Bonus lesson – tuning guitar

James Taylor posted this intriguing lesson on tuning a guitar.

New Perspective

What happens when this guy puts an iPhone inside his guitar?

Play an instrument, improve your brain

Scientists watched brain activity using FMRI and PET scanners. Multiple areas of the brain light up when the subject is listening to music. Even more so for a musician playing music. While playing, musicans’ brains are “simultaneously processing different information in intricate, interrelated and astonishingly fast sequences” according to neuro-scientists.

To watch the whole 4 minute Ted video, click here.

free guitar handbook from Berklee

Get a taste of Berklee’s legendary guitar instruction in their free downloadable Guitar Handbook. This extensive PDF contains lessons taken from Berklee’s 12-week online guitar courses, and covers introductory topics such as scales, triads, strumming techniques, and more.

Download it here.

Songwriting and the guitar

This article by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers in Acoustic Guitar magazine includes 21 songwriting tips from Paul Simon, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell, David Wilcox and others, as well as example videos and tabs.

Here’s tip 5, just to whet your appetite.

5. TUNE DOWN. Conversely, you can lower the tuning of all the strings a half step or a whole step to put the guitar into a less familiar range while still being able to play normal fingerings. When I was a beginning guitarist trying to learn “Yesterday,” I wish I’d known that Paul McCartney was playing in standard tuning down a whole step. Instead of wrestling, as I was, with F and Bb barre chords, he used easy key-of-G shapes that sounded in the key of F. Since then I’ve been repeatedly surprised to learn how many songs were written in lowered tunings, from John Fogerty classics (“Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Fortunate Son”) to more recent tracks by Keller Williams and Ben Harper.

Read the full article here.