Would you like to add some lead elements to your guitar riffs or chord progressions, but you’ve never done something creative before? If you are not experienced in improvising, an easy way to get started is to use the pentatonic scale. The good thing about the pentatonic scale is that it is easy to memorize […]
In this lesson on writing your first guitar song I gave you six chords to choose from to use in your song. These chords sound good together because they’re all derived from the key of C major. If I added the chord of say, F# minor in that mix, though you could still use that […]
What you learn in your first guitar lesson may vary a lot, depending on who your teacher is if you have one, and what sources of information you access if you don’t. In this article I will explain what your first guitar lesson should consist of and, more importantly why this should be your first […]
Many beginner guitar players tend to find changing from one guitar chord to another pretty hard. Playing beginners tunes one note at a time is pretty easy, forming chord shapes and memorizing them is not that hard either, (though this depends on what the chord is), but when it comes to change guitar chords: How […]
“[Heavy metal] has as one of its central elements the element of hatred” Dr. Paul King, Live Buzz 93, in my country Malta, was my first Heavy Metal gig, and I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned. I knew that this went beyond skipping mass on Sunday, or doubting the existence of God, as I […]
If you are learning to read standard notation on your instrument, this article contains steps that can make the whole process much easier and faster. Get the goal tempo. Play a recording of the piece from a play-along audio track that many reading books come with. Use the ‘tap’ feature of your metronome. (First of […]
When you start learning the guitar you are clueless. You don’t know what you will need to learn, how to learn it, in what order, whether you have what it takes, how long will it take, and many other questions you don’t yet have an answer for. In this article, I will delve in some […]
Simply put, arpeggios on guitar are the same notes you play when you strum a chord one note at a time. For this reason, I used to believe that playing a guitar arpeggio meant plucking the notes of the chord I was playing (ex a) instead of strumming them (ex b) Though frequently called a […]
Many exercises, riffs and licks on the guitar are made of notes coming from strings adjacent to each other. String skipping is a technique where you play notes from strings of wider distances, either all the time, or partially. This gives you the ability to play wider intervals on the guitar, that is, notes that […]
The sole reason I picked up the guitar 25 years ago was to play Heavy Metal. I added new genres among my favorites along the way, but back then it was just Metal and its close relatives Hard Rock and Punk music. And I had a problem. What my favorite guitar players like Tony Iommi […]