Easy Music Guides

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Will.I.am has revealed that LMFAO will make a guest appearance during Madonna’s performance at the Super Bowl next weekend. “I’m going to the Super Bowl this year to see my group LMFAO perform with Madonna,” the Black Eyed Peas rapper told Capital FM. “Check that out, Will.i.am Music Group is pretty freaking two for two! One year the Super Bowl, the next year another group part of the Super Bowl in collaboration with Madonna. That’s still happening.”

Before Will.I.am spilled the beans, the only guests rumored for Madonna’s halftime show were Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., who are both featured on “Give Me All Your Love,” the lead single from the pop icon’s forthcoming album M.D.N.A. Madonna and her representatives have not yet confirmed LMFAO as a guest for the performance.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/will-i-am-says-lmfao-will-join-madonna-at-super-bowl-20120126

Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh recently announced plans to open a new mixed-use performance space called Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif. Not to be outdone by his bandmate, guitarist Bob Weir has now revealed his involvement in a similar venture just down the road from Lesh’s spot. The two musicians still perform together in the group Furthur.

Before shuttering in 2007, the Sweetwater Music Hall was a musicians’ gathering spot in the artistic Bay Area community of Mill Valley. This week, Weir and his partners reopened the landmark venue in new digs a couple blocks away from its original location.

“Marin County used to be a real hub for music,” Weir tells Rolling Stone. “It was a hotbed for music. And I miss that. And Phil misses that. And we’re trying to bring that kind of consciousness back to Marin County. The music kind of disappeared from Marin about 20 years ago when people stopped going to clubs and stuff because everybody got married and had kids. Well, now those kids are growing up and they’re going to be playing in the clubs, so I think it’s going to happen again.”

Sweetwater’s new location in the Masonic Hall allowed for the complete renovation of a space that has hosted live music and events for more than a century. The remodeled interior is modern sleek, boasting state-of-the-art sound and streaming video technology, with clean sight lines and cozy hangout spots. It also features a gourmet cafe offering locally-sourced, organic fare.

In addition to a full performance schedule from both local and national bands, the reopened venue will revive its open mic night. In the past, the event has attracted national musicians like the late Clarence Clemons. The Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison used to frequent the club and was seen there earlier this week at a private pre-opening function. So was Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.

Weir expects that he will find plenty of opportunities to play in his hometown’s new hangout when he’s not touring. He’s set to perform a private show there with his band Ratdog this week, and he also says he plans to sit-in with guitar virtuoso Steve Kimock on Sunday.

“I’ll do whatever is appropriate in there,” he says. “A lot of the bands I play with might bring trouble to the area if we tried to play there, so maybe I’ll do solo concerts or little projects; I can think of a number of things.”

Sweetwater will also host master classes, workshops, a Sunday music brunch and a Wednesday night jam session led, initially, by Ratdog’s Mark Karan. The full schedule launches this Friday with a sold-out show by the Outlaws.
 
“For years, the Sweetwater was the place many of us local and visiting musicians headed to when we were looking to play for fun,” said Weir. “Well, our clubhouse is back – and it belongs to all of us. Woo-hoo!”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/grateful-deads-bob-weir-reopens-sweetwater-music-hall-20120126

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Kaiser Chiefs will release their new album, Start the Revolution Without Me, March 6 and start a U.S. tour that night in Boston. It’s the British band’s first U.S. release since 2008′s Off With Their Heads. While it’s been four years, frontman Ricky Wilson tells Rolling Stone the group only took a five-month break. The rest of the time was spent writing and recording new material. But that short vacation did the band a lot of good, especially here.

“You take a little step back, and now we’re going back to America and we’re flying first class and we’re playing on Letterman and we’re doing all these amazing things,” he says. “We’re playing Coachella and doing our biggest U.S. tour. It’s actually really exciting.”

The brief respite also reinvigorated them as a band. “You kind of get used to being in a band, and you don’t look forward to things as much as you really should,” he says.

