A lot of guitar players focus on learning songs. Which is good. However, the songs that players practice will tend to be within a very narrow selection of music styles. After some time, the guitarist will branch out and begin learning other forms of music. Thus expanding their horizons and introducing new skills...
Eventually, players will go further and start learning scales, arpeggios and how to perform solos. But, the problem that tends to occur is that a lot of guitarists will often remain weak technically, for too long. This causes everything from sloppy playing to having pain in the hands or wrist. In this episode of the Guitar Blog Insider, I'm going to discuss ways to help strengthen your hands, by Learning More Songs in More Styles. In getting started, I want to say that learning songs is important, and I highly recommend it. However, when you do learn songs, it is more valuable to continuously switch through songs that are from different types of musical styles (performed by different musical artists) in those styles. Changing styles like that, will help you develop a wider scope of different techniques that you'd otherwise (very likely) never get exposed to if your stylistic focus was more narrow. WATCH THE VIDEO:
STYLES OF MUSIC: Here's a basic Folk /Bluegrass strumming piece, in the style of the, "Grateful Dead." FOLK:
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Playing Folk /Bluegrass style is excellent for focusing on a lot of the open position chord types. Plus, it also tends to include some melodic passing tones as well. It's a great study of basic chord strumming, and it helps players develop a solid sense of straight time feel at slower tempos. However, if we switch to a completely different style of playing, we'll introduce separate and very different playing techniques, which will in turn strengthen our hands and allow us to incorporate new playing techniques (in order to achieve the sound required for playing in those other styles). This includes styles like; hard rock, heavy metal or even speed-metal. These music styles can offer a whole new perspective to our playing technique. METAL:
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Performing ideas in a guitar style like Hard Rock or Speed Metal will require a fast and highly accurate picking hand, along with a solid ability to control over-drive settings and distortion pedals so that the amount of "unwanted" noise from the amp (being over-driven) is kept down to a minimum. It's not as easy to do as some guitarists think. But, the skills you gain from trying to play music like this can be applied toward many other playing styles. In fact the dexterity you gain from rock and metal can even help in "Other" unrelated music styles - like Jazz.
JAZZ:
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Playing jazz offers guitarists the chance to start reaching for many unique chord voicings that are very different for the fretting hand's fingers to deal with. When making the transition from Folk, or Country or Pop music - into Jazz, we'll have to begin learning a lot of 7th quality chord types. Plus, jazz requires us to stretch the chord tones even further by including extensions like; 9th's and 13th's along with altered tones and diminished shapes. It's a lot of new chord fingerings to learn, and, this means adding a lot more fretting dexterity to the skills of the fretting hand. There's still another side of playing to consider when it comes to higher dexterity, and that's the other hand - the strumming-hand. When you stop and think about it, one of the best styles to learn for developing that side of the equation is Funk.
Funk is about as demanding as it gets when things come down to playing fast rhythms with tight chord shot ideas. Jazz playing will mix major and minor pentatonic scale single-note lines. When you study playing Funky guitar ideas, you'll need to learn how to think fast on your feet and control all of the very quick hand movements applied by both the fretting hand, as well as, the strumming hand. Funk is the style of sixteenth-notes performed using a lot of syncopation. And, this means learning how to play with many types of different off-time rhythmic elements and that will require mastering your strumming-hand's rhythm skills. FUNK:
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CONCLUSION: Even if you know a lot of songs, it still doesn't necessarily mean that you have strong control over your hands' ability to perform all types of different techniques. And, when it comes to playing guitar, technique is certainly abundant. In fact, the more control you have over your guitar sound - the better. The more chord patterns you can perform - the better. The more overall control you possess technically will help you become better equipped to play guitar in a lot more situations. That flexibility translates to less stress (when other musicians ask you to jam with them), and more opportunity to play more types of gigs, and in the end - make a lot more money.
VISIT THE WEB-SITE: Well, I'd like to end the discussion by saying, thanks for joining me... If you want to learn more about what I do as an online guitar teacher, then head over to my website at creativeguitarstudio.com and sign up your FREE lifetime membership. When you want more, you can always upgrade to either a Basic, or a Premium lesson package and start studying the guitar courses that I've organized for the members of my website.
Also, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on all of this in the comment section below... if you enjoyed this video on YouTube, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more. Thanks again and we'll catch up next week , for another episode of the, "Guitar Blog Insider."
Welcome to the new QwikSongs video lesson series. Lesson one covers the song, Midnight Rider by the Allman Brothers Band The videos are available in the members area. Includes PDF handout!
QwikSongs are available to members at Creative Guitar Studio.com. Lessons in the QwikSongs Series run through the structure of popular songs. This will include topics such as; harmonies, scales, song sections and guitar solos...
