The pentatonic scale is a five-note scale that is commonly used in guitar playing, particularly in rock and blues music.   The scale is made up of the root, second, third, fifth, and sixth notes of a major or minor scale. One of the most popular and widely used pentatonic scales for guitar playing is the minor pentatonic scale. This scale is made up of the root, minor third, fourth, fifth, and minor seventh notes of a natural minor scale. The minor pentatonic scale is often used in blues and rock music, and is a great scale for soloing and improvising. Another popular pentatonic scale ..read more

Learning the guitar is just like learning to swim, you make time and practice otherwise you may drown. The questions I get most are 'how long should I practice for, and what do I practice? These 2 questions come up in every conversation that I have with new students about learning the guitar. That answer is really dependent upon what sort of guitar player you would like to become. If you just want to play a few chords, then you may not want to put in the thousands of hours, it would take to master the guitar. Regardless of the type of player, we all need structure in our practi ..read more

Our thoughts are Our Own! Or at least that is what we think. These thoughts we call our own, to me, are like a collective stream of thoughts that pass through every single human being. Neither positive, nor negative. This is part of the idea of being "ONE". They don't have a negative or positive bias until they are subjectively viewed and taken on by a host (you and me)as their own thoughts. The truth is, whilst the thought is passing through in the stream it is objectively neutral. So, you can choose which thoughts you would like to retain as being a conscious representation of who or what yo ..read more

Greetings all. I hope you are all well.  This last weekend I took my family to see the theatre production of the "School of Rock" (SOR), now playing at Capitol Theatre in Sydney. As you may already have been aware, one of our best students, Max Hart is one of three actors playing the role of lead Guitarist Zack Mooneyham. Well on Saturday night we got to see Max play Zack in the production and I can tell you without any bias that "The School of Rock" is absolutely awesome, a laugh a minute and a first class production.  Till "SOR", Max had only ever audtioned for a school talent cont ..read more

One of our students Campbell (pictured above), started taking lessons with us at Alien Guitar Secrets mid last year. In that time, Campbell has improved his guitar playing exponentially. Just before we broke for the Easter holidays, I was able to teach Campbell how to construct chords (triads) from the Diatonic Modes of the Major Scale.  Well, after 2 weeks of no practice I got to see just how much sank in from our previous lesson.  Not being what I would call shy, Campbell grabbed the whiteboard markers in hand and took the opportunity to teach me (the teacher) what I (the teacher ..read more

Understanding Song Structures and Forms So, you have just begun to get your head around the Diatonic Modes of the Major Scale and are beginning to explore the scales and chord progressions that come from them. You practice your ass off with licks and arpeggios, but you soon realise that all of these scales and and other 'shredderings' are useless unless you put them into a song. So how do you do that? Well, if chord progressions are the building blocks of a song, then understanding a songs' structure and form is the blueprint you must be able to read . Song structure is the arrangement of ..read more

  Visualisation An Introduction to Visualisation. Using Visualisation techniques as a tool to help make you a better guitar player isn’t as far fetched an idea as you may think. Anyone that has been with me long enough, knows that our journey on the guitar, and the concepts I teach about guitar, music and playing, inevitably arrive at conversation about the use of positive reinforcement to help you achieve your goals on the guitar and in particular, VISUALISATION. The conversation itself, usually starts out harmless enough. More often than not, it’s trying to get a student through a chall ..read more

The idea of developing or training one’s ears to achieve better results in your guitar playing and over all musicianship, isn’t a new concept. In fact, if I take you back to the early 80’s (when I was a boy, becoming a man), I can tell you that I would use my ears to figure out songs and guitar solos over 90% of the time. The only times I would ever look at and try to use tablature (tab), to help me with songs, licks & solos, were when they were being transcribed within an issue of ‘Guitar Player’ magazine, or similar. I was a teenager and didn’t always have the $5.00 spare to shell out fo ..read more

  Singing what you want to play is what all great players and composers do, period! And, if you’re sitting in your chair right now protesting at that statement, or squirming at the idea of it, then I  suggest that you address the reasons you that you feel so fearful of doing this. After all, it's for the BENEFIT of your playing, right? I know it can be a difficult thing to overcome because I was once there. And believe me, the  reasons(excuses) for not singing were many, but at a particular point about 20 years ago, I realised that, in order for me to be the best I cou ..read more

How to Write Face Melting Licks By Rob Lobasso    What do these famous guitarists all have in common? Their faces have melted because of the humble guitar lick. 'boom, tish':)  Ok. I hear you. Lame joke,  so i'll stick to my day job.  So what’s a guitar lick, and how do I write a 'face melter'?  Well, according to Wikipedia, ‘a lick is "a stock pattern or phrase" consisting of a short series of notes used in solos and melodic lines and accompaniment. Licks in rock and roll are often used through a formula, and variations technique in which variants of ..read more