hampshire guitar orchestra newsletter

This is a web-archive of the Newsletter we emailed to our subscribers in May 2005

The passage of time may mean that some links to external sites are out of date or broken

Our website at www.hago.org.uk remains THE place to find out what's going on in hago, but it's grown so much recently that you might feel overwhelmed by the 439 pages there. In which case this Newsletter will tell you about some of the more recent pages.

We're keeping our Newsletters in plaintext format so they're quick to download and small enough to keep, but we hope you find the new layout and new sections will make it easy to read.

DIARY

We had a cracking concert at St Faith's Church Havant yesterday - we told you about that on 26th March - and it was good to see some of you there too!
Glad you liked our new 2005 repertoire!
Couldn't make that one?
What about.... June 23rd at The Rowans, June 11th at Cambridge, July 1st at Emsworth - more details at www.hago.org.uk/concerts/

Our joint Concert with Bruce Paine on July 7th is Bruce's only UK concert on his European tour this year - you won't be disappointed. Tickets in advance are £7.75 (conc £5), but bring your wallet - once you've heard Bruce you'll want to buy his two latest CDs when you're there - save about £3 per CD too!
Book at www.hago.org.uk/2005/07/ - tickets already selling.

FURTHER AHEAD

We have a provisional booking at Petersfield on November 12th, and we'll be finalising our Christmas events in August - more news soon!

WEBSITE NEWS

www.hago.org.uk is attracting more visitors every month. In April, we served over 31,000 pages, and we had 2355 visitors from search engines, finding us in response to 1033 different searches.

Enjoy our handful of truly bizarre search terms at www.hago.org.uk/zeitgeist/ - what WERE our visitors looking for?
Our most popular pages in April were about the baritone guitar (we don't even have a baritone guitar!) at www.hago.org.uk/guitars/baritone/ and our tongue-in-cheek look at Portsmouth's Spinnaker tower at www.hago.org.uk/2000/popup/forget-2.php, which caught the eye of a large Weblog recently and sent us 100 visitors in a day and a half!

NEW WEB PAGES

Make www.hago.org.uk/news/ your first stop when you visit our website - all the latest changes to the website in date order, with links to the changed and new pages. There's always a link to it from the home page. You'll find news of our most recent Concert, and a revised total amount of money raised for charity.

RECRUITMENT NEWS

A lot of people can't believe that we're just a band (pardon the pun!) of classical guitarists united by a love of tuneful music, a lot of hard work and a great friendship. They seem to think we're like a football team - carefully recruited, with players (oh, another pun!) and reserves. Not so - we're always looking for like-minded players, and we don't go out head-hunting, we kind of hope players will pluck (oh, a third pun!) up the courage to contact us, and then come along to a rehearsal and join in. We've music to tickle the fancy of diploma players who want to try our altos, and we've music to develop Grade 4 players too. And everyone in between. It's all about playing comparatively straightforward music to a really high standard. Interested? visit www.hago.org.uk/join/ or ring Derek Hasted our Musical Director on 023 9247 9200

GUITAR NEWS

We have a second contrabass guitar on order, and someone queuing up to play it. This will be a tremendous addition to our sound, but it won't reach us in time for many of this season's concerts - it's being made to order.
We hope to broaden our sound still more with another alto in due course. Finding a committed Grade 7 to Diploma player to take it on board is our next goal. Some guitarists seem not to like company (not us - we love sharing music-making!), but we're keeping our ear to the ground for more fine players who want to share their skill, not keep it for themselves!

What's it like playing an alto? Well, there's nothing to learn - the notation means it feels simply like playing a small guitar. It's a feisty little beast though, and a 2 3/4 hour rehearsal leaves a tingling in the fingertips of both hands! Getting a good tone is a real challenge, but we reckon there's someone out there with the commitment to make it happen.

FOR OVERSEAS VISITORS

Have you visited our MD's photo gallery? Come and see our pictures from the country of Hants, taken throughout the year.

There's a new addition this month - the imposing Stansted House, with a front lawn that's almost exactly 3km long. On the day we took the photo, there were wild deer grazing in the surrounding woodlands - quite a rare sight at that time of day. We would have trekked off after them, but we had that 3km walk back to the car!

FOR GUITARISTS

If you live too far away to come to one of our Concerts, you might be interested in our Guitar FAQS at www.hago.org.uk/faqs/ where you'll learn a bit more about our guitars, and pick up some hints and tips on tuning too in our "tuning problems" page. We tend to use D'Addario EJ46 strings - the intonation is always good, and the stability under temperature changes is second to none. We're mourning the passing of the old EJ46-9 - packs of 9 strings, which means one can keep the basses fresh and save money too. Some of us are trying the EJ46C composite strings with the funny third string - a bit prone to pick up nail noise, but free of the intonation problems that plague nylon third strings. The basses definitely last longer too, but that lovely silver sheen soon vanishes...

Well, I reckon it's time to bid you farewell, and say that we look forward to meeting as many of you as possible at our concerts!

hago newsletter 21st May 2005

CONTENTS