Creating An Effective Warm Up Routine Warming up before playing is a crucial part of your long-term progress as a guitar player. One of the benefits is that you prime your fingers to make the most efficient motions and use the minimum amount of pressure each time before playing. [...]

The #1 Trick That Drastically Improved My Lead Playing Regardless of your preferred genre, chances are you’ve imagined yourself playing an amazing solo or melody line at some point! I mean, come on, playing solos on the guitar is totally awesome and a lot of fun, so why wouldn’t [...]

How To Get Started With Writing Your Own Songs Even If You Are Not Advanced Most people think that you have to be really amazing to write your own songs. You hear things like “you have to have natural talent” or “you either have it or you don’t” which [...]

Reasons why your vibratos aren’t sounding as great as they could be  A quick introduction for beginner guitar players A vibrato for anyone who doesn’t know. Is a phrasing technique to make a note on your guitar sound super awesome. Well, it does sound super awesome when you do [...]

Why you should NOT quit guitar lessons when your life gets stressful Every guitar teacher knows that guitar lessons are often the first thing that students give up on when their life gets more stressful due to school or work demands, while other activities such as various sports are [...]

The 3 Major Mistakes of Beginners When you start out learning how to play the guitar, most of the students do not know, what they have to focus on in order to get maximum results in the shortest amount of time. One simply does not know what the consequences [...]

2 Simple Ways To Get Creative With Your Open Chords A common trend I see in lots of guitar players as they start out, is that once they’ve learned their open chords, they get bored and want to move onto something else (learn new chords in other positions on [...]

Why are you struggling to encourage your child to practise guitar when there are video games around?  A lot of parents express to us that they are struggling with their child practising guitar because they always want to play their video games.  They are also very lovely parents who [...]

How to Create a Groove Using Harmonized Scales Introduction Many times in lessons, I create a groove for students (using a looper or midi-generating pedal or software) on the fly for them to solo over or practice switching chords with.  The advantages of doing this as opposed to using [...]

Comparing How Amateurs and Professionals Jam Because of the unpredictable nature of a jam session, each participant’s musicianship really comes to the fore in many ways.  I have run many jam sessions that were open to the public over the years, and I offer this, not as a be-all [...]

Easy ways to create your own chord progressions When you start learning guitar, most of the times you begin with learning some basic open major, minor or 7th chords. After a while, you expand your chord vocabulary to some advanced or suspended chords by learning from either chord progressions [...]

How I climbed Mount Everest… Imagine this - you’re at the base of Mount Everest. You’ve got all your hiking gear on and you’re ready to climb.  Now just the idea of climbing this mounting can seem pretty like a daunting task. I mean… that’s a lot to climb! [...]

Two critical ear training exercises you must master It is very obvious that having a good ear is important for all musicians, but it is especially important for guitarists to consciously train and focus on this. As guitar players we don’t get any automatic help in ear training from [...]

3 Reasons Why You Are Not Likely To Blame For Not Being Able To Learn To Play Guitar Yet So, you have tried to learn how to play guitar already and it did not go well. Guess what? You are not alone. The reality is that most people who [...]

More Than A Theory: Why You Should Understand Music Fundamentals On Guitar Over the years of my playing guitar and taking guitar lessons, I have noticed that many guitarists tend to not learn basic fundamentals of music which is a shame since just understanding a few basics can easily [...]

5 Reasons Why Your Guitar Playing Doesn’t Sound Good Yet A time comes, in the course of learning the guitar, where the student feels like he can play songs, riffs, licks and solos but for some reason, they don’t seem to sound good. Where he knows he’s hitting the [...]

Three Benefits Of Learning Music Theory There are many guitar players who try to learn independently (without guitar lessons or a teacher) and for some reason take pride in it. Some of these people believe that doing so will create a unique sound for themselves, something that nobody can [...]

Beware of Trojan Horses I don’t mean computer viruses here, nor literal wooden horses delivered unexpectedly to your door. ‘Trojan horse’ in this case is a metaphor for ‘things which you think are good for you but are actually bad.' Modern society constantly bombards us with marketing and cultural [...]

The Myth of Finger Strengthening Exercises Do you spend hours working on finger strengthening exercises but still struggle to make your playing sound musical? Have you bought a grip strength builder only to find it had no effect on your playing whatsoever? Chances are you’ve bought into the myth [...]

The Top 5 Reasons People Give To Avoid Learning to Play Guitar  One of the coolest parts of being a guitar teacher is getting the opportunity to meet and talk with people. These people come from all walks of life and have different likes and dislikes. One of the [...]

What To Do When Practicing Guitar Becomes Stale (PT 2 Inner Turmoil): There are many reasons why your practicing might become stale as a guitar player and so, as a teacher I think it’s important to discuss why your practicing has gone stale and how to give it some [...]