Lessons

In this lesson we’re going to take a look at how to tune a guitar. It seems so basic, but it’s a fundamental skill every guitar player needs to have and it’s one you should develop from the start.

Arpeggios are great tools to be used in music, but they can take a little time to get under your fingers. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at a few approaches to practicing arpeggios that not only build technique, but also improve musicality and overall knowledge of the fretboard.

As guitarists, once we learn the pentatonic boxes we seem to immediately strive to get “out of the box” and extend our playing up and down the fretboard. However, what if instead of trying to get out of the box, we seek to maximize what each box position has to offer?

Learning songs on guitar provides a great opportunity to expand your knowledge and skills beyond what’s required to just “play” the song. However, it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of learning songs chord for chord and note for note without putting much thought into what you’re actually playing. 

Barre chords are an important part of a guitar player’s repertoire and really expand your ability to navigate the fretboard beyond open chord playing. That said, they can be a bit of a pain to get down as they require a good bit of hand strength and dexterity to play well.

Parallel scales are scales that share the same root note, or tonic. It’s easy to confuse them with relative scales, which share all the same notes, but have a different tonic note. In this lesson we’ll take a look at what parallel scales are, how to figure out the notes of the parallel scale, and common uses for the scales.

Sus chords, or suspended chords, are variations to traditional major and minor chords. While the name might seem unfamiliar, you’ve undoubtedly heard them many times and would recognize them immediately in popular songs like “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen and many others. They have multiple uses and really help to add color and movement to chord progressions, particularly around a single chord.

In this lesson we’re going to explore triplets on guitar. Triplets are rhythmically different than quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes and can really add a cool feel to both rhythm playing and lead guitar licks.

In previous lessons we’ve learned about major, minor and diminished triads. In this lesson we’ll round out the triads with augmented triads. We’ll take a look at the interval structure that creates the augmented triad and map them to the guitar fretboard.

In this lesson we’re going to take a deep dive into the G major scale on guitar. We’ll look at the intervals and notes that make up the scale, the five positions and patterns for the scale, chords that are built from the G major scale, and also look at some song examples based in the key of G major.