Guitar Hero III

Cliffs of Dover on expert:



Easy, right? Well you can learn how to play that pretty well in a few hours on Guitar Hero 3. How long would it take on a real-life, strings and everything guitar? I have no idea. Let's look at one of the many attempts at a guitar tab for this Eric Johnson song.

Crap. It's 8 pages long. Most tabs are 1, maybe 2. Definitely not 8.

|---15'-15-12-14----12-------|-12-----------------12-15-14-12----14-12------|
|----------------15----12-15'|----15-12-----12-15-------------15-------15-12|
|----------------------------|----------14'---------------------------------|
|----------------------------|----------------------------------------------|
|----------------------------|----------------------------------------------|

Oh man, that looks hard. I'm going to practice it, however, and see if I can't at least get the intro going in a week or two. This young kid on YouTube plays a pretty mean version and you can clearly see his hands and follow along I think. Someone else on YouTube told me in a comment that they learned from Jamorama's Lead Guitar package how to play in Eric Johnson style and a bit of Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Find your own "Guitar Center" ;)

I have been reading Guitar Magazine and a couple others I picked up at the newsstand and keep looking into taking some serious guitar lessons. The main problem is that I'm a student and, seriously, who has time to go across town and sit down with some burnt-out hippy who teaches guitar for rent money? Anyway, I learned spanish from a CD and figure I can do the same with a guitar course so I ordered a series of videos and materials from the "Unlock the Guitar" series. I will keep you guys updated about how well it works, but it's gotten great reviews so far and I'm super excited!

Click Here to see what they include in the Unlock the Guitar set.

Between the Bars

Elliott Smith: a real guitar hero. Yeah, he's gone now... but before that, he was a great, soulful writer. When you listen to an Elliott Smith CD, you are hearing the poor bastards entire life pouring out through a cheap acoustic guitar and straining high-pitched voice.

One of my favorite songs is Between the Bars which you can watch here in this excerpt from a short film about his life called "The Lucky Three."




More than I like watching and listening to my favorite guitar players, I like seeing how others interpret their songs. Cover versions are often bad (I'm not linking to about a dozen other crappy versions of Between the Bars and you should thank me for it; they're terrible!) but sometimes another artist will really "get it" and provide an even deeper and/or different experience that expands on the original tune.

Here's a great example of what a cover can do for a song: Madeleine Peyroux's soul-evoking jazzy voice over a slow rendition of Between the Bars.



Oh yeah, don't forget to check out the guitar tab so you can learn how to play the song yourself! Good luck and have fun!