March 2011 Archives

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EXCERPTED FROM: The Comics Journal

It’s my understanding that venerable industry news and criticism magazine The Comics Journal let the world know today that Tim Hodler and Dan Nadel will be taking over the magazine’s web iteration.

Hodler and Nadel are best known as an editorial team in terms of their work on the magazines The Ganzfeld and Comics Comics. Nadel has also written two lauded books for Abrams collecting artists that worked in mainstream comics that might have been alternative creators in modern times, and is the driving force behind the art comics publisher PictureBox.

Tim and Dan are among my favorite writers about comics and favorite comics people generally. I look forward to what they bring to the Journal, and I greatly look forward to their long overdue attention to a proper on-line archive.

Read more on Comics Review Newsmaker Interview: Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler Of TCJ…

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Comic panel of Secret Agent X-9 fighting a gang of armed thugs.

Alex Raymond excelled in dynamic action illustration

I immediately fell in love with Alex Raymond’s art when first exposed to it.  As a film noir and detective fiction fan, I discovered that he illustrated a comic strip called Rip Kirby, with the script by Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and Thin Man author).

After Raymond’s death, the strip continued with other artists and changed to Secret Agent X-9.

Raymond made his biggest splash as the originator (author and artist) of Flash Gordon.  Awesome stuff and influential to this day.

Here you go — enjoy Alex Raymond.

WADE

 

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The other day, I finally got around to replacing the strings on my acoustic guitar, something that had been overdue for a while.

New Guitar Strings

As I finished fitting the last new string, and then tuned them up properly, my guitar seemed to have a refreshed sound, from these zingy new strings. It struck me that I should probably change the strings a bit more often, just to get that feeling of refreshing the sound once in a while.
Read more on Refresh Things with New Guitar Strings…

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By Mike Viola

 

 

There is a base human need to consume.  We gotta eat. We do it with food, we do it with sex, we do it with raising our kids. We do it with movies, music, musicals, paintings, pictures, pictures of musicians in musicals who paint movie posters. The list goes on.  What do we love more than lists? Crossing something off our lists. Consuming our lists.

Let’s walk right past the “I wanna be famous” stage of being an artist. Even though you tell yourself and everybody else around you that you “don’t want to be famous, I just want to be heard.”  You’re kidding yourself.  You’re hungry.  I know very famous people at the top of their game. One guy is the only surviving member of his era. He’s the best. Everyone knows he’s the best. And it’s not enough for him. And that hunger has nothing to do with more fame. He’ll die starving, a very rich man.

Read more on Mike Viola is Lost in the Supermarket…

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Have you ever looked at guitar chord charts, and wondered how those chords were constructed? Or were looking for a chart for a particular named chord, but couldn’t find one?

In this series of posts, I’m going to look at some aspects of guitar chord theory, namely how guitar chords are constructed using the notes of various scales. This will hopefully give you an insight into where guitar chords come from, and some idea of how to create chord shapes on the guitar fretboard.

In this post, I’ll talk about how basic chord construction works for guitar chords. Later posts will cover how more complex guitar chords are created, using the same principles.

When you first start learning the guitar, pretty much one of the first things you learn to play are the basic major guitar chords, such as C-major, G-major, etc, and you learn to read guitar chord diagrams like this one:

C major chord

which shows an open C-major chord. That’s all well and good, and if you learn a few of these different chord shapes, you’ll be able to play a range of songs. Where though, do these shapes come from?

As you progress on the guitar, it becomes very useful to know something about how chords are constructed. This will let you find chord shapes anywhere on the fretboard. Also, if you want to play lead guitar, then having some understanding of how chords are built from scales will let you create much better sounding solos.

Guitar chords, or more generally any chords in music are created by choosing certain notes from a particular scale. Here, we’re going to look at chords created from the major scale.

Here are the notes & guitar tab for the C-major guitar scale:

C major scale with degrees

The top section shows the regular musical notation, with the names of the notes next to each one. The lower section shows the guitar tab for these notes.

The colored numbers in the middle are important. These are known the scale degrees, which is a fancy way of saying “the note’s number within the scale”. The notes marked in blue are the root notes of the scale, since this is the C-major scale, the root note is the note ‘C’ (3rd fret, 5th string on the fretboard). The notes marked in yellow are the other (non-root) notes of the scale.

