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 pre-made backing tracks (on Youtube, [...]
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 end-all guide to jamming, but [...]
How To Spice Up Your Blues Guitar Playing With Turnarounds Blues is a great style to jam with other guitar players and musicians. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself to be a blues player or not, with just a little knowledge and know how, you can easily find your way around in a [...]
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 it well. And can really [...]
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 often kept up. This is [...]
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 the neck, do some lead [...]
Why are you struggling to encourage your child to practice guitar when there are video games around? A lot of parents express to us that they are struggling with their child practicing guitar because they always want to play their video games. They are also very lovely parents who feel bad when they take [...]
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 created by your teacher or [...]
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! Where do you even start? [...]
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 our instrument. Pianists always get [...]