Being a hobbyist or gigging musician in the 2020s is quite a bit different from when I learned to play a few decades ago. One big difference is that the modern first-world guitarist has access to a fair bit of helpful technology. Below are four apps I love and use regularly! Pro Metronome One of…
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! 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…
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.
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! 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 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.
Here’s your step-by-step guide on how to read guitar tablature! While there are some real advantages to learning musical notation, tablature is the widely-used alternative for many guitarists. Tablature is basically a map for a given song that shows which frets to play on which strings. In its most basic form guitar tablature is six…
A little useful music theory for jamming guitarists!