The Awesome Power of the Third
It’s time to learn about the awesome power of the THIRD. No, you don’t NEED to know this. It’s just cool.
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Articles accessible to beginning guitarists
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Hit The Road, Stray Cat: A Cool Chord Progression You Need To Know
Here’s a cool chord progression you need to know! It’s so cool, you’re quite likely to recognize it from some hit songs. Here are a few that use very similar progressions: Here’s this chord progression in the key of E minor (Em), but you can of course transpose them to any key you need. Here…
Unlocking Musical Magic: A Primer on the Circle of Fifths
The Circle of Fifths is a chart that shows the relationships between all the musical keys. The Circle of Fifths can be helpful, but it takes a little education for a newcomer to understand it. That’s why I made the Box of Fifths, because sometimes it’s easier for me to reference a simple list of…
The Circle of Fifths Reference Chart: Your Key to Musical Brilliance
You might be interested in this article: Unlocking Musical Magic: A Primer on the Circle of Fifths.
How To Transpose A Song to a New Key
Some guitarists prefer to learn and play songs in their original keys. There’s a lot to recommend that perspective, but what if your vocal range just doesn’t match up with the song in its original key? There’s a solution: transpose it! To transpose a song is to move it from one key to another. We…
Unraveled: The Blueprint of the Major Musical Scale
Unraveled: The Blueprint of the Major Musical Scale! This article discusses the formula to build a major scale and how that formula and the scale itself apply to musical keys and the Circle of Fifths. Do you absolutely need to know this to play guitar? Nope, you don’t. But it’s cool information and you might…
Box of Fifths: A Quick Guide to Musical Keys
An alternative reference to the venerable Circle of Fifths. The top box has the sharps and the lower box has the flats. That’s pretty much it.
The A to G of the Musical Alphabet
Here’s the “A to G of the Musical Alphabet!” I was going to have a “tl;dr” section at the top of this piece, but this article turned out to be pretty to-the-point. It’s just this one idea: the musical alphabet starts at A and goes through G then starts over again, pretty much forever. Although…
How to Do a Blues Turnaround
How to do a blues turnaround! The turnaround is a cool riff that shows up time and again in blues and rock songs. Sometimes it shows up as an introductory phrase, sometimes it shows up as the riff in the last measure of a 12-bar blues, leading right back to the start (hence “turnaround”). There…
Blues Shuffle 101: Your First Guide to Groovy Blues Guitar Rhythms
Blues Shuffle 101: Your First Guitarist’s Guide to Groovy Rhythms
The guitar is a minimalist instrument: it is six wires attached to a piece of wood. Yet despite its simplicity I’m consistently amazed at the emotion those wires can evoke. One thing I love about the blues shuffle is that all you need to make this driving groove happen is two strings and a desire to rock.
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