It's Here! The product of many years' typing, in and out of private lessons, here's a comprehensive exposition of Taplature in action, bringing ease of access to playing all your favourite songs! Finally see all the too-often-overlooked details that make up not just this unique collection, but, ultimately, just about any piece of music! Yours for Free! Just navigate via the Taplature menu bar to the Library page on this website and you'll find an easily searchable (and fully sortable on larger screens) collection of riffs, licks, strum patterns with lyrics and even full guitar solos laid out ..read more

A little knowledge and some just-above beginner level skill can go a long way. In this post we'll build step-by-step but quickly from what may be your first power chord to playing some proper band-level classic rock. Power Chords - The Easiest Way to Play Guitar? A decent grip on power chords is enough to play basic but solid guitar for just about any song you like. No need to worry if chords are major or minor and we can just ignore all those complex looking numbers! One shape fits all. Find the root note and plant your power chord there. It's not fancy but it works, as we'll see below. You ..read more

String bending on guitar is one of those things many never get quite right, all due to missing out on a few simple pointers. In this lesson we'll cover everything you need to get squeezing strings like a pro! Let's Keep it Simple! Though string bending is an intricate skill, we won't need to examine much music to understand its requirements. Here we'll mainly limit our investigation to just two notes but with a few different ways of presenting them which will cover all the often-missed details you'll need to correctly execute most string bends you'll ever encounter. Here are the two notes we ..read more

Until you can do it easily, singing while strumming your guitar confidently at the same time can appear like magic. There's actually surprisingly little you'll need to learn in order to be able to perform that magic on guitar yourself, as we'll see below: In this article I'll be focusing on 8th notes (quavers); in particular the "basic strum" pattern (click here for an easy primer on that if it's new to you) twinned with any combination of 8th note lyrics. 8th Note Strumming Possibilities If we consider a single beat of music limited to our picking-hand either strumming or missing the strings ..read more

The screaming lick as the "Wah Wah" pedal is kicked in towards the end of Sweet Child O' Mine ties together a cascade of bends, slides, hammers and pull-offs to make a real showpiece in the middle of the final guitar solo of the Guns 'n' Roses' masterpiece. In this lesson we'll take a look into how we can break it down into 6 bite-sized pieces for "easy" learning. https://youtu.be/1w7OgIMMRc4?t=180 Click to hear the lick! Anyone can learn to play this; *if* it's approached well! A lick like this might look overwhelming to begin but when approached in a systematic fashion there shouldn't be a ..read more

One of those guitar licks that's remained Greek to me forever, here we'll pull it apart and take a deep look into the difference between nearly playing and really playing it! Back to the Drawing Board! Lightning-fast, the single bar shown above and played at 1m34s (click the video below to hear it) of the original Thin Lizzy recording can be learned by anyone if approached in the manner we'll examine below. https://youtu.be/YWZbWiIYuYc?t=93 Click to hear that ripping lick! This is a lick I thought I could nearly play back way in the 80s but it's also one I've never managed to bring to the sta ..read more

You too can soon have strong, clean legato technique like a guitar pro with just a few simple ideas twinned with a little effort, applied of course the Taplature way! Getting better at pull-offs and hammers on guitar is another undercovered topic that's all too often only addressed with the tired old advice, "keep doing it and you'll get it". That may work for some but keep reading for the method that's guaranteed to work for all! https://youtu.be/JyMpehzFP-I Click to View This Lesson's Companion Video Legato 101: What a Pull-off Isn't! Executing a pull-off correctly on guitar is not just a ma ..read more

How to practice singing and strumming at the same time to get John Denver's classic campfire song running smoothly enough to delight your audience. Today's Challenge: Singing While Strumming Here's the first line of Country Roads drawn out in Taplature along with a standard campfire strum. Putting together the strum pattern and lyrics at the same time can cause major problems for many. In this article we'll look at the requirements to make doing so easy, in the shortest time possible! The Steps to Success ... 1. You'll need to be able to play the "basic strum" pattern shown effortlessly. Clic ..read more

Have You Been the Victim of a Bad Tab? You May be Entitled to Information! The big problem with basic tabs, like the one shown above (screen-grabbed from ultimate-guitar.com), is that there's all too often no indication as to what rhythm the notes are played in and where the beat (in particular the first beat of the bar) falls. For those of you with well-developed "rhythm muscles" that's not usually a big hurdle to overcome, but for most, then at some point there's going to be a struggle, especially when things get a bit more complicated than 4 simple eighth notes! If you've managed to name th ..read more

Learn how to practice this epic guitar solo played by Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh on The Eagles' most famous track with this slow (30bpm) run-through written up in Taplature! This is a remake of a video I first posted in 2007, one of my first on YouTube. Getting views was easier back then and it racked up one and a half million hits in its first 2 years. For some reason YouTube then deleted it, claiming copyright infringement even though it was just me and my guitar running through the solo at a musically unrecognisable snail's pace. Here it is again but this time enhanced with Taplature! https ..read more