Capos are a way to give your hand a little bit of a break. Instead of playing a ton of barre chords, you can use familiar shapes to play chords that we’d otherwise need barre chords for. How do we start thinking about using our capo so we can start p ...
There are 5 pentatonic shapes but most only use 2. How do we start using the other 3?! One way is to get used to how licks we’re already familiar with fit into these other shapes. In this blog post I'll be using three licks but transposing them to ...
So in this post I’ll be talking about talking about how to start anaylzing the song “Recorda-Me” as an example of how to think about soloing over the song. *This is built upon my previous posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 The song's chord pro ...
Training our ear is probably the toughest thing to do in learning music. I can show you where to put your fingers and what string to pluck, but really we need to change the way we hear music in order for everything to make sense. What’s funny is w ...
Here's a another example of playing songs within our CAGED chord shapes. Why? Just like my previous example, to get a better idea of where chord tones are, where arpeggios will lay on top, to see things in one position instead of sliding all ov ...
It’s the Pentatonic Scale. Yup. It’s just another way to play the pentatonic scale. But what’s so cool about it is the way it’s laid out and the way it sliiiiides to the other positions is so much more conducive to actual musical phrasing. A ...
Yes, the title says it all. A good way to think about soloing is: how you start dictates where you’ll go. So if we take a look at the available beats in a measure: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + We’ll note there’s eight places we can start. A good way to ...
Yes, these are a few of MY (yes... me, me, me!) favorite scale exercises. Some of them are tricky, some aren't as tricky, but they all accomplish the same thing... getting us more familiar with our scale shapes. Scale Exercise | 4 Note Pattern ...
My last blog post on this subject (Jazz Key Structures | Part 3) talks about what scales to use when and my best at a brief explanation of the Minor ii-V-i. While it gets you playing the right notes, it doesn’t sound too jazzy… why? Chord tones. ...
So you want to get better at Chord Melody’s? You’ve come to the right place. Here are a few songs to help get you started: Layla Outro - Derek and the Dominos https://youtu.be/E5cdlCHaWtM I use this as a starting point to understand how we ...