To build a basic major chord, we just take the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes from the major scale, and play them together at the same time. Here is the same diagram as above, but now the notes that will form the C-major chord are highlighted:

C major scale highlighted notes

So the basic major chord consists only of these scale notes 1, 3, 5, and none of the others. If we play these 3 notes together, we get the basic C-major chord, also known as the C-major triad:

C major triad

Play all the scale notes on your guitar, then only the 1, 3, 5 notes shown, to get an idea of the sound of the basic major chord.

These 3 notes form the bottom part of the C-major chord in the chord chart shown above. To get the other 2 notes, we just repeat the scale notes 1 & 3 (notes C and E), and stack these on top, to get the full C-major chord:

C major chord

All basic major chords consist only of these 3 scale degrees, 1 (root), 3 and 5 taken from the major scale. The above example used the scale of C-major to create the C-major chord.

To apply this for a different chord, you would start off with the major scale (e.g. the G-major scale), and take notes 1, 3 & 5 from it.

How can this help when playing lead guitar? Say the rhythm chords are C-major followed by F-major, and you’re playing a solo over these. As we’ve seen from above, the notes in the C-major chord are C, E, G. While the rhythm is playing the C-major chord, then lead licks and phrases that start or end on one of these notes, will overall, tend to sound a better ‘fit’ with this chord than other notes from the C-major scale.

When the rhythm changes to the F-major chord, the notes in this chord are the 1, 3 & 5 scale degrees of the F-major scale, which are the notes F, A & C. You would change your licks & phrases to start or end on these notes while the rhythm is playing this chord.

That’s not to say that you have to play licks/phrases that start or end on those 1, 3, 5 notes. Doing so though, is a way to learn how to make your licks & lead lines match the underlying chords, and will seem to blend in better with them than playing just any notes from the scale.

With lead guitar, one aspect is understanding the chord construction from scales, which we’ve introduced above. The other aspect though, is knowing where these particular notes are on the fretboard, which is a different thing to learn & practise. These two aspects together though, can really improve your guitar soloing ability.

Next time, we’ll look at extensions of the basic major chord, and use this same approach to see how these chord variations work.

Chris

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One thing I’ve enjoyed over the years is collaborating with songwriters all over the globe via the internet.

I’ve had collaborators in Australia, Canada and other parts of the USA whom I’ve never met.  And yet we make beautiful music together.

One fellow out on the east coast was not only one of the best I’ve run into, but he came to San Diego for ComiCon a few years ago and we actually got to meet.

Another one was just down the road a few miles and we wrote some terrific things — and got to meet a few times.

If you have songs that need some finishing — whether you need lyrics or melodies — I found a great resource.


SongWriting Fever Blog is very democratic.  Any type of music, anything goes.  Post your lyrics like a want-ad or post a request for collaborator like a lonely-hearts singles ad.

I think I know where I’ll find my next collaborator.

WADE

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I’m guessing that there are a fair amount of comickers who follow our li’l site, and I’d like to ask a favor of them. I’ve got a vaudeville-themed board game that I’ve designed, and I’m looking for some spot illustrations for the cards. There are 45 cards to illustrate, so I’m looking for as many folks to contribute as I can find. Do one card, do five, anything you can contribute would be appreciated and will really help!

Catches? Oh, I’ve got a handful of catches… Firstly, there’s no money in this deal. I’m looking for folks who love to draw, who love old stuff, and who love Barnacle Press. Next, I need these illustrations by this coming Monday, the 16th of November, one week from this very moment! I’m heading to the wonderful BoardGameGeek.con convention next Wednesday, and I need to assemble my game to bring along.

The upside? Well, I think that any follower of this site will find the subject matter to their liking. It should really be a lot of fun to draw these things, and I’m just looking for black and white cartoon portraits of people. No wild action, no backgrounds. The end result will be a Creative Commons licensed, free print ‘n’ play board game that will be available here at Barnacle Press. And a plus: it’s actually a really fun game!

If you’d be interested in lending your pen to my cause, drop me a line with a link to your work, and I’ll send you a link with more information: my name is Holmes, this site is BarnaclePress.com. I’ll wager you can figure out my email address…

BarnaclePress

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http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/9448965/2/istockphoto_9448965-music-speakers.jpgHello Everyone,

So I’ve been under the hood the past six weeks developing a solution for a feature that you’ve all been requesting:

Music Upload

Yes! you can now upload your music in mp3 or midi on your profile and also download and stream other members’ music.


SongWriting Fever Blog

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