My Online Guitar Lessons

Hello fellow guitarists, welcome to my brand new blog at myonlineguitarlessons.com!

Whether you are a beginner, an intermediate player, or you’re actually Paul Gilbert taking a look at my blog, I hope to provide something new and refreshing for all of you guys (and gals). I am almost as excited as a small child on Christmas Eve to get this blog up and rolling with great tips, tricks, reviews, and a general hangout for people who have the same passion that I have for guitar.

For the next few weeks I will be filling you in on some of the things I’m learning from my guitar teacher, as well as different guitar-related articles. Feel free to comment on my blogs to let me know what you think about them, and in what direction future blogs should go.

Rock on,

Jesse Holmes

My friend sent me a link today to a YouTube video of a person named Michael Angelo Batio playing a double necked guitar solo. This is one of the most creative guitar feats I have witnessed yet. To play as a right handed person while being left handed that fast has to count for something. He then goes to a cross armed tapping solo with each hand on opposite guitar necks. The level of performance this guy plays at is simply incredible. A great showman (some say too much), and a very technical and fast guitarist. Read an interview he has with Ultimate-Guitar here, as well as this sweet video, along with some of his other works.

I was just checking out some websites that I consider staples in my daily surfing as a guitarist (Ultimate-Guitar being my favourite) and came across this amazing guitar. It’s a restored replica of Slash’s favourite 1988 guitar which he used when touring for the first Guns N’ Roses album. I mean, this thing is pretty. And at a $5,880 MSRP, it better be. Well, at least it comes with a free leather jacket. Gibson is releasing three different inspired by Slash guitar models. They have the Custom Shop Slash inspired by Les Paul Standard VOS (MSRP $5,880), the Gibson Slash Les Paul Standard (MSRP $3,499), and then the Epiphone Slash Les Paul Standard (MSRP $1,464). Obviously the Custom Shop guitar has higher quality materials than the Gibson and Epiphone Standard guitars, with all available info, features, specs and gallery pics here. The guitars launch on April 1st.

We can continue on like we did previously in a continuous circle of our fifth notes of each new scale until we find all the major scales. So we started at C Major, went to G Major which had one sharp, then to D Major which had two sharps, A Major, which has three sharps, and so on. Write out all the notes of each of these major scales on a sheet of paper and keep them in front of you to determine a song’s key, or to know which notes to use within each key. Now, you can play any note on your guitar, go up two frets to find the next note in that key’s major scale, go up another two frets for the next note, then one fret, then two frets, then two frets again, then two frets again, and then one fret, and you will have just found out the major scale for that beginning note. Pretty nifty huh?

Now we will get down a little deeper into the harmonies of each note in our scale, which chords to play, and which chords were used in pretty much every old rock and roll song. We can place a number value on each our C Major scales’ notes and learn another new formula that shows each notes’ harmony. We will start at C and call it 1, number the next note D as a 2, E as a 3 and so on, from 1 to 8. This is another formula you can just take at face value, memorize, and then apply. Here is the formula and then I will explain after: 1-Major, 2-minor, 3-minor, 4-Major, 5-Major, 6-minor, 7-diminished, 8-Major. Taking our new numbered valued system where 1 is C, 2 are D, 3 is E, 4 is F, and so on, we apply our previous formula to each of those notes. Once applied, we now know the notes in the scales’ harmonies by playing the specified chords. This would mean that the chords for the key of C would be as follows: 1-C Major, 2-D minor, 3-E minor, 4-F Major, 5-G Major, 6-A minor, 7-B diminished, and 8-C Major again.

In old rock and roll, the first, fourth, and fifth chords where used as a main chord progression. So play these three major chords in any key, and you will have a basic progression. The 5th chord is known as the “turn around chord” that brings you back to your first chord, or a different chord to lead into another verse, chorus, or bridge. Many old love songs included the 6th chord, known as the relative minor chord into the mix as well. Now this becomes a numbers game. You write out your major scales as we learned before, apply the number value and major and minor chords accordingly, and then mess around with those chords to come up with your own progression.

