Hear A Pin Drop?
Dear Theory Godmother
Is there an easy way to remove the pins in the bridge of an acoustic guitar when you’re changing strings? At present I’m using a pair of pliers but I can see that they are marking the pins and I’m afraid of accidentally damaging them. Why don’t acoustics come with some sort of Swiss Army knife type of implement to make this job easier? Wally
I can possibly save you a lot of anxiety and a considerable amount of time here, Wally. If you go to your local music shop and ask for a string winder, most of them come with a little notch on the top of them for removing string pins. Alternatively, a few string companies make pin removers – I have one made by Dunlop, for instance. In either case, all you do is simply siide the notch under the pin as far as it will go, gently apply some levering action and voila – no more gnarled-looking string pins. You’ll find that the string winder eases the job of changing strings considerably, too!

Alternate Reality
Dear Theory Godmother
Why do teachers and so on make such a fuss about alternate picking when you can clearly see guys using consecutive down-strokes when they’re playing riffs in videos? My teacher bangs on and on about it, but I don’t want to wrestle with a technique I’m never going to use. What’s your opinion? Ginger
My opinion is that you should definitely listen to what your guitar teacher is telling you, Ginger! It’s one of those times where it’s reaily a matter of learning the rules before you’re allowed to break them; sure, some riff patterns sound much more powerful when played with consecutive down-strokes, but it’s my guess that you’ll see those same guitarists you’ve spotted in videos returning to alternate picking for solo passages.
The thing about alternate picking is that it works and, at the same time, forms a basic discipline for the picking hand so that it can find its way through melodic passages and so on. No one, to my knowledge at
east, uses it exclusively for everything they play but most will use it as a basis for their picking technique. So, in this way, it’s a very important thing to master – put the time in now and I can practically guarantee that you’ll be a better player in the end.
Sustain Drain
Dear Theory Godmother
When I play a solo and try to hold a note for that’singing sustain’you hear other players use my note just disappears almost immediately. At first I thought it was my guitar, but I was at a jam session at my school recently and one of the guys asked to borrow my guitar to play a song and he managed to get much more sustain out of it. Is sustaining a note actually a technique? What am I doing wrong? Charlie
Normally I would ask when you last changed your strngs, Charlie, as ‘dead strings’won’t give you much in the way of sustain. But if you lent your guitar to someone else and they managed to get more sustain out of it, we’ve got to look somewhere eise – and it’s my guess that we’re
probably talking about vibrato.
Most guitar players will use vibrato to keep the string ringing on for longer than it would naturally. If you think about it, vibrato is actually introducing movement into the string; the fretting hand finger rocks the string from side to side and this will have the effect of making the note last longer. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that vibrato, apart from its tone-enhancing qualities, is there primarily to add essential’shape’to a note and that, of course, would include its duration.
My advice would be to take a good ook at your current vibrato technique and see how it could be improved. Ask yourself how much control it gives you over a note’s timbre; can you vary the intensity of the note7 Can you speed up or slow down the vibrato easily? If the answer to both these questions is’Er, not really…’then more work has to be done. In rny experience, vibrato is something that is easier to learn if someone shows you, rather than reading how to do it in a book. Either seek out a teacher or scour You Tube for examples -failing that, I’m sure that the guy who borrowed your guitar at school would return the favour by giving you a few tips!
Magic Numbers
Dear Theory Godmother
What’s the difference between a flat 3rd and a sharp 2nd? From what I can see they are the same note in the scale described in two different ways. Is this one of music’s funny little ways and a case of semantics or is there something more profound at work here? Steven
You’re right in that it’s the same note in both cases – and you’re also right in guessing that music’s'funny little ways’are veiy much to blame! Let’s look at a scale and see what’s going on. In Ex 1, I’ve written out two octaves of the С major scale. Why two octaves?This is because the intervals that go above the octave have to be taken into consideration, despite the fact that technically speaking a 4th is the same note as an 11th and so on.
So the note that corresponds to both a sharp 2nd and flat 3rd is Eb – or D#: music has already given the same note two different names and, for once, these labels are there to help us distinguish between the two in terms of functionality.
If we take the flat 3rd first, we can say with 100% surety that this label is always used in the context of denoting that something ‘minor’ is happening. A minor scale has a flat 3rd and a major scale a major 3rd – but a major scale can also have a sharp 2nd and a major 3rd at the same time (see Ex 2). A minor scale, on the other hand, will have a flat 3rd and a ‘normal’ 2nd – it can’t have both flat 3rd and sharp 2nd (see Ex 3).
If we consider things from the point of view of the 2nd’s alter ego, the 9th, we can see how this works in one of the blues guitarist’s favourite chords, the 7#9 (see Ex 4). If we didn’t use the alternative name for the Eb (in the case of C) we would have a chord with the very confusing title C7b3(major 3rd) or something similarly befuddling! So the different names actually help differentiate between two different musical functions more than anything else.
Songsmithery
Dear Theory Godmother
I want to start writing my own songs but I don’t really have much of an idea where to start. There don’t seem to be many books about songwriting on the market and so I’m guessing that the practice is one of those nebulous things where there are lots of different tactics and no one is really sure which one actually works! But is there any chance you could give me a few hints at how I start? Nathan
I think a good place to start would be to make a list of songs by artists you really like and then go out in search of the chord arrangements or sheet music. By studying what makes the songs you like work from a musical point of view – how a chord arrangement supports a melody and so on – you’re absorbing a lot of information. Once you can play around ten songs, try taking the
chord arrangement from one of them and endeavour to come up with an alternative melody. If you need lyrics, find a book of poetry and try making the new words fit the chords. The results might be a little shaky at first, ‘ but if you persevere, you’ll probably find that you begin to come up with better and better sounding material.
In the meantime, you could try searching for information regarding how chords are derived from scales and which chords sound best together, etc and begin supplementing your songwriting with a little theoretical knowledge to keep things moving. Very briefly, the way this process starts is to understand the way in which the major scale is harmonised to provide chords for every single note (see Ex 5). Obviously, having a chord change on every melody note is wildly impractical and so it’s usual to let a single chord support several melody notes at a time. Musical evolution decided that the chords most suited to supporting every
note of the scale are those built on its first, fourth and fifth notes (see Ex 6) and this became known as the ‘three chord trick’because so many songs were put together using just these three. Naturally, things get far more sophisticated than this, but I’m sure if you start with the procedure that I’ve outlined, you’ll be well on your way soon enough! It works for U2, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Lou Reid, Neil Diamond and many more great writers, so you’d be in good company!
A Bridge Too Far?
Dear Theory Godmother
I have an oldish Strat and recently I wanted to raise the action a bit and found that the grub screws in some of the bridge saddles were so tight I couldn’t move them. As the guitar is officially a vintage model (it’s a 75) I don’t want to replace them with new parts and so have you any idea how I can free them up? This problem must have occurred before? Vmce
You could try removing the offending bridge saddles and soaking them in light machine oil like 3-ln-One and if that doesn’t work, one of the stronger penetrating oils like Plus Gas or WD40; but in my experience, once those grub screws become corroded they stick fast and practically nothing is going to budge them. In fact, I still have a set of badly jammed-up bridge saddles from a 76 Strat I no longer own!
I think your only option in the end would be to buy a set of replacements from a Fender dealer. Keep the originals in case you ever sell the guitar as it’s of a very collectable vintage and that particular market can be very fussy about parts that have been changed since the guitar was new. Just tell yourself that those saddles have been on the guitar for 34 years and it’s completely understandable that they need replacing.