“I just CAN’T SOLO!!” Man, the guy was frustrated. He’d tried all kinds of things in order to learn how to solo. He’d learned the pentatonic minor scale (a GREAT start by the way) but he couldn’t figure out how to make his solo sound like anything BUT the scale. He’d tried copying solos verbatim […]
It appears that a group of students and a professor in the UK have created an algorithm that can analyze the audio file of a song, and spit out a score that indicates the likelihood of that particular song becoming a hit. Songwriters the world over are always trying to figure out what will produce […]
A common trajectory that many beginning guitar players follow goes something like this: They learn the basic chords, and a few songs as well. They learn bar chords, to step things up a bit. They learn a simple scale, like the pentatonic minor, and get their first taste of soloing. They want to take their […]
In my ongoing series of cool guitar riffs, I hauled out my electric again (seems like I’ve been neglecting a little too much lately – at least in terms of creating new lessons!) for you. This riff is based of the E diatonic minor scale – if you’re not familiar with it, brush up in […]
The E pentatonic minor scale in open position is one of those goldmines that keeps giving you cool stuff to play. This riff is a perfect example — it sounds great, it’s not too complicated, and once you get it under your fingers, you can use it over a bunch of different progressions. It is […]
Pick up almost any hit song from the last 50 years and you’ll find the same handful of chord patterns underneath. The chords change key, the tempo changes, the band sounds different — but the bones are often identical. This post walks through the 7 most popular guitar chord progressions, where they show up, and […]
Three free videos. The fretboard isn't twenty separate positions, it's one system that keeps repeating. Once you see that, the chord shapes you already know stop being mystery moves and start being the where of something bigger. I'll show you in about fifteen minutes total.