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 …
Barre Chord Exercises for Beginners
Master the B major chord with these lessons! The chord that gives beginner guitar players the most problems is the B major chord which looks like this: A couple notes about this picture: I’m only pressing down on the strings with my first and third finger, and my third finger is sort of bent backwards. Though it may appear that …
Rondo Alla Turca by Mozart
Rondo Alla Turca arranged for lead guitar I arranged this for lead guitar, meaning I took out the bass clef part of the composition. I’ve only embedded the first page, as I’m still double-checking my work on the rest of it. What is on this page will get you through a great deal of the song, but not the “solo” …
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 …
Rhythm Guitar Lesson: Strumming
Tips for Beginners and Troubleshooting Strumming Problems Strumming Techniques for Beginners A lot of the concepts I’ll be talking about in this post are covered in the lessons I’ve done on other pages in the site, so I will be referencing those. The first thing many people want to do when they learn how to play guitar is to learn …
Guitar Lessons for Adults
It’s never too late to learn guitar! In the past few years, I’ve had a lot of new students sign up who are over 50 and are either retired or semi-retired. It’s never too late to start taking guitar lessons, or lessons on any instrument for that matter, so don’t let the fact that you’re not a kid stop you …