If the band needed to remind themselves of that fact, Wilson isn’t complaining. “No one wants to hear people in bands talking about how rubbish their life is when there are a million kids in a million garages across the country who are queueing up to take their place,” he says.

So he’s focusing on the positive, of which there’s plenty at the moment. “Over the last summer, when we were doing festivals all over Europe and Australia and Japan, suddenly you remember people come to see you because they enjoy it,” he says. “Just remembering that is an amazing feeling.”

Now they’ll get to share that feeling Stateside and at Coachella, playing on the same day as fellow Brits Radiohead, Noel Gallagher, Kasabian and more.  Wilson is excited to see them all – of Radiohead, he says, “Fucking hell, man” – but one act he is particularly curious about is David Guetta.

“People fucking love that guy,” he says. “I’m in a band with guys with guitars and drums, but I totally understand why David Guetta is one of the most popular people on the earth right now. It’s because it’s fun and people like it.”

Kaiser Chiefs also plan to bring the fun, and they don’t aplogize for that. “At a festival we like seeing the bands where everyone sings along,” he says. “We write those kind of songs.”

The group brought that same populist approach to the new music. When a very different version of this record was released last year in the U.K. under the name The Future Is Medieval, the band recorded 25 songs and let fans pick the album they wanted. “Fans could choose their 10 favorite tracks and then they owned that. They sold their copy and they got paid for it,” he says.

For the U.S. version the band let their new label, Cooperative, have a go at making the sequence they wanted. “We said to them, ‘You’ve got this batch of songs, you make your album,’” he says. “They made their album.” And how does he feel about it? “When we recorded the 25 we knew we had to be happy with anyone’s choice of 10. That was why they all had to be up to a certain standard. Tthere was no filler. And I know some people who don’t like our band might disagree with that, but personally I do feel we’ve made the strongest body of work we’ve ever done.”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/kaiser-chiefs-refreshed-ready-for-new-album-and-tour-20120126

If you’ve got any questions, we at guitar Noise are always happy to answer them. Just send any of your questions to David at dhodgeguitar@aol.com. He (or another guitar Noise contributor) may not answer immediately but he will definitely answer!

Time to dip into the “email bag” once again! Today’s question concerns two of the song arrangements from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to guitar:

Hi David

I want to tell you that I’m enjoying your book, a lot, and making some headway in the difficult but fun voyage of learning to play.  It sat on my bookshelf for a few months.  My first impression was that these songs would not be near as much fun as your guitar Noise songs and, to be frank, “Tom Dooley” and “Banana Boat” reinforced that impression.

Luckily, I picked up your book and CD again, skipped around on the CD and heard many songs I liked.  I have worked my way through half of the book, skipping a few things I already knew or already could do, trying some things I cannot yet do and planning to keep going back and trying (like barre chords).  Your arrangement of songs like “Oh! Susannah,” “Wayfaring Stranger” and “The Cruel War” enable a beginner guitarist to sound good.

I’m struggling with playing both “The Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special” at anywhere near correct tempo.  I’m wondering if this is typical, at my stage of development.  I’ve been working hard at learning the guitar for about eighteen months.  I find fingerpicking style easier (I can do your earlier guitar Noise version of “Scarborough Fair”) but I do like the sound of the pick, too.  Perhaps, I should concentrate on learning just the fingerpicking style because I do not have the luxury of limitless time.  Any thoughts, David?

Thank you for writing and thank you as well for your kind words concerning The Complete Idiot’s Guide to guitar. Thank you, too, for giving it a chance! I know that “Tom Dooley” and “The Banana Boat” song are reasonably easy, but it’s hard to come up with something that a total beginning can play easily and still sound like a cool song. I did try to get my publishers on the “Horse with No Name” bandwagon, but they were totally set on using only Public Domain material (or my own songs, which is how I snuck in “Julia and John” at the very end).

With “Gallows Pole” and “Midnight Special” you’ve chosen two of the hardest pieces. Not because of the speed but because of the thought behind it. When I recorded both of these songs for the book, my intent was to do something very spontaneous, just as one would when playing a song on the fly. Then came the wonderful task of transcribing it all afterwards!

