Avid Guitar

Usually, a fanboy post about an American Idol contestant wouldn’t have a place on a guitar blog such as this. However, on the latest American Idol, James Durbin was accompanied by Zakk Wylde of Ozzy Osbourne’s band and of Black Label Society. Zakk was sporting his signature beard, BLS vest, and signature Gibson bullseye Les Paul.

Durbin was performing Heavy Metal a Sammy Hagar song from the 1981 animated film of the same name.

Durbin was the last performance of the night, and as usual, did not disappoint. I was jumping around like a little teeny-bopper when Zakk Wylde came through the curtains onto the stage.

The fact that Durbin and AI could pull such a superstar guitar player really speaks to Durbin’s talent, because you know Zakk would not jeopardize his own reputation by singing with some sucky wannabe rock singer on a pop show. Durbin is the only true rocker that has ever graced the Idol stage, and is the best rock vocalist I have heard in a very, very long time. Durbin is definitely my favorite, but I almost hope he doesn’t win so he can get his own band and make great music (similar to what Daughtry did).

James Durbin: Heavy Metal (ft. Zakk Wylde)
You can see the performance for yourself here.

Most guitar buyers would just shun off the wood choice as an unimportant factor in their purchase. If you see a guitar you like, you buy it. “Hey check it out, this one has flames on it. Sweet!”

The species of wood in your guitar and the style of wood on the fretboard and neck can be the absolute most important factor in your guitar, right up there with your choice of pickups.

Here are the common types of wood made into guitars you see at the guitar shop:

Body Types

Alder – This is the most common species of guitar wood. It is very light and retains a lot of the high frequencies, which means it’s great for Stratocasters and people who play in the higher register. It is very “bright” sounding.

Mahogany – Mahogany is not super-deep sounding, but most of your heavy metal guitars are going to feature mahogany wood. That is not to say that they’re for metal only, as they’re great for any blues or any other style of music where you would want a deep, ballsy tone. It will add a growl to your higher notes and gives you a nice, bassy sound. Mahogany is very heavy.

Basswood – Basswood has a very low, bassy sound, but sounds great while soloing. It is not too heavy, and not too light, but it is comfortable. It is a very soft wood, which means that if you ever wanted t ow work on it later it would be easy to manipulate. The softness of the wood will often soften out those low sounds, and add some flavor to the higher notes.

Fretboard Woods
There are 3 common fretboard woods:

Maple – Very bright and very dense.

Rosewood – Is the most common fretboard style and is naturally oily, which allows it to have a bit richer sound than maple.

Ebony – Ebony is kind of a the middle-child between maple and rosewood, it can have a rich tone, but can also be very bright.

Neck Woods
Usually neck wood is the same as the wood of the guitar, unless it is a bolt-on neck (usually maple).

Maple – The most common electric guitar neck wood. The tone is highly reflective, and will not warp as easily as other woods. It will focus more energy and vibration into the body of the guitar than any other neck wood.

Mahogany – Mahogany is a little more responsive than a maple neck, and will absorb more of the vibrations. This further adds to the deeper sounding tone of a mahogany guitar.

Rosewood – Rosewood is very heavy, and will provide excellent sustain while also smoothening out the highs.

Make sure you research any guitar that you’re interested in, and choose the right style of wood for you. The style of wood can either make or break your sound, and you should know going in what you’re looking for.

When Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, and any other “Guitar God” launched into a solo, it was sex to your ears. You would listen to the main riff of the song, waiting for that climax right in the middle where that big solo would kick in. It seems those days are gone, and now we’re just left with horrible riffs and no solos.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m not listening to the right style of music. From what I’ve heard on the radio, of which I am a frequent listener, every song sounds so similar. We’re now down to simple, over-distorted, four-chord riffs that fail to inhibit any emotions.

