My Friend Chris Standring just emailed me that his new CD and specifically the title single is Numero Uno on Billboard.

Chris is a great jazz guitarist and a great guitar teacher. This is his 6th CD and now he is publishing through his own record company Ultimate Vibe Recordings.

Chris states “I wanted to take a major left turn musically on this album and as soon as I started messing around with orchestral samples, the drive to realize this project became much bigger than me.”

You can hear parts of each track on his Blue Bolero website. Click Here

Chris has also done something quite different. He has also included a guitar course around the tracks on Blue Bolero. As I stated Chris is an excellent guitar teacher so if you want to improve your guitar playing you might want to check it out – GO HERE NOW.

Hey there!

In this lesson we will look at the opening chords for the “Smoke on the Water” song by the British rock band Deep Purple. Everyone who plays electric or even acoustic guitar had played it at some point in life, testifying to the incredible popularity of the song.  First released on the album Machine Head in 1972, the song ranked number 426 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. What made it so famous are its simplicity and its central theme. The song starts out with the actual riff played by Ritchie Blackmore, later to be joined by hi-hat and distorted organ, drums, and eventually bass guitar and vocals.

Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple

The song has a story behind it, well reflected in the name of the song. On the 4^th of December 1971 Deep Purple had decided to record in Montreux, Switzerland using a mobile studio at the entertainment complex of the Montreux Casino.  The night before the recording session, the infamous Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention had a concert in the theater of the casino.  In the middle of performance, someone fired a flare gun and the place quickly caught fire. The fire had a devastating effect, destroying the entire complex. The title of the song came from the members of the band; watching smoke rising over the water of Lake Geneva which came from the burning of casino complex.

This song is so popular among beginner guitarists, but as Blackmore himself demonstrated it is now over two generations of guitarists that do so improperly. It is not played in fifths as most guitarists do, but in all fourths. A special charm adds playing it through an overdriven amp using your fingers. Note, that you don’t have to play rock only using pick. Richie Blackmore or Jeff Back for that matter who were able to get very hard rock sounds using only their fingers.

So here you have the riff. Please note the ghost notes (dead notes, which still have to be struck but muted to such a degree that they would only produce a percussive sound).

Here’s the actual riff:

And finally, listen to the playback of this riff and watch Deep Purple perform live to get the right rhythm and feel. Good luck!

smoke_on_the_water_ver6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7dQ8t6skTM

B.B. King Biography

Is there anyone who wouldn’t know the one and only king of the blues, B.B. King?

His visual image and his guitar Lucille has become iconic, while his powerful singing and unparalleled in emotion vibrato has changed the would of guitar playing. I wanted to share in this post some of the interesting facts of B.B.’s biography that may inspire you pick up your axe more often.

Born September 16, 1925 on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Riley B. King is without any doubt one of the most influential guitarists of all time,  ranked by the Rolling Stone magazine #3 on its list of the “100 greatest guitarists of all time.  It was him who joined the raw blues licks with a cleaner and more concise approach of the jazz players, such as Charlie christian and Django Reinhardt, whom B.B King greatly admired. It was him who introduced fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato, the path which virtually every electric blues guitarist has since followed.

Since the age of eight he worked on plantation  where he was paid 35 cents for each hundred pounds of cotton he picked. At age 14 he bought his first guitar – three-quarter-sized Stella for $15.00. As that was his monthly salary he paid a deposit of seven dollars and fifty cents the first month and the balance the following month. His next guitar was bought with a help of his cousin, and it was an acoustic Gibson to which he later fitted a DeArmond pick-up. At some point he also had an early Fender Telecaster, but opted for Gibson ES-335. Ever since King played a custom-built Gibson based on ES-335 design but with a closed body to reduce the amount of feedback. Prior to that B.B. had stuffed the insides of his 335s with towels to overcome this problem. And his first choice for strings and amplification also turns out to be Gibson.

Moving from being a tractor driver to being a disk jokey at the local radio station WDIA, where he gained his nickname “Beale Street Blues Boy”, later transformed to “B.B.” There he played guitar between the shows with visiting jazz and blues musicians and it was there that he first met T-Bone Walker. As King states,”From the moment I had heard him for the first time, I knew I would have to have an electric guitar myself!”.

