Play Great Guitar: Brilliant Ideas for Getting More Out of Your Six-string (52 Brilliant Ideas)
Language: English
Pages: 238
ISBN: 1905940564
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Packed with expert advice for getting more out of your hobby, plus over 25 original compositions to try yourself, Play great guitar is guaranteed to give you plenty of inspiring ideas and more practical skills so you can improve your playing and enjoy your guitar even more.
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successful their records added orchestral parts from strings and horns and extra percussion. 28 Two notes from one It’s 3 a.m. In the lounge bar the barman sets you up another drink. There’s no sign of her. You sigh, grab your guitar and play … octaves! This is the fastest route to a little jazz sophistication. Take a tune, or just improvise, but play octaves instead of single notes. Result? Cool sounds and firmer fretting. A MUSICAL SPAN * * * An octave is the note twelve
and is held by the first and third fingers. The second is when they are three strings apart and fretted by the first finger and the fourth finger. The former is easier to move about. There are also non-movable octaves involving the open strings, where only one note in the octave is fretted, the open string giving the other. This works with the notes E, A, D, G and B. Octaves naturally form part of guitar chords as notes are doubled up. If you take an ordinary E chord it contains two octaves on E
enjoying a higher profile of late owing to the fact that Sting of The Police recently made an album about the Elizabethan lutenist and songwriter John Dowland, Songs From The Labyrinth, which featured many of Dowland’s lute songs. Sting is not the first person in the rock field to develop an interest in the lute. In the early 1970s Jan Akkerman of Dutch band Focus took up the lute, and included a charming lute piece of his own on the band’s Focus III album, called ‘Elspeth of Nottingham’. The
lute also found an important champion in the classical guitarist Julian Bream who recorded several albums of lute music (albeit with a classical guitar sensibility) in the 1970s, including The Woods So Wild. Today, there are many expert and authentic players such as Paul O’Dette. The lute has a delicate sound which does not project like the guitar. This is despite the fact that its strings (except the highest) are doubled (known as ‘courses’), and, as with a 12-string guitar, the fingers fret
any free fingers. A capo lets you get more out of a single open tuning (see Idea 35) by raising its pitch to different keys. Q Does it matter what sort of capo I get? A Most capos fit most necks but a curved neck will mean a straight capo won’t make good contact with the top and bottom Es at the same time. If you want to capo a 12-string or nylon-strung guitar, check the capo copes with the wider neck. Second, how quick a change do you need to make and how critical is tuning stability? If you
