Rock Guitar For Dummies

Jon Chappell

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118069608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Gitarrenmusik

Face it, being a rock guitarist is just about the coolest thing you can be– next to a secret agent with a black belt in karate. But even if you were a butt-kicking international person of mystery, playing rock guitar would still be cooler because it involves art, passion, power, poetry, and the ability to move an audience of listeners. Whether "moving your listeners" means mowing down crowd surfers with your power chords or making the audience cry with your sensitive melodies, no other musical instrument allows you so much versatility.

Whatever rocks your world, Rock Guitar For Dummies can help you bring that message out through your fingers and onto that electric guitar that's slung over your shoulder. If you're a beginner, you'll discover what you need to know to start playing immediately, without drowning in complicated music theory. If you've been playing for a while, you can pick up some tips to help improve your playing and move to the next level.

Here's a sampling of the topics covered in Rock Guitar For Dummies:

• How electric guitars and amplifiers work

• Choosing the right guitar and amp for you, and how to care for them
  
  

• Left-hand and right-hand guitar techniques
  
  

• The different styles of rock guitar playing
• Creating great riffs
• The history of rock guitar
• Buying accessories for your new toy
• Top Ten lists of the guitarists you should listen to, the rock albums you must have, and the classic guitars you should know about

Rock Guitar For Dummies also comes with a CD that includes audio of every example shown in the book, plus play-along tracks with a band.

So, if you consider yourself an air guitar virtuoso and would like to try the real thing, Rock Guitar For Dummies can help you on your way to becoming an accomplished guitarist.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Part I

So You Wanna Be a Rock-and-Roll Star

In this part . . .

**IN a DROPCAP**

It’s time to start your engines . . . your rock guitar engines, that is! Chapter 1 gets you revved and in gear by showing you the parts of the electric guitar and the amp, and also discusses how the electric guitar differs from the acoustic guitar (and it’s not just the volume!). Moving on to Chapter 2, you get to strap yourself in and sit — or stand, as the case may be — in the driver’s seat — because you’ve got to look cool with the guitar in order to play it! Chapter 2 tells you all you need to know to start playing: how to hold the guitar, how to tune, how to read notation, and how to play your first chord. Part I finishes up with Chapter 3, with an introduction to the guitar’s best friend — the amp.

Chapter 1

It’s Only Rock Guitar . . . But I Like It

In This Chapter

Hearing the difference between electric guitar and acoustic guitar tone

Discovering the inner-workings of the electric guitar

Knowing the essential components of the electric guitar sound

Getting the gear that goes with your guitar

Rock guitar does not have a dignified history in music. It doesn’t come from a long lineage of historical development where composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms wrote lovingly for it, composing concertos and sonatas highlighting its piquant and gentle qualities. It was not played in the great European concert halls or in the parlors of fine households.

Not only was rock guitar unknown to the great composers of the ages, but they couldn’t have even conceived of such a thing, even in their worst nightmares. (So imagine what they would have thought of an Ozzy Osbourne concert — a nightmare no matter which century you hail from!) Indeed, even if they could have heard, through some sort of time travel, an electric guitar banging out the riff to “Satisfaction,” they would have hardly recognized it as music.

Rock guitar is a modern, late-20th-century invention, a phenomenon of the post-electronic age. It has no memory of a bygone era when youth was respectful of elders, music was a polite pursuit, and musicians gave a rusty E string about social acceptance.

Rock guitar is for people who like their music loud, in your face, electric, and rebellious, and who owe no debt to history. Rock guitar is probably not the wisest choice of instruments to tackle if you want to garner acceptance from the music community.

So, if you want respect, take up the flute. But if you want to set the world on fire, attract throngs of adoring fans, and get back at your parents to boot — pick up an electric guitar and wail, baby, wail, because rock guitar will change your life.

First, though, you gotta learn how to play the thing.

Differentiating Between Rock and Acoustic Guitar . . . It Ain’t Just Volume

When you see someone flailing away on rock guitar — on TV, in a film, or at a live concert — be aware that what you’re seeing tells only part of the story. Sure, someone playing rock guitar is holding an instrument with six strings, a neck, and a body — qualities that describe the instrument that classical guitarist Andrés Segovia played — but the sound couldn’t be more different. That difference in sound is the key to understanding rock guitar. What’s important is not the leather, the hair, the onstage theatrics, the posturing, the smoke bombs, or the bloody tongues, but the sound coming from that guitar.

It was the sound of the electric guitar, so different from that of its predecessor, the acoustic guitar, and placed in the hands of some early, forward-looking visionaries, that forced a cultural change, a musical modification, and a historical adjustment to the way we experience popular music. Songwriters had to write differently, recording engineers had to record differently, and listeners had to do a major attitude adjustment to get their ears around it. Heck, people even had to learn new dances.

But what makes the sound of an electric guitar so different from an acoustic one? If you didn’t think about it, you might say, well, volume. Rock guitar is just a whole lot louder than its acoustic counterpart. Although that might be true most of the time, volume alone is not what makes rock guitar unique. True, rock is listened to at high volumes — its message tastes better served up loud — but volume is a by-product, an after-effect, not what makes rock different or what drives it.

To become familiar with the qualities of the electric guitar, try this simple test. Listen to track #66 on the CD that came with this book. As you listen, turn the volume down so that it’s quiet, very quiet — quieter than you’d normally listen to music, rock, or otherwise. You’ll hear that the guitar sounds, well, just different. In fact, if you have to strain a little bit to make out that what you’re hearing is a guitar at all, you’ll be aware that the tone (the quality, or character of the sound, independent of its pitch and volume), in spite of the low volume, doesn’t sound like the guitar that your camp counselor strummed around the campfire when she led you in a rousing chorus of “She’ll Be Comin’ Around the Mountain” or “Oh Susannah.”

To really understand rock guitar, you need to explore some of its qualities other than volume. Don’t worry, though, the book gets back to volume eventually.

Sound quality, or timbre

When guitarists “electrified” to their acoustic guitars, they originally intended to give the guitar a fighting chance in the volume department. Unsatisfied with the results of placing a microphone in front of the guitar, they sent the guitar’s sound to a speaker by placing a magnetic element called a “pickup” under the guitar’s strings. (See “Signal”and “Distortion and sustain” later in this chapter for more on pickups.) Players quickly found, however, that, unlike a microphone, a pickup didn’t just make the sound louder, it changed the tone too. But how? It wasn’t that obvious, but it was tangible.

The basic differences between a guitar coming out of a pickup and a guitar playing into a “mike” (slang for microphone) are:

The sound is smoother and less woody.

The sound is more electronic, with purer-sounding tones, like that of an organ.

The sound has a less defined life cycle, or envelope — a beginning, middle, and end. These stages, so clear in the sound of a plucked acoustic guitar string, are blurred together in an electric guitar.

Now let’s explore how electrifying the instrument affected its sound — to the eventual benefit of rock guitarists.

Signal

When progressive-minded guitarists of the ’30s and ’40s first put electro-magnetic elements under their strings to “pick up” their vibrations and send them along a wire to an amplifier, they did a lot more than increase the volume — though they didn’t know it at the time. They were on their way to creating one of those “happy accidents” so common in art and science (and this was a little of both, really).

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