Think your hands are too small for the guitar? Try these tips! One common complaint I hear from students is that they feel like their hands are too small. The first thing I usually tell them is that one of the most famous rock guitar players ever had pretty small hands – Angus Young of AC/DC. There are plenty of …
Picking On The Twelve String Guitar
How the tuning of the 12 string can confuse picking patterns There are two very popular songs with intros played on a 12 string acoustic guitar that have a few notes that sound different from what you hear on the recording: More Than a Feeling by Boston, and Wanted Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi. Below are the tabs for …
Which G Chord Is Right?
Learn about the different kinds of open G chords There are a few different ways to play the open G chord, and the truth is, there is no right or wrong way to play this chord. All of the different versions are real G chords, but there are songs where one version is more appropriate. It’s good to be familiar …
Learning the Fretboard
Tips on learning the notes on the guitar Memorizing the notes on the fretboard is helpful for a lot of things. The two most important reasons to do this are to be able to easily find barre chords up and down the neck, and to know where to play scales when improvising. The good news is, you don’t have to …
Alternate Picking Exercises
Beginner’s Guide to Alternate Picking Basic Technique Why should you pick down and up? Hopefully, you’re not actually asking that. You need to do alternate picking because you won’t get very far in life just using all downstrokes – just watch, oh, any guitar player from the past 50 years. The foundation of your alternate picking technique should be based …
Arpeggios for Beginners
Improve your pentatonic solos with arpeggios Arpeggios are like scales, but with fewer notes, and are based on specific chords. If you’ve just started trying to improvise your own guitar solos, you should probably hold off on learning arpeggios and keep working on pentatonic scales. On the other hand, if you’ve gotten bored with the pentatonic scales, then learning what …
What Chords Do I Need To Know?
Learn how many chords you need to know The short answer is, you don’t need to know ten thousand chords to be able to play the guitar, so those books that have that many chords are sort of overkill. On the other hand, you shouldn’t stop after learning seven chords like Marc Bolan did, although he did manage to write …
Improvisation Tips For Beginners
Fundamentals of Improvisation Before you start trying to make up your own guitar solos, you need to have some basic skills mastered with a capital “M.” Ideally, you should be able to play all of the pentatonic scales in all 12 keys at 140 bpm in 8th notes, and should be able to do the advanced exercises I have in …
Finding Accurate Guitar Tabs
What Free Sites Have Good Guitar Tabs? It amazes me how quickly songs get transcribed these days. When students ask me to show them a song by a band I’ve never heard of, I can often find a guitar tab online no matter how new the song is. Whether or not that tab is accurate is another story . . …
String Bending Guitar Lesson
Learn the basics of bending strings Learning how to bend strings is one of the most important things you can do as a lead guitar player. You’ll encounter it in guitar solos in most styles of music, most commonly in rock, blues, and country. Before you try learning any guitar solos, you should spend a little time working on some …
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