When people talk about “the blues guitar scale” they’re usually referring to the minor blues scale, a hexatonic scale (6 notes). In reality, there are two kinds of blues scale – major and minor – but since it’s used more commonly, the minor blues scale seems to have earned the title of “the blues scale” […]

Building a vocabulary of guitar licks is one of the first things you need to do if you want to play the blues. In this lesson, I’m going to assume you’re quite new to the blues but already have some knowledge of guitar techniques like string bending, vibrato, hammer-ons and pull offs, and slides. If

Do all your minor pentatonic guitar licks and riffs seem to sound the same?  Do you feel like you’re recycling the same ideas over and over again without ever creating anything new? If that’s the case, I have good news for you. You’re at the end of the first phase of learning how to use

Though heavy metal was the reason I picked up the guitar in the first place, I couldn’t start playing my favorite genre from the start. When I listened to heavy metal guitar techniques like fast legato runs or sweep picking being played, I used to believe that it would take me ages before I could

In this lesson on guitar picking, I gave you a set of exercises to train yourself to play the guitar with a pick. In today’s lesson, we’ll take guitar picking an extra step by using the pick together with the remaining fingers: Hybrid picking. In order to execute hybrid picking technique, your thumb, and index

Learn what sus chords are, how to play them, and how to use them in songwriting. In this lesson we’ll go into three aspects of suspended guitar chords.First we’ll see what they are made of, from a theoretical point of view, and what makes their sound so distinct from other chord types. Secondly I’ll give

If I had to try to answer the question “How many guitar chords are there in all?”, my answer would be inaccurate, incomplete, and completely useless to your guitar learning progress anyway. The reason is that the answer to this question would depend on variables such as whether: Among others. What is more relevant to

In this lesson we’ll explore 7th guitar chords: How they are formed from a theoretical point of view, how to play them (chord diagrams) as well as how to use them in a musical context. Part 1: 7th Chord theory A major or a minor guitar triad is made of the 1st, 3rd and 5th

If there is one thing guitar students of this era have in abundance, it is guitar exercises. There are millions of exercises on the Internet, some pretty generic, some aimed to teach you a specific topic. Needless to say, this is amazing. We had to scrape together what little money we had to find books