What Is A Good Guitar For A Beginner?
By Peter | February 15, 2010
Choosing to begin to play the guitar can be a great decision, but when picking your first
guitar there are a few things that you should take into consideration. So what is a good guitar for a beginner? Firstly you’ll need to decide if you’d like to play an acoustic or an electric guitar.
In my opinion, for the beginning guitarist, an acoustic guitar makes more sense than the
electric variety. This is because of two things: The first is that, when playing an electric guitar through an amplifier, it can be fairly difficult for a beginner to make a nice clean sound. This means that technique will suffer and it can also be frustrating for the novice player. In addition, apart from the amplification problems just mentioned, electric guitars use light strings, which are generally easier to play than an acoustic. This means that if you firstly learn on an electric instrument and then decided to swap to an acoustic (and to really become proficient on the instrument, you
should learn how to play a lot of types of music on both varieties of guitar) it can be fairly difficult.
Clearly a beginner won’t need an excessively expensive guitar — the impressive sound quality from a high-end instrument will probably be lost on a beginner. However, it’s very important not to buy a cheap model; a cheap guitar can be very aggravating when the beginner is trying to make a good sound. They can also be hard to play, and if the instrument is too hard at first, many beginners will simply give up. As a general rule, try to buy one that doesn’t completely break the bank, but is at least on the higher end of your budget.
So a good guitar for a beginner really depends on the person it’s for. Always ensure that the guitar is a suitable size. For most adults this means that it should be a standard adult-sized guitar. However, if you’re buying an instrument for a child, you should look into smaller child-sized instruments [there are half size and three-quarter size guitars available].
Just as an additional tip, if you are a beginner, make sure you buy an electronic tuner. As your ear develops, you’ll no longer need this for tuning the guitar, but at first, before you can tune from ear it’s important to use this device to make sure the guitar is always well tuned; otherwise you’ll fall into bad habits and won’t be able to properly recognize notes.
Topics: Learning Guitar | No Comments »
How to Design Band Logos
By GuestPoster | December 14, 2009
What better way is there for your work to become well-known than being a band logo designer? Unlike making a logo for some teeny-tiny nearly-unknown web design company, a band logo has a pretty decent chance of gaining some recognition. Unless, of course, you make a logo for a lousy little band in Tumbleweed who only gets gigs to perform for the hearing-impaired senior citizens.
Band logo design is not that different from regular logo design. Both of these graphic design jobs are executed in the same manner; a clear symbol that properly represents the essence of the band, a proper font for the band’s name, or a combination of both. As the artist hired to undertake this task, you will have to figure out how to effectively sum up the band’s name, genre, and essence in that one little picture, and it has to be unique while being easily readable. Maybe once the band achieves international fame, you can butcher the logo into something completely indecipherable that only the fans will recognize. But until that point, make sure people can read the band name.
If you can’t think of a good original symbol to use, there’s no shame in using an existing symbol with a little design tweaking. For example, a fantasy rock band that called Jupiter could use the planetary symbol that looks like a curved number four and make it look as if it’s made out of chrome and surrounded by stars. These symbols are not copyrighted because they are typically universal, so use these if you have to.
Also like regular logo design, you have to use proper artistic elements in the design of a band’s logo, because it may be the logo that makes or breaks their dreams of stardom. That being said, if you’re designing an identity for a death metal band, you probably should not use delicate cursive fonts, soft edges and subdued colors. Who would take a metal band seriously with that kind of logo representing them?
Topics: Band Promotion | No Comments »
Nirvana Acoustic Cover
By Peter | December 6, 2009
Nirvana is clearly one of the great alternative rock bands of the late 80s / early 90s. They produced so many classic tracks, but their short history was tragically ended in ‘94 with the death of Kurt Cobain.
They are of course famous for their brand of rock music (think “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Something In The Way). However, they performed several of their own acoustic songs and covers. One of the stand-out covers they performed was an acoustic cover of Lead Belly’s version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”
If you don’t know who Lead Belly (wikipedia.org) is: His real name was Huddie William Ledbetter, and he was a folk singer and songwriter during the first half of the 20th century He led somewhat of an interesting life, being sent to prison and a chain-gang, from which he was able to escape. His music was no doubt influenced by his intense life experiences.
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (also known as “In The Pines” and “Black Girl”) was recorded several times by “Lead Belly” decades before Nirvana covered it. The song wasn’t actually written by Lead Belly, and is a traditional American Folk song from the 1800s. However, Lead Belly’s version differs slightly in musicality to various other versions from around that time. The song has been performed by dozens of musicians over many years – notably Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and The Grateful Dead.
Nirvana started playing the song in the early ’90s after Cobain was introduced to the track by Mark Lanegan. Probably the most famous version of this acoustic cover was on Nirvana’s performance on MTV Unplugged from 1993. This version also appears on the band’s MTV Unplugged album. Another version of the track (a solo home demo of Cobain) is available in the boxset “With The Lights Out”.
Topics: Acoustic Cover | No Comments »