Warm up sheet

Here’s a sheet I made to help me warm up / practice guitar. It’s got a circle of fifths, a list of all possible combinations you can use your fingers and a diagram showing the spacing and harmonised chords of the major and harmonic/melodic minor scales.

I like to use the circle of fifths for practicing new chord shapes, scales and arpeggios – it forces you to jump around the fretboard a bit. The finger combinations is a good chromatic exercise for warming up and forces you to use finger combinations you might not be used to. The harmonised scales are good for practicing arpeggios and chords. It also lets you know which chords go well together and gives ideas for interesting ways to use arpeggios over chords. The intervals are good for one string scales.

I got the idea for the finger combinations form Guthrie Govans ‘Creative Techniques’ series. A great series of books! Thanks to Lucy for getting the layout right!

Hope it helps!

Warm up sheet I created.

GNU Solfege

I’ve been using GNU Solfege (found here) for over a month now. It’s a free piece of software designed to train the users’ ears and voice at being able to recognise and sing intervals, aswell as being able to recognise chords, written intervals, and written scales, amongst other things.

Note: To use on OSX, you have to have X11 installed, which can be found on your install discs.

I’ve mainly used the program to train my ears with ascending and descending melodic intervals (intervals where the notes are played one at a time) and, more recently, to train myself to be able to sing intervals (being able to sing an interval helps you recognise an interval, aswell as allowing you to sing slightly more intune). It has a few nice features, like keeping track of the users’ mistakes, allowing the user to track their progress; and automatically playing the next interval, saving some button clicking.

It also has features that will display the current interval being played, on score, a keyboard and a fretboard – I’ve been displaying it on a fretboard to train myself to be able to recognise an interval and find it on my guitar. Of course, this means you could cheat, but you’d only be cheating yourself .

However, one feature I would like would be for Solfege to play any diatonic interval (including some compound intervals) – currently the user selects two intervals from a list (e.g. fourths and fifths, major and minor seconds, e.t.c.) and Solfege plays one back and asks you which it is, so the user has to navigate a lot of menus if they want to test themselves on all the intervals available.

I’ve only covered the main features that I use here, but Solfege offers many more, which can be found on the website: http://www.solfege.org/

I’ve found this software very, very useful, and according to my stats I’m improving.

8/10 – very useful, but not quite perfect.

 

Update 11.11.10 Under Misc -> Configure Yourself -> Melodic Intervals the user can choose which ascending and descending diatonic intervals they wish to train themselves on. So it does have everything!

So Stu Ham came into BIMM today to give an hour and a half masterclass. He played some badass bass and answered questions and told us some funny stories, and gave some good advice.

When asked “If you could go back to when you were 18 and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?”, he replied, “Yoga.”. He went on to talk about how a good posture is vital to playing to avoid injuries (something I’ve learnt from my golfers elbow), and how staying relaxed when playing is important – you shouldn’t be straining yourself, and yoga is good to relax your muscles and get used to a good posture. Little breathing exercises to relax yourself, etc.

Other advice he had, which I thought was ace, was to go home and dismantle our instruments. Just unscrew the neck and put it back on again (obviously, after slackening the strings). Learn how to adjust and remove/replace each little thing on your guitar. He made an analogy with US Marines having to be able to dismantle an re-assemble their weapons in the dark. I liked this, especially as learning to do the little jobs on a guitar saves you paying someone else to do them! Whether or not I’d dismantle my guitar unecesarilly is another question…

When asked on how to learnt to play fast, he replied with (and I paraphrase) “Learn to play slowly. You can play a million notes quickly and get away with poor technique, but when you play them slowly, you have to conisder the attack, dynamics and quality of each note. Learn to play accurately slowly, and speed will come with time.”. In light of this, I might do slightly less brutal metronome practice in the future! Which probably also aid with avoiding injuries.

I think that was the best bits of what he had to say. He played some pretty awesome tuff to us too. I asked him if he had any advice on applying to Berklee (which he attended) and he said to be as prepared as possible. Can’t argue with that! Apparently the question warrented a handshake, and it was nice to see he didn’t have some girly, limp shake like some people do.

Overall, a nice guy, a fantastic musician, and a great performer!

The guitar, on score.

One problem I found when I started to look at how the guitar is represented on sheet music is, where do the notes go? If you’re not sure about which pitches are represented where on score, then you may want to brush up before reading the rest of this post!

First, it’s worth noting two things:

1. All pitches on the guitar are written using the treble clef.
2. All pitches on the guitar are written an octave higher than they sound.

Sidenote: Due to point 2, the guitar is a ‘transposing instrument’, i.e. you have to transpose the written pitch before you play it. However, as it’s just an octave, this is easy and not a consideration for most players, but is important when composing for instruments covering different octaves.

The open strings can be represented as follows (ignore the time signature for now), from the low E to the high E:

Going from the lowest note on a standard (six strings, 24 frets) guitar (open low E), to the highest (fret 24 on the high E), we can see the standard guitar covers four octaves:

Now, where you play these notes on a guitar is more a matter of choice, and convenience depending on the piece being played, as the guitar has the ability to play the same pitch in different places, as demonstrated with this tab:

Note: The above pitches aren’t quite exactly the same. This is to do with equal and true temperament, which I’ll go through another time.

That’s all for now, enjoy!