This is the fifth part in my series on the system behind playing the blues on the guitar. In this part, I’ll talk about the role that the major pentatonic and major blues scales play when soloing over a blues progression. The other parts in the Breaking Down the Blues series are: Part 1: The...
Being a guitarist is a lot like being an athlete. A certain amount of practice has to go toward general maintenance of your playing on both a physical and mental level. You have to do exercises that will keep your skills in a state of readiness, so that when the time comes to go out...
This is the fourth part in my ‘Breaking Down the Blues’ series. In the previous parts, I covered the 12 bar blues progression, the extended box pattern of the blues scale, and I demonstrated some blues licks. Here are links to the previous parts: The Blues Progression The Blues Scale 5 Tasty Blues Licks In...
This is the third part in my ‘Breaking Down the Blues’ series. In part one, I went through the blues progression, common variations of it, and how to put it together in any key you want. Part two covered the blues scale, it’s most common patterns on the neck of the guitar, and how to...
Bar (or barre) chords often present a huge difficulty to beginner guitarists. Almost every student I have struggles to some extent when they are first learning to use bar chords in the songs they play. Even though it can be tough to get a grip on these types of chords, they are incredibly important to...
Being able to sing while playing the guitar is a great skill to have. In fact, I’d say that having at least a basic ability to sing while strumming chords is a skill that any experienced guitarist should have. Learning to do it is tricky at first, though. It involves developing some basic pitch control...
Believe it or not, there is a fine art to making mistakes when playing the guitar. Mistakes are, to some extent, inevitable. No matter how good you get at the guitar, mistakes will always be part of the experience of playing. Skilled guitarists make mistakes smoothly. Often their mistakes are hardly noticeable to the listener...
Looking back at my development over the years as a guitarist, an important skill that I acquired was the ability to create my own exercises that target whatever I want to improve on at the moment. This is a skill that most advanced guitarists eventually develop. It’s incredibly helpful to be able to this because...
The web is bursting with resources for the aspiring (and experienced) guitarist. A quick web search for any guitar related topic will return a trove of sites. There are a handful or sites and resources out there that I’ve found to be particularly useful for both developing as a guitarist and for teaching. So, I...
Whenever you pick up your guitar, it’s important to be aware of whether you are planning on ‘practicing’ or ‘playing.’ These are two distinct mindsets that will determine a number of things: how you think and feel while playing, whether or not you try to fix mistakes, how critical you will be, and so on....