Tag Archives: intermediate

So, you know your CAGED chords, arpeggios, and scale shapes, but when it comes to moving around the fretboard, you still feel lost. If this sounds familiar, there’s really just one small piece you’re missing that’s keeping you from seeing everything up and down the neck.

In the last lesson, we harmonized the G major scale in first position to understand the chords and intervals contained within the scale. This type of exercise is great because it reinforces four essential skills at once: scale position identity, interval recognition, root note awareness, and diatonic harmony. In this lesson, we’re going to do the same with the G minor scale.

When I think of Mixolydian, there’s one band that immediately comes to mind: Grateful Dead. Many of their tunes are in Mixolydian. Once you get the sound of the scale in your ear, you can’t help but hear it all through their music. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at the Mixolydian mode, interval qualities, and the Mixolydian scale patterns.

I love to work from arpeggios when improvising and creating musical lines. It’s so easy to create a melody with them and they can be easily expanded upon with scales. In this lesson we’re going to work through a simple musical exercise for applying arpeggios and scales to the guitar.

Mixolydian, along with Dorian, is one of my favorite modes to improvise over. It’s rather straightforward and gives you room to experiment and intermix several approaches. In this lesson we’re going to take a look at a three simple options for improvising a guitar solo in the Mixolydian mode.

Legato is a guitar technique in which notes are connected together in a smooth manner. On the guitar, this is achieved with hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides while minimizing picking of the strings. At face value, it might seem like a simple technique to pick up. However, it can be quite challenging as it requires ample finger strength and exceptional timing.

Learning scales is quite a task and how you go about practicing guitar scales makes all the difference. No doubt it’s challenging, but learning to play them fluidly up and down the fretboard is so rewarding. While it takes time and effort to achieve, it can be simplified with a four step process that can make your practice much more effective.

In this lesson we’re going to dive deeper into the dorian mode on the guitar. We’ll take a look at what makes up the dorian mode, explore the dorian scale shapes all over the guitar fretboard, view some sample dorian chord progressions and cover a few approaches to soloing over a dorian progression.

Slow Dancing in a Burning Room is one of John Mayer’s best songs, both lyrically and musically. Musically, it’s rather simple. But the simplicity is what makes it so great. In this lesson we’ll break down the intro to the song and take a look at the chord progression and the riff he’s playing over top of the progression.