Fretless

Rainsong got the ball rolling and now we have Klos, Journey, Composite Acoustics, Emerald and probably more now producing carbon fibre guitars, as the competition picks up prices will drop and long term experience will help manufacturers develop better quality and better sounding guitars. You can pick up a bottom end carbon fibre guitar from around 700 (USD or £), so they are not all in the €2,500 region, although Emerald seems to be aiming at the higher quality end of the market. Jazz players are discerning - or fussy, depending on your viewpoint - and so you might find this article helpful: Composite Acoustics, Rainsong, and other carbon fiber flattops

In addition to plectrums/picks, capos and tuners, Jim also bought and revived the pedal company MXR so there are a multitude of ways in which Jim Dunlop has been helpful to guitarists.

Nicely done, Neil, and I like the tasteful recording, too. All that is missing is Audrey Hepburn's vocal and some lush strings.

I will take a guess: in the major and minor scales we have different major and minor 2nd, 3rd, 6th and 7th notes. The root, 4th and 5th are the same in both major and minor scales so that is why I guess they are called perfect.

Ian, when Dave Gilmour's 12-string has been sold, treat yourself to a visit to Richard's Guitars in Stratford-upon-Avon to at least try a £941 Faith FV12TB 12-string. Here is me playing Ode to Joy from Learn & Master Guitar session 2.

Make sure you buy a two-channel Focusrite Scarlett, ie. 2i2 or 2i4. You can record your mic through one input (one channel) and the guitar through the other. Avoid the Focusrite Scarlett Solo as it is a one-channel audio interface.

Colder, one thing I have noticed through playing in church and also in smaller groups, whether that be a children's group, home group or even when playing and singing alone at home, is that songs (or keys) that work well in church when folk are singing in a large room and possibly standing, often are too high for smaller group situations. I now drop a song by 2 or 3 semitones for smaller groups and they generally are more comfortable to sing.

My first guitar was an electric because I wanted to play electric guitar. I later bought an acoustic but my heart is in playing electric guitar. I think it is worth bearing in mind which instrument inspires you to play and therefore learning and practicing will be more enjoyable.

For (electro-)acoustic guitar in a live situation I pretty much always use this little setup above. The Bodyrez is a single-knob combined compressor and EQ and the reverb gets adjusted according to how reverberant the room is.

Thanks, Steve. This is really useful for those of us elsewhere in the world, for example, I rarely stay up until 3am so I rarely get to see the live lessons live.

I would describe the different DAWs as being like a car, a van, a lorry (or truck to our American friends) and a bus. In principle they are all motorised vehicles designed to get you from A to B. In practice, the way they operate and their particular strengths and weaknesses differ enough that moving from one to another is never quite as straightforward as it should be.

ProTools is ProTools and has long been the tool of choice in professional studios. Garageband is the cutdown version that Apple produced after it bought Logic, so it would be more accurate to say that Logic Pro is the more advanced version of Garageband. Ableton Live is the defacto DAW for live use, playing tracks, controlling MIDI and DMX lighting. Reaper has earned great respect as a capable DAW. It is open-source and the $60 price is affordable to most.

Mrs. Fretless and I have 10 Sennheiser e835 mics for live work we do with vocal groups. For recording I prefer LDCs (Large diaphragm condenser mics).

I record every band practice and gig as I can be a better judge of my playing when I am a listener than when I am on stage and not hearing the mix as the audience would. I have always found it most helpful. For this I use a Zoom portable recorder.

Here you can get an idea of the bass ukulele's size which is described as baritone ukulele size. The strings have a soft rubbery feel and they enable such a short scale to have such a low tuning. I read a lot of reviews and chose to ignore the under £200 basses for the shortcomings given in the reviews. This is the video that persuaded me, listening to an upright bass player demonstrate it amplified and unplugged.

https://i.imgur.com/h9q72uX.jpg 10 months ago I bought this (pic. above) a Kala U-Bass, so it is a ukulele and also it is not! I love it. I mostly play the songs we sing in church as these are songs I at least play regularly, although I play drums at church, not bass.

I gave my Strat to a techie to lock the bridge and he did similar to what Ian did: flatten the trem (by tightening all the springs underneath rather than Ian's method) and adjusted the saddles to reset the intonation. It has worked fine for me for the last 30 years.

If you put your guitar in its case and never open the case it will stay in tune much longer. Guitars are made to be played (that's the motto of Guild guitars) and learning to tune them is a skill that needs lots of repetition to get a good ear for it. Also, in addition to Neil's comments about humidity, I believe the worst thing you can do to a guitar is for it to have a rapid change of temperature. Two examples would be leaving a guitar in a car and taking a guitar from a heated house out into the cold December weather for carol singing - but I guess the latter depends on where in the world you are and what the Christmas weather is like for you.

If the topic is correct then it will be a Les Paul model which is electric.

I found this (below) on this web page. I don't have two Moog synthesizers but I am still going to try with tremolo and wah pedals and see how close I can get. When “If” was recorded, the track was enhanced by a mysteriously quavering sound that gave the song a distinctive sheen. “That was created by two Moog synthesizers,” Gates reports. “Paul Beaver came in and set them up – I played a plain old Fender Telecaster guitar through a voltage-controlled amplifier, and he put that into these two oscillators that triggered each other in random fashion. When we were all done he said, ‘I hope you liked that and got it on tape, ‘cause I could never do that the same way again.’”

I think the wobble is the tremolo and the change in timbre is the wah. I plan on trying it out this week. I will let you know how I get on.

I had never thought about it before but listening to it I can imagine getting close to that sound with a tremolo (pedal or on some older style amps) and a wah pedal. Do you have both effects or would you like me to try?

I have BIAB and have been using since about 1993 and still do. I bought it as I wanted to rehearse songs for church and couldn't get the others in the band interested so this allowed me to quickly programme the song structure, chords and find a suitable style and, hey presto, in a couple of minutes I had a backing band that I could at least rehearse with. BIAB has moved on from those days and the ability to add melodies is, I believe, now part of the package but I haven't got round to trying that. It also, if you buy the larger and more expensive versions, real drums rather than the MIDI drums of the earlier versions. The video above is a fair advert of what BIAB can do, just preparinga song takes longer when you don't know where everything is as there are no so many styles and the indexing of them could do with updating. I have always been on a Mac and I will say that BIAB has always been a Windows program poorly ported to the Mac, which just makes it clunky. My guess is that PG Music is still not a licensed Apple Developer abecause the windows don't work the way other software for Macs does. In a year ort two I will be replacing my now 7 year old Mac (with its 7 year old coopy of BIAB) and I will buy the latest BIAB version, so for all its misgivings I still like what it does. The company is great in that the price for upgrades is not stupid like some software companies, so you can affordably start with a lesser version and upgrade, which is not upgrading the program but rather it is just adding more content - more styles and more real audio. Here is a song I played (way back in '95) where the backing track was made in BIAB; the only live instrument was my guitar: Edit: I just looked at your link. I buy direct from the authors, PG Music at http://www.pgmusic.com

Just a minor, pedantic point: there are 12 semitones (or frets if you prefer guitar speak) in an octave, which means there are only 12 possible scales and therefore positions. Any beyond the 12 will be enharmonic equivalents, eg. F# and Gb, C# and Db, etc.

Mandy, I am so sorry that it took me so long to do my video reply and also that the video was recorded without a script; I was just thinking it up as I went along. I hope there is something useful you can glean from it.