Episode #001 "Midnight Rider" the Allman Brothers.
Section one works through the structure involved with creating the harmony of the songs main verse.key signature and tonality will be the focus.
Section two explores the structure of the songs chorus section. Includes the study of the effects of how the songs chorus impacts a tonal color shift compared to the verse.
Section three is devoted to the songs solo section. We'll study the underlying riff for soloing over, the riffs key center and tonality, along with the scales required to perform licks and lines to produce corresponding solos.
Sign into the website (or create your free members account) to join the members site. Sign up for the Basic Monthly or Premium (annual) membership to download the PDF handout for this lesson and study all of the other classes available on the website.
Become a FREE member of the website, sign up today!
In this video, I'm going to give your skills a boost for when you're playing that next guitar solo by helping you to start ripping up the neck with eight mixed arpeggio licks...
The following licks cover everything from; Major and Minor, to Seventh qualities, Extended ideas, Diminished and Altered arpeggios.
Licks 1 and 2: Mixed Major and Minor Triads...
Lick #1).
Lick #2).
Licks 3 and 4: Major 7 and Minor 7 w /Extended:
Lick #3).
Lick #4).
Licks 5 and 6: Mixed 7th Chords, w/Triads and Compound Extended Intervals
Lick #5).
Lick #6).
Licks 7 and 8:
Mixed 7th Chords w/Altered and Diminished Harmony
Lick #7).
Lick #8).
Well, hey, thanks for joining me, If you'd like to Find Out What You Should Learn Next on Guitar - take a look at the courses over on my website at CreativeGuitarStudio.com.
My step-by-step; Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced courses will cover what you need to know, along with how to be able to move forward and become the best player that you can be.
I've worked on these courses since 1992 and I feel that all together they're the best guitar program you'll ever find. The courses will help you learn to identify what's required to get you up to the next level of guitar playing, in a very organized way, that makes sense.
So, I look forward to helping you further at CreativeGuitarStudio.com ...Until next time - take care and we'll catch up again next time. Bye for now!
In this final review lesson, I will be running through a group of priority subjects that we have covered over the last nine months. I believe these subjects are the ones which players should be focused on for long-term success in the performance of both steel-string and nylon-string acoustic guitar...
In this lesson, we'll explore how to work toward "zeroing in" on a collection of some of the most important acoustic topics. These will include subject areas such as; how to create and trace out simple melodies from scales and chords, as well as, how to apply a wide array of different acoustic finger-picking techniques.
PART ONE: Example one, takes a simple melodic line (operating as a single-note scalar statement) from within the key of "C Major," (example 1a), and expands on the idea using a fingerstyle acoustic guitar approach, (example 1b). Example 1b, explores how to take the single note line and add slight modifications to incorporate interesting groove and phrasing.
Example two, breaks down of a simple open position pattern picking approach (example 2a), involving a key of "G Major," preset plucking pattern consistently applied across the string sets. Along with the plucking pattern, the part applies a consistent rhythm pattern used across the 2-bar phrase. The result is a solid and flowing feel.
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PART TWO: Drills and exercises in example three are designed to help build and maintain a high degree of technical skill. It is important to apply at least a few daily drills to help maintain good plucking and good fretting hand control. The drills in example three will help guitarists understand a number of specific exercise areas that can be focused on.
Example four completes our final-review lesson by exploring the importance of developing proficiency with the more advanced acoustic playing styles of "Classical" and "Jazz."
These genres are important, because these two guitar styles are at the pinnacle of higher level playing technique. The benefits of developing more skill in both Jazz and Classical will result in better ability and skill across many other acoustic guitar playing areas.
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RELATED VIDEOS for: Review - Continuing Acoustic Education...
When it comes to performing jazz ideas, most guitar players who have their playing background in Folk , Rock, or Pop, will tend to get fairly intimidated when it comes to playing Jazz...
Feeling intimidated about playing jazz doesn't have to be the case. And, learning to simply produce a jazzy sound in your guitar playing, isn't overly complex, and it won't take a thousand hours of practice to be able to establish either.
In this episode of the Guitar Blog Insider, I'm going to cover a few simple ways to help, "Bring Jazz into Your Guitar Playing Style." And, we'll do it in about ten minutes.
To be able to add the jazz sound into your guitar playing - as quickly as possible, we're going to focus on understanding the basics of something known of as "Rhythm Changes." The term "Rhythm Changes" refers to the chord progression occurring in George Gershwin's song, "I Got Rhythm." These changes are one of the most popular Jazz chord progression sounds available. And, by simply taking a small segment from these chord changes, a guitarist - (even one completely foreign to Jazz playing), can start sounding very jazzy.