Do today’s guitarists not have the same influences that we’ve had in the past? Did they not grow up listening to Guns ‘n’ Roses, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Rolling Stones? Have they never heard a Metallica or Ozzy Osbourne song before? What happened when they made the transition to playing the actual guitar themselves? Did they not sample their favorite artists and learn songs from their influences? I suppose they figured, “Well, I can’t really play any scales. I can’t really make any good riffs. But I know a few chords and let’s just crank up the distortion and change them around every which way. We’ll have our singer scream at the top of our lungs and nobody will hear what I’m playing anyway.”

There’s the problem. The older hard rock bands found a way to always fight for the spotlight, but continue to perfectly intertwine the instruments together into beautiful artwork.

I think a majority of the problem in today’s music is that the bands barely even have to play anymore. In the old days, the bands would get in to studio, plug in their crap, and play. If a note didn’t ring out right, or there was a beat missed somewhere, screw it, leave it in there. There was human error.

In today’s song recording, the drummer goes in first, and lays down his beat. Then the bass player goes into the studio and records his part over that. Next goes the rhythm guitar, then the lead guitarist, and finally the autotuned singer. This format is effective and efficient, but the listener is cheated in the end because the band doesn’t sound like they’re playing together anymore, but it sounds more like four or five separate parts. Heck, Slipknot doesn’t even record in the same studio anymore. They each have a recording studio in their own homes, and just send around the tapes of the other guy’s parts and add their parts to it. They don’t know what the final version of the song sounds like until it’s mixed and everyone else hears it.

The days of the “Guitar God” are behind us. For now, we’ll have to cope with what we have and hope that some savior comes along in the music business.

One of the greatest ways that a guitarist can find a gem of a guitar is by searching your local pawn shops. For those who don’t have the money to go to Guitar Center and get a $1,500 Fender Stratocaster, you could go to the pawn shop and find one for $500 or less. I just love to go the pawn shops and look at the guitars in there, and often times I will buy an old beat-up guitar and fix it up like new, which is just one of my favorite hobbies.

There are a few things to watch out for when buying from a pawn shop:

1. Check the price tag
Obviously you’re going to check the tag to see how much it costs, but be careful; a lot of those guitars are priced even higher than their retail value. If you have found a guitar you like, it is nice to have a 3G phone on hand or have someone to call at home who can check the going price of a guitar you have found to make sure you’re not overpaying for a dud.

2. If it looks too good to be true…
it probably is. If you see a Gibson Les Paul in there for $100, there’s something terribly wrong here.

3. Most of the good ones aren’t on the floor
I have had a few pawn shops employees inform me that they indeed have very nice guitars in the back: Gibsons, Fenders, Gretschs, etc. However, they usually hold these guitars for private collectors. This means that when they get a guitar that they think is worth a lot of money, they have people that they’ll call and say, “Hey, I have such and such guitar up here, you wanna come take a look?” Basically, don’t expect to find a Gibson Les Paul with Serial No. 00001 in a pawn shop.

4. Always plug it in
Don’t ever buy an electric guitar without first trying it and playing it. Most of the time the pawn shop won’t put a guitar out that doesn’t work, but every so often one may slip by them or it did work when they put it out. Also, you need to be seeing if you like the sound, and checking for unnecessary string buzzing. Make sure the jack and the pickup switch is working properly, and check all of your volume and tone pots. Also try to look down the neck and make sure it is not warped.

5. When you do find something you like
Don’t pay the sticker price for it. You can always talk them down a few dollars. I’ve only had one incident where I was trying to buy a guitar, and they wouldn’t let me go any lower on the price. The kids that were working there said that their manager specifically told them not to haggle on the guitar prices, and that the computer wouldn’t let them lower the price of it anymore (yeah right). Luckily, that particular axe was already at an affordable price since it was a beat-up piece of junk that I was buying for a project guitar anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal.
Try to get them to at least compensate for the tax. If the sticker says $300, try to get them to take $300 even.

As someone who absolutely LOVES going to pawn shops, music stores, and old garage sales looking for guitars and music memorabilia, I hope that I have helped anyone that would like to delve into that in the future.

