Playing Rock Guitar Lessons

Following the post on the Iron Maiden Guitar auction in the last post on Playing Rock Guitar Lessons, the auction has finished. It was only open to Fan Club Members.

Iron Maiden Guitar auction

The guitar had just 10,000 views. The winner of the guitar was LoneWolf127 with a bid of £16,691 sterling. Over 19,000 euro or over $26,000. It originally cost $1300. That bid was placed last Tuesday a week before the auction end. I don’t know who the winner was, found someone on the net, a 48yr old religious women from the US with that username. Don’t think it was her.

Iron Maiden Guitar final price

The bidding for the other two items went on till the end. A signed poster for the Iron Maiden movie Flight 666 went for £925 (over 1000 euro or $1500). I thought this person may be from India and had seen Maiden in Bangalore.

The third item a personalised Flight 666 framed platinum DVD disc went for £2091.66 (US $3270 or 2400 euro). This belonged to Rod Smallwood Iron Maiden manager for sales of the disc of over 100,000 in the US. This person looks to be a big buyer on the net, busy on EBay and other forums.

By the way the movie Flight 666 is a great documentary. Really shows the happy side of being a real rock star as opposed just playing guitar video games.

Further interesting angle to picking the right guitar. This is the ultimate guitar for playing rock guitar, a Black Beauty Gibson Les Paul with gold hardware. Price tag at the moment is around £16,700 sterling and rising. ( Or it is just $27,000 US dollars or 19,200 euro ). It is also an Epiphone. Normal retail price is around $1,300 US dollars.

Last week you could buy this guitar for £1,000, yesterday morning, Monday the 25th of January for only £5,600. Inflation is terrible these days.

What would make it so expensive? What could rise the price from $1300 to $27,000 in a week?
What if one of the biggest Metal Bands ever signed it?  All of the members of Iron Maiden have signed this particular guitar with a gold marker.
– Adrian Smith, Guitarist
– Steve Harris, Bassist
– Bruce Dickinson, Lead singer
– Dave Murray, Guitarist
– Janick Gers, yet another guitarist, one of the three amigos
– Nicko McBrain, drummer
Have all signed it.

Why? For a charity auction of course. For the charities, Childline (www.childline.org.uk) and Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy (www.nordoff-robbins.org.uk)

Playing Rock Guitar Gibson les Paul Iron Maiden

It is a very exclusive item, as there are not many signed Iron Maiden guitars out there. It looks great with gold hardware and expensive gold writing and comes with a hard case.

The auction is also only open to Iron Maiden Fan Club members. Probably in the hope that it will go to a real fan that will keep it in their home and not sell it for profit rather than hang on some wall in some big name rock cafe. Not many fans would have $200k lying around in these days of the economic downturn. But this band are lucky enough to have a few big fans, such as the multi millionaires Metallica, so who knows who is the real highest bidder behind it.

Why they picked a Les Paul? It is also the same as the guitar that Adrian Smith plays on stage (his of course is without the expensive gold scribbles on it).

Playing Rock Guitar Adrian Smith

They are also auctioning a signed poster from the Flight 666 movie, current price £751. Also Rod Smallwood’s personal Platinum disc for USA sales of over 100,000 for the movie FLIGHT 666 for £1325. These are probably a more attainable price bracket for the ordinary fan.

You can check out all three of the items above for the auction here.
http://www.ironmaiden.com/auction/
It closes the 1st february so get your bid in now.

Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden Manager, has also done his bit with a charity cycle of Egypt for the causes. You can donate here for his efforts by going to

www.justgiving.com/rod-smallwood

I’ll keep you up to date on the guitar price. You would certainly need to learn to play guitar after paying that price for an expensive guitar.

The electric guitar is better for playing rock guitar and getting a hard or heavy rock sound.  The acoustic is generally not used used as the main guitar in rock is generally used for ballads or quieter songs.

First you want the right type of guitar.  The best well known brands, particularly for Classic Rock guitar music, are the Fender Stratocaster and the Gibson Les Paul. 

Gibson Les Paul Guitar

Epiphone is the value version of Gibson and Fender also has a value version in the Fender Squier brand.  There are more modern guitar brands like Jackson Guitars, ESP, B.C Rich, Yamaha or Ibanez.

Try and get a guitar with a Humbucker pickup. Looks like a double pickup, see the pickups on the Gibson Les Paul guitar above. This will give you a fat meaty rock sound. Get a guitar with at least two pickups on it as well. Three pickups are nice but not totally necessary. One pickup will limit your sound.

One guitar to avoid which is not associated with rock is the Fender Telecaster, it has a bigger association with country music. 

Guitarists often use lighter gauge strings, 9’s to make it easier to play, string bend etc.  Lighter gauges also give a lighter sweeter tone.  Heavier gauge strings, 12’s can give a richer more solid heavy sound though.  The string gauge is up to individual taste.  As you learn to play rock guitar, you probably should start off with a lighter gauge for ease of guitar playing and then go up to 10’s, then 12’s or whichever gauge you choose, as you become better.

The Guitar can also have a tremolo bar which used during lead solos.  The Floyd Rose tremolo is the best for keeping strings in tune.  The bridge floats when not used.  You won’t need a tremolo when you begin guitar lessons so it is not necessary at the very start.

The next piece in your sound is the guitar amplifier.  The amp amplifies the sound from the electric guitar.  Best known brand is of course the Marshall amp, which of course comes in a stack.  There are loads of other good brands such as Vox, Fender, Gibson, Roland, Peavey and Laney.

A 15 watt amp is good enough to begin with as a practise amp.  You can get a lot of noise out of 15 watts.  You can get bigger ones, 25 watts etc, when or if you plan to play in public.  Some amps come with built in effects such as distortion or more probably an overdrive switch which are handy for playing rock guitar.  Only thing is the effect are hard to switch off when you are playing.  You need to stop your guitar playing for a moment to hit the switch which interrupts the guitar music.

An amp is essential, doesn’t matter if you have a built in effect or not on it.  You should try and practise your guitar lessons on the amp as you learn to play guitar.  When you play the guitar amplified you get a different sound.  You also get unwanted sounds amplified such as the noise of your fingers sliding or fingers and pick hitting the strings wrong  (pick attack sounds) or buzzing of untouched strings.  Practising with the amp will teach your to damp these unwanted sounds. 

You can also buy a noise gate to cut off these unwanted sounds.  But you need to set it under a certain level or else you also cut off your wanted guitar notes as well as your unwanted sounds.

In the next part we will take a more in depth look at Guitar effects.