73% geek, the rest is girly-bits

If you enjoy listening to NRK P3 and also use Spotify then Andreas Solberg over at NRKBeta has got a present for you. He’s written some nifty code which uses Spotify’s new Metadata API to create a page showing NRK P3’s A, B and C play-lists all hooked up with Spotify links. This is a nice way to grab hold of the music you like and listen to it whenever it suits you. Also, it’s very, very cool.

screengrab from freshspotify.com

freshspotify is an alert service which will email you whenever music from your favourite bands are added to Spotify. Account creation/log-in is done via your Google account, and it will even suck in your favourite artists from last.fm and add alerts for them. Super nifty or what?

Now that I have a few chords down, I want to be able to practice them by playing a song or two. I can read music (played piano for a few years), but I still don’t understand how musical notation relates to guitar playing. In other words, right now, I want to learn how to read tabs.

There are hundreds of tab sites out there, but as a beginning guitar player who can’t read tab yet, they haven’t been much help to me. They don’t explain strumming or rhythm and I’m still a bit fuzzy on the details of reading them. Turns out there are a number of ways I can overcome those difficulties.

• Guitar Pro 5 [Win/Mac]
  Guitar Pro is a desktop tab editor for guitar (and banjo and bass), which also turns tabs into note sheets that play the song. Thus teaching rhythm while it shows the position of the note on the fretboard. Now in it’s fifth iteration, the good news is that the app seems to have a huge library (thousands) of tabs in Guitar Pro supported format. The “bad” news is that it costs $59.00. If it is as nifty as it seems, I think that is a fair price, particularly when they throw in their guitar method for free.

• Songsterr [Online]
  Songsterr is an online app which purports to do the same basic things as Guitar Pro, but for free. To be able to access some features like playing songs at half-speed, and fullscreen mode you need to sign up for a free Songsterr Plus account. I’ve tried it briefly and it’s nicely executed. Loading a song takes a while, but once it’s there, it’s there. As for tabs, I think the Guitar Pro format is supported, i.e. Songsterr can access a huge library. According to a comment I found on Mashable, Songsterr seems to be based in Russia, so I assume there is less chance of organisations like MPA shutting them down, or demanding a take-down of tabs.

• Power Tab [Win]
  Power Tab Editor is a tab editor/authoring tool for Windows which supports midi playback, in effect making it a free (if perhaps more basic) version of the previous apps mentioned.  Power Tab used to have a huge library of tabs in .ptb format, but that was shut down in April 2008 and still isn’t back yet. Though the release date for version 2.0 was supposed to be winter 2002, the beta has yet to be released. However, as of writing, Power Tab is still officially an active project.

• Shuule [Online]
  Shuule seems to be a java-based player for tabs, similar to Songsterr. According to their blog it’s still in the Alpha stage, but it has indexed some (thousands) of tabs in Guitar Pro format for testing purposes. Unlike Songsterr it seems to only be search-based for now, so you can’t just browse your way to an interesting looking tab, you have to search for the song by title or artist. When I tried it, it was slow to load, and when it did load there was no sound, so it seems to be a case of ymmv for now.

• Guitar Guru [Win]
  AFAIK Guitar Guru was designed to teach guitar by adding information to the tab and allowing playback, similar to Guitar Pro. Certain features like voice command, and CD/MP3 synching look pretty cool, and I’m not sure that other apps offer them. The software itself is free, but I haven’t (yet) been able to find compatible tabs for it anywhere other than Musicnotes where each tab seems to cost around $4-7.

I’m a massive fan of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games, and after clattering on plastic Les Paul guitars for over a year, the urge to learn to play an actual fretted and stringed guitar was overwhelming. Luckily for me I already own not one, but two guitars. I have a classical guitar I bought as a teenager, and P bought himself a nice little acoustic number in London about nine years ago. However, neither of us can play. At all.

About a week ago, I concluded if I haven’t learnt to play the guitar at least passably by the end of the year, I’m getting rid of the instruments once and for all! OK, so I can’t get rid of his, but one guitar in a non-guitar-playing-household is enough.

As a means to learning I’ve been poking around on the ‘net and found a couple of nifty videos and sites that should help me get the guitar of my dreams. I promised myself one of those once I can play at an acceptable level, and I’m only half joking…

mental_floss: Anyone can play guitar
The first lessons I found were the mental_floss Anyone Can Play Guitar lessons. They start at choosing the right guitar, but I’m not sure where they will end up, because the series is at lesson 11 as of writing, and I don’t know how many lessons there will be in the series. The lessons are pretty cool, but they were too fast for me. After I managed to misunderstand the G chord and played it wrong for a while, I decided to take a break and try something that fit my pace better *sigh*. I’ll definitely take another look once I have some basic chords under my belt.

lesson 1 | lesson 2 | lesson 3 | lesson 4 | lesson 5 | lesson 6
lesson 7 | lesson 8 | lesson 9 | lesson 10 | lesson 11

guitarjamz.com
After not doing too well with the mental_floss lessons I found Marty Schwartz on YouTube who has a slew of guitar lessons spanning from beginner to advanced, many of them focusing on how to play songs. After bemusedly staring at the videos for a while, I decided that this was one I’d definitely return to once I can actually play a bit. There is supposedly even more stuff at guitarjamz.com, but I’m not ready for that yet.

justinguitar.com
The third site I found, and which I’m currently using, was Justin Sandercoe’s justinguitar.com which has a metric assload of free lessons, and videos. I’m currently working my way through his beginner’s course and it’s nicely explanatory. I’ve never really understood guitars, but reading through the lessons here has really helped me.

Right now, I’ve been playing for a few days and all I have to show for it so far are sore fingers and buzzy chords. I shall, however, persevere.

photo by Rob Sheridan

It’s interesting to see the differences in approach various artists have to the Internet.

Trent Reznor has time, and time, and time again proven that he “gets it”. Yesterday he posted the following message on nin.com:

1.7.09: your gift!

The internet is full of surprises these days.
I was contacted by a mysterious, shadowy group of subversives who SOMEHOW managed to film a substantial amount (over 400 GB!) of raw, unedited HD footage from three separate complete shows of our Lights in the Sky tour. Security must have been lacking at these shows because the quality of the footage is excellent.

If any of you could find a LINK to that footage I’ll bet some enterprising fans could assemble something pretty cool.

Oh yeah, you didn’t hear this from me.

posted by trent reznor at 12:56pm

Proving yet again that he knows how to build and maintain a fan base. I hope it’s working for him, because as a NIN fan I have to say it’s working for me. I can’t wait to see what people do with this leaked footage, and I hope that it only does good and adds even more to NIN’s fan base.