So many of King’s tunes entered the Hall of Fame. His first successful hits were “Woke Up This Morning”, “Three O’Clock Blues” and “Sweet Little Angel”. King won a Grammy for a tune called “The Thrill Is Gone” and was shortly inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. From the 1980s and onward King breaks the record appearing on numerous television shows and performing well over 300 nights a year. In 1988, King reaches a new generation of fans with his single “When Love Comes to Town”, co-working with the Irish band U2. In 2000, King teams up with another guitar legend Eric Clapton to record album called Riding With the King.

B.B. King is also proficient in a number of other instruments  and is also described as a “musicologist” owning over 30,000 records. He has had Type II diabetes for over twenty years and is an FAA licensed Private Pilot who frequently flew to gigs.

THE A CHORD PLAYED IN 3 POSITIONS

Hello! Wanted to share with you a little bit of theory and to explain how it is possible to have different fingerings for the same chord. Guitar is a unique instrument, in line with some other stringed instruments in that that it allows to have the same notes in different positions. Consider the E on the 6th string for example. An open E on the 6^th string is the same note as E on the 5^th string on the 7^th fret and E on the 4^th string on the 2^nd fret. This is something that would be virtually impossible to do on the piano for instance, where each note has its own peach and can not be doubled. This creates the possibility for having multiple fingers for individual notes, intervals, chords and scales.

There are two reasons why this specific of guitar is so useful. First of all, having the ability to, let’s say, have the same chord in different positions proves to be very useful when switching from single note playing to chord strumming, or combining single notes with chords (listen to Jimi Hendrix’s masterpieces to get a feel for it.) The other reason is that the notes making a chord though being often times the same in pitch would be doubled differently in various positions of a chord on the neck.

Let’s consider a simple A-chord for example. It is built on the root (tonic), in our case A, the major third – C# and a fifth – E. And how do I know all this? I simply take the first, the third and the fifth notes of a major scale on which the chord is built.

So, the first chord, using an open A string is the well known A major chord in the second position:

As you may see, it starts from the root, which is an A, than it adds a fifth, followed by another A an octave apart, and finally we have a major third followed by yet another fifth an octave apart from the first.  You may wonder why the notes are not in order, but that is perfectly acceptable on the guitar. Let’s look at the second chord in the fifth position. Your first finger should bar the fifth fret, and putting your other fingers in the indicated positions you should have: root, fifth, root octave apart, major third, fifth an octave apart and another root note two octaves apart.

The following chord is a little tricky to finger, but all is possible with some practice. Here you have root on the 5^th string 12^th fret, followed by a major third, a fifth, once again the root octave apart and a major third octave apart.

Now here is the explanation to all of this – just as the scale is not played in one position, but can be played all over the fretboard, so the chords build on the notes of the scale can be placed in a number of places on the fretboard – thus giving you the ultimate freedom of expression.

Recently I added a couple new sites to the guitar lesson Web.

first a New Learn to Guitar Solo Site:

http://www.myfirstguitarsolo.com

and a new beginner site:

http://www.easyguitarlesson.com

More to come…

Did you see the Grammys
Sunday night?

Did you catch the
Les Paul tribute?

Before there were
fast shredding guitar
players Les Paul
was playing with blinding speed.

And he did it
with a sense of humor.

Alot of what Les Paul did
was repetition.

The same riff but
slid down the neck.

Here is a riff you can work on:

p=pull off

h=hammer

E|--11h12p11h12--9h10p9h10--7h8p7h8--5h6p5h6--
B|--------------------------------------------
G|--------------------------------------------
D|--------------------------------------------
A|--------------------------------------------
E|--------------------------------------------

It looks like a lot of notes
but it is just a simple
hammer and pull off twice
then drop down two frets.

Try it slow at first before moving frets.
get the basic hammer pull off hammer
before moving.

After a while you will get it and
see how simple it is.

You can go to the 3rd fret even.

Now try it by changing just one note.

Play the last note on the B string:

E|--11h12p11-----9h10p9-----7h8p7----5h6p5----
B|----------h12--------h10-------h8-------h6--
G|--------------------------------------------
D|--------------------------------------------
A|--------------------------------------------
E|--------------------------------------------

When you get it going fast it
sounds kind of cartoonish.

Have fun with that and make
up a few riffs on your
own by just changing
one note.

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Its time we finally put those cell phones to a good cause.How I ended up in the emergency room. 

I was in a lot of pain.  But as I lay there I overheard some of the ER staff talking about the Earthquakes in Haiti.That is when it hit me that even though I was in the most pain I had felt