It’s common for guitarists to get stuck in pentatonic scale boxes every now and again, and while you can sound great just milking box one of the minor pentatonic scale, it’s great to be able to travel the length of the fretboard without sounding like you’re moving from box to box; that’s where extended pentatonic scales come in! I’m going to assume you already have a good knowledge of most of the classic five pentatonic positions on the fretboard and introduce you to these extended pentatonic scales, which will break you free of those trusty boxes. Extended Pentatonics Scales – How They Work W ..read more

There comes a time in every guitarist’s life when they feel the need to *drum roll* learn the modes. While this is a commendable endeavor, it often leads to potentially great pentatonic blues and rock players losing their way in the unnecessarily confusing world of modes. So, if you’re still struggling to learn the modes, I think I might have the answer. Theoretically Speaking There are basically two ways you can look at modes. The first is a major scale starting on a different note, and the second is as scales in their own right. The first approach lends itself well to playing over modal (dia ..read more

You may think learning scales, arpeggios, licks and whatnot will make you a great improviser and don’t get me wrong–these things are the foundations of improvisation–but practicing these things have a kind of ‘limit of usefulness’, if you will. I often get asked how to practice improvisation and my answer is simple: practice improvising. For example, there are only a certain amount of times you can run a scale before you need to start improvising with it–if your goal is to practice improvisation–otherwise you’re just getting good at/practicing running scales. You may think you’re becoming a be ..read more

You’re probably familiar with that ringing sound in your ears on the way back from a concert or a gig, and it usually wears off after a couple of hours. However, when it doesn’t wear off, or it becomes a permanent feature of your hearing, you probably have some degree of tinnitus. Studies have shown that tinnitus can affect up to half of all musicians at some point in their careers, while among the general population the figure is around 10 to 15 percent. The good news is that a new tinnitus treatment (check it out here) in the form of natural supplements that not only provide relief from tinn ..read more

In this lesson, I’ll show you how to take a complex idea – infusing your playing with Arabic guitar scales – and start working it into your repertoire in an effortless way. Branching out and listening to different styles and genres of music is critical to your development not only as a guitarist, but as a musician. I like to do this mainly through improvisation and the exploration of scales other than those we habitually turn to when taking a solo. There are some amazing sounds in Arabic music that might seem out of reach or difficult to implement, but here’s a subtle but easy way to do just t ..read more

Chord tone soloing is one of those things that either eludes guitarists, or they shy away from it in favor of the one-scale-fits-all approach. While you can get by without necessarily learning chord tone soloing, the extra dimension it adds to your playing really makes it worthwhile investment of your practice time. In this article, I want to show you a simple method that you can implement almost immediately into your playing so that you can start to hit all the right notes in all the right places. A looper pedal is a great tool to have on hand for practicing chord tone soloing. If you don’t h ..read more

If you haven’t checked out Udemy, it’s a platform where you can learn pretty much anything at your own pace. It’s also been around for a while, so there are a ton of new and old guitar courses to choose from. You can check out the best ones (according to us) in this article, while here we’re going to take a look at some new Udemy guitar courses for a variety of levels that are worth checking out. The Way Music Works – Gretchen Menn First up is The Way Music Works, which is a course taught by the very talented Gretchen Menn of Zeparella fame, as well as her excellent body of solo work. It’s a c ..read more

The phrygian dominant scale is a hidden gem in the modes of the harmonic minor scale, but we’re not going to get into too much theory here; instead, we’re going to look at a couple of concepts that will allow you to start using the phrygian dominant scale in your playing right away. First of all, let’s compare it to something you do know, the classic A Minor Pentatonic scale. So, we’ve changed the b3 for a 3 but when using the minor pentatonic, you’re probably doing slight bends on that b3 anyway, so it doesn’t make that much difference. We also have a b2 to create the two-fret gap, and a b6 ..read more

As guitarists, we tend to play in a linear fashion by moving from one string to the next, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it can’t get somewhat limiting in sonic terms. To break out of that linear style of playing, I really recommend incorporating some intervallic leaps into your playing. The idea behind intervallic leaps is to play wider intervals that you would normally do when playing in a linear fashion. Eric Johnson’s spread arpeggio voicings are a good example of this, and there’s a great book called, ‘Intervallic Designs for Jazz Guitar: Ultramodern Sounds for Improvising‘, b ..read more

When Allan Holdsworth played chords, it could look downright bemusing and somewhat physically demanding; what’s more, how did he even come up with that stuff in the first place? Even before discovering Holdsworth myself, I kind of thought about chords in the same way because I found the more traditional way of seeing things a little difficult to get to grips with, or rather, I couldn’t use it to good effect in my playing. I wanted something more guitaristic that took advantage of the nature of the guitar and the layout of the fretboard. The way Allan Holdsworth thought about chords is quite a ..read more