WHY RHYTHM CHANGES: "Rhythm Changes," (the complete Gershwin approach), are typically a 24-bar progression that follows a specific format of chord changes, (see; Advanced Guitar - Stage One - Lesson 09). However, for our purpose, we're only going to focus on four chords from this standard jazz progression. These chords make up the main element of jazz rhythm changes, and they will function as a fantastic place to start learning jazz from. The cycle of chord changes found in the first four chords of a set of Rhythm Changes will go a long way in helping a musician develop their skills for playing jazz. First of all, let's explore the chord shapes that you'll need to become more familiar with.
CHORDS PATTERNS: The chords used in playing "Rhythm Changes" make up a popular group of chord movements that are known of as the "I-VI-II-V." This progression is extremely common in jazz music and in our example, we'll study these chords within the key of "C Major." THE TONIC CHORD: The "I-chord" of our progression is going to be based upon the tonal center note of the key which is "C." Typically, we'd find a "Maj7" chord performed on this degree, however we're going to play a simple extension here of a "Major 6." The addition of the "6th" is very common and applying it will add a jazzy flair to the sound of the tonic chord.
THE "VI"-CHORD: The "VI-chord" for most "Rhythm Changes" (progressions) is generally played as a "Secondary Dominant". A "Secondary Dominant Chord," is a chord that has been converted to a "Dominant 7th chord" but normally exists as another chord quality. In our case the "VI-Chord" would normally function (diatonic) as an "A Minor 7th." But, after being converted to a "Secondary Dominant," it now operates as an, "A Dominant 7th."
THE "II"-CHORD: The second chord of our key, (the third chord of the progression), is the normally functioning (diatonic), "D Minor 7."
THE "V"-CHORD: The 5th chord, (operating as the last /final chord of our progression), is also functioning as a proper (primary), diatonic, "G Dominant 7th."
Practice cycling through all four chord shapes until they begin to feel smooth and connected. Have the cycle of chords move at a slow tempo, but switch from one chord to the next quickly.
SCALE ASSOCIATION: Once you're familiar with the basic chord changes, ( the chords above can be found in all kinds of different jazz tunes), the next step is to learn how a simple scale (a Major Pentatonic Scale), can be used to form a few basic jazzy melody lines around this set of chords. For our example, we'll remain at up in and around the 7th position on the guitar neck and we'll learn one of the most common Major Pentatonic scales for the key of "C major."
Keep in mind that I've added a passing tone to the Major Pentatonic, it is a minor third interval and it functions chromatically (in between), the major 2nd and the major 3rd of the scale.
THE MAJOR PENTATONIC (w/b3 Passing Tone):
The lowered third used within this chromatic passing approach is a critical sound for us because it's going to be integral for developing the "Jazzy" effect. This "Jazzy Effect" is a core concept of the application of this scale over the "I, VI7, II, V7" chord changes (the Rhythm Changes). CREATING MELODIC IDEAS: Now we will use the scale from the tonic of "C" and we'll organize a jazzy sounding melodic statement that can be played along with the "Rhythm Changes" group of chords we just studied. The more you work on creating melody with the scale pattern, the more that this progression will help you get started with using this scale within a jazz format. Melodic Statement:
As you can tell from the sound of this melody, by playing over our, key of "C Major - Rhythm Changes," using the "C Major Pentatonic Scale," (with the, "minor 3rd passing tone"), we end up producing a jazzy melodic statement that really fits the bill for the sound of this harmony. Going forward, you can use this "Major Pentatonic b3rd" scale for creating melody over Rhythm Changes in any key. Using the "Major Pentatonic w/b3," is not only a fantastic way to get going into the world of playing Jazz, but it is easy to accomplish. So, you can start developing that "Jazz Sound," in a short period of study time.
CONCLUSION: As you can tell from studying these exercises, learning to play in the style of Jazz isn't as complicated as it might seem at first. And, your approach to jumping into Jazz chords (and creating melody over them using basic scales) doesn't take a lot of effort to in turn produce some nice jazzy sounding lines. In fact, as you've just heard right here in these examples, the sound of the "Major Pentatonic" with the lowered 3rd included (to create that "Chromatic Passing" line). Is an excellent way to learn to form some basic /initial jazz solos over one of the most common chord progressions used in jazz music.
VISIT THE WEBSITE: Well, I'd like to end the discussion by saying, thanks for joining me. If you want to learn more about what I do as an online guitar teacher, then head over to my website at creativeguitarstudio.com and sign up your FREE lifetime membership. When you want more, you can always upgrade to either a Basic, or a Premium lesson package and start studying the guitar courses I've organized for the members of my website.
Also, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on all of this in the comment section below... if you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up and subscribe for more. Thanks again and we'll catch up next week , for another episode of the, "Guitar Blog Insider."