Ultimate-guitar.com, the best internet website to find guitar tablature, has an application for iPhone in which you can search for guitar tabs via the search engine. You can also play a song on your phone and find the tabs for the song that’s playing at the time. 

For those who don’t know, guitar tabs are a guitarists way of not having to read real sheet music.
E—————————0——||(Thinnest string)
B————————0———||
G———————1————||
D—————–2—————-||
A————-2——————–||
E———0————————||(Thickest string)

On this example, you would start at your thickest string (the 6th string), and arpeggio the chord all the way down. Each line is a string, and each number is a fret. So you fret the 2nd fret on the 5th string, 2nd fret on the 4th string, and 1st fret on the 3rd string. The 0s mean that you don’t fret that string anywhere, but you do strum it as an open string.

Well, after that quick little lesson on how to read guitar tabs, I’ll get back to the point. This application is very, very helpful for the traveling guitarist. Say you forgot the note to a song and just can’t find the darned thing, just search that tab on your phone and BAM you have it right there.

Now this application is also coming to the iPad, making it easier for those who have an iPad to access the app. The fee will be $6.00 a year, which is a fairly reasonable price app-wise. If you’re into playing guitar or want to learn, I suggest downloading this application or at least checking out ultimate-guitar.com

So I found this link on www.digitaldreamdoor.com, a music site, that had a list of the “100 Greatest Rock Guitar Riffs” in order. Every single aspiring rock guitarist should learn these riffs, and I also want you to note that most of them are from older rock bands and that they’re not too complicated.  A good rock guitar riff doesn’t have to be the most technical, awe-inspiring, fastest thing in the world.

Here’s the top 20: There’s also a list of the top “100 Greatest Metal Guitar Riffs” that includes these in it’s top 10

1. Smoke On The Water – Deep Purple
2. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – Rolling Stones
3. Sunshine Of Your Love – Cream
4. Layla – Derek And The Dominos
5. Oh Pretty Woman – Roy Orbison
6. Iron Man – Black Sabbath
7. Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
8. Heartbreaker – Led Zeppelin
9. You Really Got Me – The Kinks
10. Sweet Child O’ Mine – Guns N’ Roses
11. Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix Experience
12. Day Tripper – The Beatles
13. Walk This Way – Aerosmith
14. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida – Iron Butterfly
15. Whole Lotta Love – Led Zeppelin
16. Sweet Home Alabama – Lynyrd Skynyrd
17. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) – Jimi Hendrix Experience
18. Paranoid – Black Sabbath
19. Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne
20. Back In Black – AC/DC

There’s also a list of the top “100 Greatest Metal Guitar Riffs” that includes these in it’s top 10:

1. Iron Man – Black Sabbath
2. Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath
3. Master of Puppets – Metallica
4. Paranoid – Black Sabbath
5. Run to the Hills – Iron Maiden
6. Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne
7. Raining Blood – Slayer
8. Breaking the Law – Judas Priest
9. Ace of Spades – Motorhead
10. Holy Wars…The Punishment Due – Megadeth

Black Sabbath is on the metal list seemingly a million times, but who can blame digitaldreamdoor.com for that?

Anywho, every single aspiring rock guitarist should at least learn these main riffs of these songs, if not the complete song.  Even if you’re not really interested in playing metal guitar, you should learn these 10 metal riffs.

Here’s the links to the complete lists if you would like to see the full top 100, and it actually goes down to 200.

Rock

Metal

This blog is for you!  This is a blog for and about guitar players (with some general music stuff thrown in).  I will talk about scales, chords, albums, riffs, guitar news, gear, and every other tool a guitarist needs to learn and get better.  If you don’t play guitar or don’t care about people who do, you can still read the blog.  Surely everyone cares about music.  I will try to cover a wide spectrum of musical styles, but know that I will always be partial to classic rock, hard rock, metal, and the blues.  Every so often you may see a FIGHT THE POWER, but for the most part it’s going to be WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT!