Gibson Les Paul 2008 Standard: Gibson’s newest version of the Les Paul Standard was released August 1st 2008, and it features built-in lock on strap buttons, a larger neck tenon, with an uneven neck contour to make for a comfy neck, frets leveled by Plek machine, and locking Grover tuners with an improved ratio of 18:1. The newest 2008 guitar Gibson has introduced their weight relief chambering, which has included routing chambers in precise areas of the mahogany slab body as specified by Gibson R&D. Before the 2008 release, Les Paul Standards were holy like it had holes routed into the body, but it was not chambered like most of the guitars now are.

Gibson 1961 Les Paul SG Guitars: Gibson experienced a huge fall in electric guitar sales mainly because of their high prices and huge competition from Fender’s equivalent but much lighter double-cutaway design in 1960 on The Stratocaster Guitar. Gibson then made changes to the infamous guitar line. The 1961 guitar was thinner and much lighter than the previous guitars, with two sharply pointed cut-aways and vibrato system. Nevertheless, the revamp was done without Les Paul’s knowledge…ooops. The musician saw the guitar, he gasped, and he asked Gibson to remove his name from the guitar and he said goodbye to Gibson. Even though this separation happened in 1960, Gibson had a huge stock of Les Paul logos and truss rod covers, and so they continued to use the Les Paul name until about 1963. That is when the SG guitar’s name was finally altered to SG, which stands for Solid Guitar. Plus the SG line, Gibson continued to issue the less expensive Les Paul Jr’s and Les Paul Specials (and the Melody Makers) with the newer body style. These were the standard Gibson electric models until the reintroduction of the Les Paul Standard Goldtop and the Les Paul Custom guitars to the market in 1968.

Gibson Les Paul Recording Guitar: This guitar is often shunned by guitar purists who consider it to be too full of gadgets and buttons. The Recording features low-impedance pickups, many switches and buttons, and a highly specialized cable for impedance-matching to the amplifier. Less noticeable changes included, but were not limited to, maple fingerboards (1976), pickup cavity shielding, and the crossover of the ABR1 Tune-o-matic bridge into the modern day Nashville Tune-o-matic bridge.

Gibson Les Paul Deluxe Guitars: The Les Paul Deluxe was in the midst of the newest 1968 Les Pauls. This guitar featured “mini-humbuckers”, also known as “New York” humbuckers, and did not at first demonstrate to be very popular. The mini-humbucker pickup fit in to the precarved P-90 pickup cavity having an adaptor ring developed by Gibson, actually just a cutout P90 pickup cover, in order to use a supply of Epiphone mini-humbuckers left over from when Gibson moved Epiphone production to Japan. The Deluxe was introduced in 1968 and helped to normalize production among Gibson’s USA built Les Paul guitars. The 1st materialization of the Deluxe featured a one-piece body and three-piece neck. The body was a thin layer of maple sandwiched by two layers of Honduran mahogany. Later a small volute was added. 1969 Les Paul Deluxe’s mark the Gibson logo devoid of the dot over the “i” in Gibson. In 1970 the dot over the i had returned, with a new Made in USA stamp on the back of the headstock. By 1975, the neck construction was changed from mahogany to maple, until the early 1980s, when the production was returned to mahogany. Vintage, new and used Gibson Les Paul Guitars can be purchased on sale and a great bargain can be had online.

Gibson Les Paul Studio: In 1983 The Les Paul Studio guitar was introduced and is still being made today. The planned market for this guitar was the professional studio musician. Consequently, the design features of the Studio were for optimal sound output. This guitar kept only the elements that added to the tone and playability, together with the carved maple top and standard mechanical and electronic hardware. Nonetheless, the Studio design left out many stock Gibson decorations that did not affect sound quality, including the binding on the body and neck. A notable exemption to this is the Studio Custom, a guitar in the mid 1980s that incorporated body and neck binding, though with dot fingerboard inlays instead of more ornate trapezoids.

Gibson Les Paul Robot Guitar: The Gibson Les Paul Robot Guitar was released in December 2007. The guitar has a computer built into the guitar body with a master control knob next to the volume knobs, which can be pulled out, turned, or pressed to issue different commands to the guitar. One of the more memorable features is the capability to tune the guitar to standard tuning simply by pulling out on the master control knob and strumming the guitar, while the tuning pegs amazingly adjust themselves to standard tuning. Another use of the master control knob is to be able to tune the guitar to alternative tunings, such as drop D, by pressing on the control knob to fit the setting. The Les Paul Robot Guitar has a new custom silverburst blue finish. While the guitar was advertised in the American as a world’s first, similar systems, some external, have been in use for decades.

Gibson Les Paul Dark Fire Guitars: Just recently on December 15, 2008 Gibson publicized a new interactive computerized guitar that produces more sounds and it is named the Dark Fire. The guitar has a computer built into the body and controlled by the Master Control Knob or also called the MCK. The MCK gives guitar players the skill to change the pickups and coils, fine-tune each tone and tunings automatically and at once, even while a song is being played. Similar to the Robot Guitar, the Dark Fire Guitar features the capability to tune the guitar, nonetheless, enhanced over the Robot Guitar, the player can tune it up to 500 times per battery charge, letting the tuning pegs adjust themselves to different tuning styles. Using the Chameleon Tone Technology Gibson says this guitar will produce every imaginable guitar sound. In addition to the enhanced and advanced tuning features, the guitar has 3 various types of pickups, which includes: Burstbucker (humbucker), a P-90 single-coil and a bridge-mounted piezo acoustic–all of which add to organic blends of original sounds.

http://music-memorabilia-posters.com/ Vintage, new and used Gibson Les Paul Guitars can be purchased on sale and a great bargain can be had online.

