-335 because it had a deeper, warmer sound than the other 12 string electrics (which came out fast and furious after The Beatles movie, “A Hard Days’ Night” made the 12 string Rickenbacker electric popular)

Since Roger McGuinn was a diehard Rickenbacker player David Crosby used the Gibson 12 string for live performances and brought it out again for the Byrds reunion album in 1973.

This is definitely one I would like to own!

For more information on this and other Gibson guitars visit out pal Dom at Vintage Gibson Guitars

A capo is a device placed on a on a guitar neck to shorten the strings and raise the pitch for as many frets up as you place the capo. It is short for the Italian term capotasto which means “head of fretboard.”Each fret on the guitar represents a half-tone. So if you put a capo on the 1st fret all of the open strings will sound a half step higher than the usual pitch.

1. Neck Stress

For 12-string guitars many manufacturers suggest that the guitar be tune lower and a capo put on to raise the strings to pitch. This is because the strain on the neck goes up exponentially with each note raised.

2. Tonality

A second use for the capo is to change the quality of the sound. For example, a G - chord played two frets up will be an A -chord but will have a different tonality than the standard A. The capo works especially well for replacing barre chords, like a B (in which the index finger is used as a de facto capo, thus taking away its use for playing notes) which do not have the ring of open chords.

3. Change Key

This is the most common use for a capo especially amongst novices who have a limited knowledge of playing full chords in other positions. More experienced players will do it for this plus the added bonus of greater tonality. or example, a standard D chord is without a bass root and the next bass note is the 5th, which is an A. If you capo the neck at the second fret the full C - chord becomes a D with more full sound

Gordon Lightfoot used the capo for both his 6 and 12 sting guitars. He like singing in E and Ab so, for example, in Long Way Back Home he raised the capo up 2 frets to give the D-positioned E chord a bright sound and then in The Gypsy raised it 3 frets so he could sing in Ab while playing in E-position.

Much like the piano soundboard the biggest problem in caring for a high quality guitar is the properties of the wood which cause it to shrink or expand with changes in humidity. For many such guitars this can lead to expensive repairs.

Low humidity is the biggest problem for guitar care in many part of North America. The water and oils in the wood are slowly leached out leaving the instrument brittle. In most cases the result of this dryness is cracking on the top, especially leading to the sound hole.

Cheap Guitars Not Affected by Humidity

This tendency for cracking in high-end guitars is not prevalent in cheaper guitars because the tops are made of plywood. Although it offers a very blase sound plywood is not affected by changes in humidity. This is because they are made with a sandwich of wood veneers in which the grains in the middle layer run perpendicular to the top and bottom layer giving it strength and durability.

Too much moisture causes”bloating” in the back of solid wood guitars. This can lead to sloppy sound caused by glue joints coming loose in response to the expansion of the wood. The glue deteriorates causing the bracing to come loose..

Ways to Keep Humidity Constant

• 1. Room Temperature: n the winter a good way is too to keep the room temperature lower: Heat gets rid of humidity.
• 2. Plants: Having lush plants in the room is like having natural humidifiers.
• 3. Furnace Humidifier: an addition to the furnace puts constant humidity throughout the whole home.
• 4. Room Humidifier: Puts a fine spray into the air. Use distilled water to prevent airborne distillates. These particles may cause allergy flare-ups.
• 5. Guitar Body Humidifiers.

“Dampit” is a device which can be placed inside a guitar to release moisture directly inside the instrument. This is a direct way to provide humidity and is basically a wet sponge inside a tube. The tube is perforated with small holes to release the water into the body of the guitar slowly.

Many musicians do not like the way the Dampit moves around and would rather use a wet sponge in a plastic container inside the guitar case.