Gift for guitarist | page 284

A few practical tips - these will guide you through the world of six-stringed instruments, while they won’t ruin your budget.

A few practical tips - these will guide you through the world of six-stringed instruments, while they won’t ruin your budget.

No-more false notes

People with perfect pitch will precisely recognize the note they’ve just heard. Allegedly, we all have this ability until we become eight months old. With only a few exceptions, we all lose our perfect pitch later, but no need to worry - because we are barely using it when playing an instrument. Most of the people has relative pitch - this means that we can recognize the difference between high and low notes. Experienced musicians are even capable to identify the interval between two notes. But even the world’s biggest guitarists are using tuners without fear. The most popular choice is a clip tuner - it is clamped to the guitar’s head. You can see a moving needle on the small display, which indicates the difference between the tone of the string and the perfect tuning. Now the good guitarist can utilize the time between two songs very effectively - while he is tuning the guitar just with his eyes, he can entertain the audience with a quick joke.

No more lazy fingers

Every guitarist should learn the basics of the right technique and get to know his “own tone”. The individual nature of the tone is what tells him apart from other players - this is what makes him recognizable. B.B King and Jimi Hendrix are renowned for their typical vibrato, Alvin Lee is known for his rapid tempo, Eric Clapton for his precision, Stanley Jordan for the effective tapping and Stevie Vai for his extensive chords. Without experimenting or finding your range of expression, playing the guitar would be just a boring exercise. But without mastering the technique, your individuality could seem leastwise a bit ridiculous to others. To find your style, it’s recommended to listen to others, imitate them and then set on your path at the right time. The guitarist must learn the technique by regular exercising on a genuine fingerboard. To maintain the skill, you can use various aids to strengthen, and increase the flexibility and speed of the wrist, fingers and forearm muscles.

You’ll lose sound without maintenance

The guitar requires intensive care and maintenance - just like any other stringed instrument. The wooden material, from which the guitar is made is very prone to drying, so it is protected by a layer of varnish. This layer should be treated regularly with polishing and waxing substances for increased gloss. The most used part is usually the fingerboard. It needs regular cleaning and hydration. Strings and frets are regularly contaminated by sweat, grease and miniature dead skin-residues from the fingertips - this will result in a dull sound with too short reverberation. Cleaning the instrument after every exercise or test should not be neglected. The basic maintenance pack should contain a wax, a cleaning substance, moisturizer, polish, a microfibre cloth, but a truss rod wrench, or a string cutter could come in handy as well.

Marvelous boxes

You can never offend a woman with a bouquet - and you can never offend a guitarist with a small box. Pedal effects are known as small boxes among guitarists, and these are the secret ingredients to make an electric guitar able to squeal, croak, grain, phase, spread wide and reverb in the hands of every rocker, metalhead, punk or jazzman. The effects are available as small boxes or larger multi-effects - they represent a higher form of effect intelligence. They are capable to simulate a few hundred sounds of different amps and loudspeakers - so they allow you to creatively shape the final sound of the guitar.

Record-breaker Hawaiian exoticism

The electric guitar will stay fashionable for a long time, but the worldwide statistics show a slight drop in their sales. This could be surprising, but there is an almost 15 % raise in the sale numbers of acoustic guitars, including banjo, resonator guitars and mandolines - in the same decade. But there is an exotic instrument, which literally shocks with an 50 % sales growth. This small, mostly 4-stringed instrument got his name from the Hawaiian Islands, it has been around for almost 140 years, but it was lurking only on the edges of music industry. Ukulele stands out with it’s compact, small size, it’s easily portable, affordable and technically not really demanding. Almost everyone can learn to play the ukulele - without a teacher. YouTube offers hundreds of know-how videos. There’s something peculiar about their tropical sound, that makes people laugh, and makes them happy even when it’s raining outside. Somewhere Over The Rainbow...