By Joshua Dylan

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We all know Dolly Parton. Singer, songwriter, performer, actress and brilliant business woman.

Always dressed to the nines, not a hair out of place, perfect make up and lipstick – and painted finger nails….long painted finger nails!

Have you ever watched Dolly play guitar? If so, have you wondered how she can sit down with a guitar and play it without those long, claw-like finger nails getting in the way?

Sure, it’s possible to play guitar with long finger nails, classical guitarists do it all the time. But with Dolly, we’re talking about daggers, nails that can do some real damage!

For her it’s simple. She plays with one finger.

Sounds impossible to those of us who struggle to contort our fingers into all shapes imaginable to form complex guitar chords, but for her it’s easy.

She does it by tuning her guitar to an open chord. Quite often hers is tuned to an open E chord.

By tuning the guitar to an open chord she can strum it without any fingers on it, and be playing a full chord – in this case, an E.

Then by placing one finger across any fret and barring those notes, she is playing another full chord.

Let’s look first at how to tune your guitar to an open E tuning.

6th string (E) – leave it as it is normally

5th string (A) – tune this string up to a B. Do this by playing the note on the 7th fret of the 6th string, and tuning up the 5th string to match it

4th string (D) – tune this string up to an E. Do this by playing either the 6th string, or 1st string, and tuning the 4th string to match it. In this case the 4th string will now become an “octave” of the 1st or 6th strin3rd string (G) – tune this string up to a G#. Do this by playing the note on the 4th fret of the 4th string (after this one has already been tuned higher), and matching the 3rd string to it

2nd string (B) – leave it as it is normally

1st string (E) – leave it as it is normally

Now strum all 6 strings of the guitar. You are now playing an open E chord!

Want to play an A chord in this tuning? Just lay your 1st finger across all the strings on the 5th fret and strum.

Want to play a G chord? Simply barre the strings across the 3rd fret.

If you know the notes on the 6th string, then the note on the 6th string at the fret where your finger is making the barre is the root note for the chord you are playing.

One word of caution. When tuning strings up to a higher pitch, you are adding more tension to them and they can sometimes break if you go too high. Always turn your head away from the guitar when tuning up higher than normal, to prevent a snapping string from striking your face or eyes.

When in this tuning, have a little fun and play around with forming chords and discovering new ones.

Here’s a hint. In this open E tuning, form an open E chord just like you would in standard tuning and play it. Then lift your fingers off and strum the open strings. Do this back and forth a few times, starting with the open strings chord, then going to the E “shape” chord.

Can you recognize the opening chords for the intro to “She Talks To Angels” by the Black Crowes?

Open E tuning is also used quite a bit for slide guitar as well as Dobro.

I have said before that there are times for all of us that our playing gets a little stale. We feel as though we are not playing anything new, like we’re stuck in a rut.

It’s times like these when it can be good for the psyche to shake things up a bit, to do something different and off the cuff.

Next time you feel that way, try switching to an open E tuning and let your creative juices flow!

For Free Video Guitar Lessons designed for Active Adults go to http://adultguitarlessons.com/blog/?page_id=191

By Keith Dean

Keith Dean is founder of AdultGuitarLessons.com and a 30 veteran of stage and studio. He toured extensively as a road musician throughout the US and Europe, was a former lead guitarist for Jason Aldean, and has shared stages with Little Big Town, Wild Rose, Winger, Confederate Railroad and more. He is a published songwriter, owned and operated a successful music store, and has instructed numerous students in guitar. He is a Platinum Level Expert Author on EzineArticles.

Visit http://www.adultguitarlessons.com

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It’s easy to learn the notes on a keyboard instrument because one octave is repeated all the way along. Once you can identify the notes in one octave, you can find them in all the octaves. With the guitar there are no obvious repeated patterns that can help us to locate the notes. So we need to find the patterns that are on the fretboard.

On the guitar we don’t have visual clues like we have on the piano so we need to know the names of the notes that are on the guitar and then work out our own formulas for finding and remembering the notes we need.

The notes are A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The six strings on the guitar sound the notes E, A, D, G, B, E. So we have seven notes on six strings. The most obvious way to learn the locations of the notes on the guitar is to count from each of the notes on the open strings. If we look at the letters as an octave the notes go in a set pattern. The notes on the guitar always have a definite distance between them. The distance between the notes A and B, C and D, F and G is two frets. All the other notes go from fret to fret.

The fifth string on the guitar sounds the note A so let’s start with that. The open string is A, B is on the second fret, C is on the third fret, D is on the fifth fret, E is on the seventh fret, F is on the eighth fret and G is on the ninth fret. It might be easier to visualize the octave if I write it out as: A BC D E FG. The extra fret always appears between the same notes.

Now that you know the names of the notes on the open strings you can see that the first and the sixth strings both sound the note E, so once you know the notes on the sixth string, you know them on the first string. You could then proceed to find all the E notes on the other strings, and you will be able to identify the notes as they go up the fretboard because you already know the pattern of distances between the notes.

You can make an exercise of finding all the instances of any note on the guitar. You can see how different the notes sound in there various positions because of the different thicknesses of the guitar strings. The notes found in the spaces between A B, C D, D E and E F are sharps and flats which is a whole other area of study. Basically the note above C is C Sharp (written as C#) or D Flat (written as Db). You should be able to do a search on the internet and find a guitar fretboard chart that you can download for free.

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

By Ricky Sharples

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