How many times have you listened to a guitarist and wondered “How does he make that noise?” Here are a few of the techniques players use to produce some strange and wonderful sound effects.

The guitar has many different techniques that can subtly alter the tone of the notes being played. The ‘musical’ techniques are primarily used to alter the sound of the transition from one note to the next, for example string bends and slurs. More ‘practical’ techniques, such as right hand tapping, are used mostly because they are the most efficient way to play a particular group of notes.

There are also techniques that produce unusual sounds that are not normally associated with the guitar, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on.

Most of these techniques are not used very often, but they can add some extra diversity to your playing style. Understanding how some of these techniques work will also make it easier to understand how other guitarists produce some of the strange noises in their playing.

Body Slap

Body slapping is a musical technique, but not in the same sense of most guitar techniques. The guitarist hits the body of an acoustic guitar with the picking or plucking hand. The sound produced is very similar to a drum. Listen to it!

This works because the basic principle behind how sound resonates in an acoustic guitar and an acoustic drum are pretty close to one another.

There are two basic methods to use this technique. Click to read the rest…

There’s never been a better time to take up ear training. More than ever before, it’s possible to train your ears when you’re on the go – giving you one less excuse for not practicing, and helping develop your ears even faster. Now you can use those 5 minutes at the bus stop or 20 minutes stuck on a train to push your ear training forward another notch.

In a previous post, “Ear training all the time” I talked about the importance of regular practice when trying to develop your ears. The suggestions in that post are mostly based around active listening. An important skill, but it makes for quite passive training: because you’re grabbing ear training opportunities wherever you hear them, there’s not generally any feedback on whether your judgements are right or wrong. Nowadays though, this needn’t be the case.

Okay, you can’t lug a Steinway around with you at all times, but you can grab an app for your iPhone that lets you check pitches and intervals at any moment. You may not have a mixing desk with you for checking audio band judgements, but you can load up some band-limited pink noise onto your MP3 player and check your memory of what each band sounds like. When you think you’ve figured out that drum beat you just heard on the radio and have the urge to rush home to your drumkit, you can pull out the electronic drumkit toy on your keyring or record a snippet of the track on your phone to check when you get home.

Here at Easy Ear Training we’re hugely excited about the power and efficiency technology can bring to ear training. We’re just beginning to discover the ways we can learn more effectively using technology, and the incredible variety of amazing electronic musical and audio gizmos is just making it easier and easier to train wherever you are.

In this post I want to focus on a particular gadget that can be your best friend when you’re developing your ears: Click to read the rest…

If you’ve been following the Frequency Fundamentals series, hopefully you’ve already had a go at the first two quizzes (1, 2), designed to test your knowledge of frequencies and harmonics. If not – now’s the time!

This new quiz is a recap of the course, for students who feel they’ve really got to grips with the material.

As usual, the quiz consists of 10 questions, chosen randomly each time you take it so you can keep practising as you learn. This one covers material from throughout the Frequency Fundamentals series, and digs into some corners of the course which the first two quizzes missed out.

You might want to refresh your memory before you dive in:

1. What’s ‘Frequency Training’ All About?
2. Introduction to Frequency Training
3. Percussion Frequencies Part 1 – Drums
4. Percussion Frequencies Part 2 – Cymbals
5. Frequency Band Characteristics – Part 1
6. Frequency Band Characteristics – Part 2
7. Background: EQ Feathering and Spectrum Analyzers
8. Harmonics and Distortion

And the first two quizzes:

Quiz 1: Percussion Frequencies

Quiz 2: Frequency Bands and Harmonics

Also, if you’re just joining the “Hearing Effects” course, now’s a great time to make sure you’re up to speed on frequencies – if you can ace this quiz, you’ll probably manage fine!

We’re always keen to hear from you – let us know what you think of the new quiz in the comments below!