Guitar Licks and Tips


You are here: Home / 2009 / Archives for August 2009

Archives for August 2009

Whole Hearted by Extreme

by

I’ve told you now that I am currently in a little acoustic project with a buddy from work. When we got together for the second time, I started playing Hole Hearted by the the 90’s band called Extreme. It went so well that we both started singing it perfectly!

I have played this song many times before with numerous bands in the past and got great response from this song. The first was with a guy named Guytano. I’ve got an old cassette version of us somewhere and it was awesome!

So fast forward to today and it seems like we’ve gonna resurrect it once again.

Going through youtube, searching for unique versions of songs, is a favorite past time on mine. Looking at different chord phrasings of songs fascinates me. My way of playing, at the risk of sounding like an old broken record, is to challenge a listener to hear different ways in which a song can be performed.

Today I found an acoustic version of this song by Extreme. It has sounds like the original, but with a little subtle twist to it.

This version of the band has original members Gary Cherone (Lead Vocals), Nuno Bettencourt (a Canadian Guitarist) with guests Steve Hackett and on slide guitar John Paul Jones(ex-bass player from Led Zeppelin). To tell you the truth, I didn’t even notice him until the end of the song. Speaking of Led Zeppelin, we’ll doing Ramble On as well!

So here is the version that I will attempt to add little parts from, to their original rendition of the song. What do you think about it?

Keep on Jammin’





Bass Guitar Beginnings

by

The bass has always played an important role in the music of yesterday and most modern music today. No matter what the instrument is, a bass line is usually always represented in some form or another, from the lower instruments of an orchestra, to the bass notes played by a solo acoustic guitarist, the bass line serves as the foundation and root for the music. Music would sound hollow and incomplete without a driving bass line. With the advent of jazz, blues and then rock and roll, a different type of instrument was needed to play a strong bass line. This is when the bass guitar came into play.

Bass guitars have been around since the 1930’s though not quite in the exact same form as the Fender bass guitars that we know today, but you could say that their predecessors, the acoustic Basses, have been around for many years longer.

The bass guitar was different from the bass that everyone had been familiar with for many years though. Instead of playing it vertically and either plucking the strings or pulling a bow across the strings, the bass guitar is played just like a regular guitar and is held horizontally.

From a distance, the electric bass guitar could easily be mistaken for an electric guitar as the both look very similar with the same solid body shape, however the bass usually has a longer neck. Also, unlike an acoustic guitar which is hollow, with a sound hole to allow for amplification, the sound of a Fender bass guitar is amplified by plugging it in to an amplifier and speaker.

With four strings tuned in 4ths just like the four lowest strings of a regular guitar except tuned an octave lower, the bass guitar is similar to the guitar and guitarist sometimes play bass and vice versa. While guitars are primarily strummed and picked, the bass can be played with a variety of techniques as well including, fingering, picking, slapping,thumb play, muting thumping and more. Because of it’s close relationship to the drums and the pulse of the music, the bass guitar is considered to be a rhythm section instrument.

Guitar Techniques

by

While the importance of a decent song to play on the guitar cannot be underestimated, the technique employed when playing it can totally determine how that song will sound. 

Just playing the all the right notes in the right order at the right time is like music by numbers. Guitar playing is as much about variety as it is skill, and its important to get a feel for how certain notes can be played in the context of your song, even if its not by the book. Most of these types of techniques get labeled as “lead guitar techniques,” but the truth is that every guitarist should have these as part of their repertoire.

There isn’t one technique mentioned here that can’t be found in a rhythm part in a number of different songs.  So these techniques should be mastered even if you only play rhythm guitar in a band.

Learn to Play Guitar

Hammer-ons and pull-offs are very similar techniques. If you want to play two or more notes on the same string, rather than fretting and picking each one individually, the guitarist literally sounds each note with their fretting hand and skips picking the note each time. The Hammer on comes into play when the note is higher up the string and the guitarist must fret the note with sufficient force to produce the appropriate note.

The opposite of this is pull-offs, which are used to move back to a lower note. Before doing a pull-off, the new note must already be fretted. The name is a misnomer, you don’t simply pull off the note, you actually pluck the string with the fretting hand as you pull your finger away in order to sound the note. Hammer ons and Pull-offs are best used when you have a fast sequence of notes all of which are close together.

Bending

Bending literally involves pushing a ringing string along a fret to change the pitch.  A great bend will allow for easy movement between notes and uses changes in string tension to produce the sound. This movement through the micro-tones of two notes can be very effective in slow bends. You can also unbend a string back to the original note for the opposite effect. This is very popular technique with a lot of lead and rhythm riffs making use of it.

However, this technique can be difficult to learn. You need to pay attention to the pitch of the note while performing the bend.  If you don’t hit it exactly, then the note will either sound flat or sharp depending on if you under or over bend the string. This can be a more frustrating technique to first learn, but it really makes a huge difference in your playing, and you will be very glad for the effort you put into it once you actually learn to bend the string properly.

Meta

Pages