Of the two, “Gallows Pole” is a little easier because pretty much everything is a variation of the pattern given at the top of page 111. And that’s really the key to playing it at speed - work on just the first two measures at as slow a tempo you need to get the rhythm and the feel comfortably in your fingers. The first measure is totally based on the Am chord, so try to keep that in place – keeping your index and ring fingers very close to the strings after performing the pull-offs. Your middle finger should be at the second fret of the D string even though you don’t play it during the first measure.

Once you’ve played the first measure, then use your ring finger to get the third fret of the A string. Because you’ve not moved your middle finger, you should see that you’ve got two-thirds of a C chord. Pick the A, D and G strings and then slide your fingers up two frets to get the last three notes.

First try doing this without worry at all about the timing. Your object is to get your fingers to perform their assigned task. Once your good with that, then start very slowly and gradually increase your speed. You should find that, with surprisingly less repetition than you’d think, you’re getting faster than you’d imagine.

The strategy with “Midnight Special” is pretty much the same, only you want to work one phrase at a time. For what it’s worth, I’m going to be doing a guitar Noise step-by-step piece on this arrangement of”Midnight Special,” much in the same manner as the “Oh! Susannah” lesson, sometime in the Spring of 2012. Hopefully that will be of help, too.

I should mention, too, that you can play either of these with just your fingers. I do it all the time. The percussive hits don’t sound quite the same but it still works. If you were to put twenty minutes a day into it I think you’d probably get it all fairly quickly.

I hope this helps and I look forward to chatting with you again.

Peace

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/guitarNoiseBlog/~3/Xk0uy7ozMpM/

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Glen Campbell, currently on a farewell tour after his recent announcement that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, will perform at the Grammy Awards with contemporary country stars Blake Shelton and The Band Perry. The Grammys will take place February 12th in Los Angeles.

Campbell, a Country Music Hall of Famer, made history in 1967 when he won Grammys in both the country and pop categories – two country western awards for the song “Gentle on My Mind” and two pop for “By the Time I get to Phoenix.” Shelton is up for two awards at this year’s Grammys, including Best Country Album for Red River Blue. The Band Perry is nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/glen-campbell-to-perform-with-blake-shelton-on-grammys-20120126

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Peter Hook has a lot of witty one-liners about Disney’s controversial Joy Division-inspired shirts that were yanked from shelves yesterday, including: ”Because of the amount of money I’ve spent in Disneyland I think they owe me something without a shadow of a doubt.”

Also: “I do wish I’d done the Joy Division oven gloves.”

And when told the shirts are now selling on eBay for over $200, he cracks up.

It’s a complicated situation for Hook. “The fact that Joy Division only existed for three years, from 1977 to 1980, and we can still make international headlines has to be more than a compliment,” he says. “But it’s an odd situation we find ourselves in as Joy Division and New Order, because when we originally started out, we didn’t believe in self-promotion of any kind – we never got involved with merchandise.”

Still, he adds: “We’ve always been one of the most bootlegged bands in history, particularly Joy Division. But it’s a hell of a compliment to be bootlegged by someone like Disney.”

This particular fashion bootleg isn’t new to him, either. “I’m used to Mickey Mouse shirts – I see them outside of every gig we do. In England we call them Mickey Mouse when they’re bootlegged, so I am used to some horrendous ones,” he says. As a result, they have a standard procedure for how to handle unauthorized merchandise. “Generally what we do in England is when somebody does something like this, and most people do it inadvertently, we just ask for a donation to an epilepsy charity or a children’s charity just to make good. So I’m sure Disney can stretch to a little gesture like that. “

That all of this comes up now is also bittersweet because of the circumstances he finds himself in with New Order. “We’re in the middle of legal proceedings at the moment about their use of the name New Order without me and it leaves it in a position where you can only communicate through lawyers,” he says. “While the band members may feel justified in their insistence they are New Order without me, I don’t think they’re New Order without me.”

