Tag Archives: beginner

Guitar double stops can add a lot of flavor to your playing. They add life and fullness to both rhythm and lead playing, creating interesting textures not achieved by basic chords or single notes alone.

With an estimated 90% of new guitar players quitting within the first year of playing, I think it’s important to start learning real songs right away. After all, that’s why we start playing guitar in the first place, right? In this lesson, I’ve provided some easy guitar riffs for beginners to start learning and playing real music.

In this lesson we’re going to work on two foundational techniques of guitar playing, hammer-ons and pull-offs. At first these techniques may feel a bit difficult and awkward, but with focused practice they’ll become an integral part of your playing.

In this lesson we’re going to take a deeper look at the D major scale, which is another commonly used scale in popular music. We’ll take a look at the notes, intervals, scale positions and chords that make up the key of D major.

With so much attention given to the left hand when playing guitar, right hand technique is a frequently overlooked. With little or no dedicated attention, the right hand seems to be dragged along for the ride with the progression of left hand technique. What can happen over time is the development of left hand technique becomes limited by the slower developing right hand, and progress as a whole slows to a crawl.

In a previous lesson, we looked at how to build chords from the major scale, which is an important concept when it comes to understanding diatonic harmony. In this lesson we’re going to go through the process of building minor scale chords, which follows the same process as the major scale.

Seventh chords are chords that include the root plus the 3rd, 5th, and 7th intervals above the root. Another way to think about it is a seventh chord is a triad plus a 7th interval.

Slash chords are chords in which a note other than the root note is in the bass position. You might think this sounds very similar to chord inversions and you’d be right.

In this lesson we’re going to dive into the Let It Be guitar solo by The Beatles. Let It Be is on the 1970 album of the same name. Performed by George Harrison, this is a great solo for the beginner-intermediate guitar player to learn.