He has had no contact about the shirts with Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris, his former mates in both Joy Division and New Order. Still, he is very aware of what they accomplished together. “When I formed Joy Division in 1977, I never thought that I’d end up at the ripe old age of 55 still being able to play Joy Division music to people who generally are very grateful,” he says. “So I’m very grateful to my co-band members, Bernard, Stephen, Ian [Curtis], for creating something that’s lasted for 34 years and shows no signs of abating.”

And Hook, who has a book about his time in Joy Division coming out in September, says he is open to speaking to his former band mates. “Life is too short to be at loggerheads like this,” he says. “And you never know, this might be just the thing that brings me, Bernard and Stephen together to have a laugh and a drink. And maybe Walt can achieve what no amount of people seem to be able to do in the world, and bring Joy Division back together.”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/peter-hook-disneys-joy-division-shirts-might-be-the-thing-to-reunite-the-band-20120126

Drake has his eye on eventually playing Barack Obama in a film about the President’s life. “I hope somebody makes a movie about Obama’s life soon because I could play him,” the rapper and actor told VH1 News at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week. “That’s the goal. I watch all the addresses. Any time I see him on TV, I don’t change the channel. I definitely pay attention and listen to the inflections of his voice. If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m pretty good at impressions.”

Drake, who broke into show business as an actor on the long-running Canadian teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation, said that he is mostly being offered roles as basketball players and rappers these days but aims to do something bigger. “I’ve been reading scripts for awhile,” he said. “I want to do something great. I want to do something for my culture: the younger people who are still in tune with everything going on. I’m actually writing with my friends right now.”

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/drake-i-want-to-play-president-obama-20120126

ABBA have announced plans to reissue their final album, The Visitors, with a previously unreleased song on April 23rd. “From a Twinkling Star to a Passing Angel,” a demo recorded around the time The Visitors was released in 1981, will be the first new ABBA recording released since the box set Thank You for the Music was issued in 1994.

The new version of The Visitors will also include six previously released bonus tracks and a DVD featuring rare and unreleased footage from the Swedish pop band’s archives, including their last-ever live performance on the BBC’s Late Late Breakfast Show in December of 1982.

ABBA disbanded in 1982 and have since refused to reunite. The band even declined to get back together for their induction in the Rock Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

A much-loved British television tradition will travel across the pond this spring when Coldplay, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Mumford Sons stage the first Secret Policeman’s Ball in New York.

The Stateside adaptation of the longstanding British benefit shows will be held March 4th at Radio City Music Hall. Like its English predecessors, it will raise money for Amnesty International and feature a varied roster of musicians and comedians. Standup comics Russell Brand and Reggie Watts are also scheduled to perform in the show, with more acts to be announced soon.

The British Secret Policeman’s Balls, which launched in the 1970s, have featured such stars as U2, Sting, Duran Duran, the Monty Python troupe and Hugh Laurie. New York Secret Policeman’s Ball organizer David Javerbaum, a former Daily Show producer, tells The New York Times that his event will be “in the same spirit, for the same cause” as its British counterpart, “and we’re trying to do it with the same energy and élan.” Tickets go on sale Monday.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/coldplay-jon-stewart-mumford-sons-to-headline-first-secret-policeman-s-ball-in-new-york-20120125

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More than 20 years after his death, jazz legend Miles Davis is being honored by the U.S. Postal Service with his very own stamp.

This year, the Kind of Blue trumpeter will be immortalized in a collection of musically-themed stamps that will also honor the singer Edith Piaf, according to The Telegraph. They will be released in partnership with the French postal service, La Poste.

“This is a fitting honor,” said Lee Barham, chairman of the steering committee for the Miles Davis Jazz Celebration. “Before Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley, there was Miles Davis.”

Davis, one of the most innovative figures in bebop and jazz fusion, died in 1991 at age 65. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

Article source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/postal-service-to-issue-miles-davis-stamp-20120125