Let’s pick right back up where we left off. With every major key, there is a certain pattern that is followed in terms of half and whole steps. Taking a look at a C Major scale—we will start with this key because it has no sharps or flats to confuse one with—we can see how many half and whole steps there are in between each note. Starting at one C and going up C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C by applying this simple formula that every aspiring musician should memorize, we can tell how many half and whole tones are in this scale, and therefore knowing how many frets between each note so one can play the scale effortlessly. Here is our “magic formula”—it may not make much sense at first, but will come in handy later—W W H W W W H.

What this means in plain English is whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. What this means in even plainer English is that in the C major scale, the intervals between each note is as follows: between C and D there is a whole step, (because there is a C# or Db between them), between D and E there is a whole step, (because of the D# or Eb between them), between E and F there is only a half step, (because there is no such thing as an E# or Fb; notice on a piano how there seems to be a black key missing), between F and G there is a whole step, and so on and so forth.

C   D    E    F    G    A   B    C   

  W   W   H   W   W   W   H

Now when you see any major scale, you can know that if you start at the root or tonic note (if it’s an E major scale the tonic note would be E), there are two whole steps, then a half step, three more whole steps, and then a final half step. How does this help us now? Using something called “the circle of fifths” we can find out every major key and the notes that are in it.

Starting again with C Major, there are no sharps or flats, so it would be from one C to the next knowing the intervals between each note. Now, we go to the fifth note in our C Major scale, which is G. Now we write out G-A-B-C-D-E-F-G and we can see that it follows our previous W-W-H-W-W-W-H formula except at one point. We need to have a whole step between E and F, and a half step between F and G. The rest of the scale is in line with the formula. So to do this, the simplest way of remembering this is when we find the fifth note of C (which is G), and then write out that note’s scale, we put a sharp (#) on the second last (or seventh note), which is the F. This would fix our problem by making the interval between E and the new F# a whole step, and the interval between F# and G a half step.

From there, we keep following our previous step, by taking the fifth note of our newly created G Major scale—which is a D—and writing out the letters from D to D again, but this time, we keep our F# from our previous scale. So the D Major Scale looks like this: D-E-F#-G-A-B-C#-D. Notice how the second last note—the C—is sharpened to fix our problem we had before, and the F is still sharp. Now we go on again. Try it yourself, take the fifth note of the newly made D Major scale (hint: A), write from A to A, keeping our F# and C# as before, and sharpening the second last note (it’s going to be the G this time.) Next lesson will deal further with our “circle of fifths” and I will show you which chords you can play in each key to start your own chord progressions—the base of every song.

Honestly, who doesn’t want to be able to melt faces off a 30,000 person crowd with a 10 minute solo so deadly it will make the first nine rows of the stadium cower in terror from the awesome shred? I know I do. I also have this burning desire to express my musical majesty with the world, but I just never knew the proper way how.

I played the guitar for a couple years now, taking some basic lessons getting me started in the right direction, even learning how to play most of my favorite songs on the radio. The thing was, I was mostly just fiddling around here and there without getting down to some serious business with my guitar playing. After breaking my wrist in a freak tragic snowboarding incident, I stopped taking lessons, although I still played guitar once my wrist healed. Over the past 3 or so years, I casually played, jammed a bit with some friends and continued on my wayward path.

I just recently became frustrated with my lack of own personal discipline with my guitar playing and went back to get some more lessons. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that my technique was right, and just someone to push me to that next level my guitar playing. I went in and asked him to start right off with the very basics. Something I could learn right away so I could immediately go home and start writing some of my own songs. I told my teacher I was especially interested in song writing and composing. This is the first thing he sat down and wrote on my paper, “The Musical Alphabet and Its Spacing.”

Some of you might groan at the thought of something so basic or so boring, or you just might groan because it has to do with simple theory. Ew, not theory, that’s like the fruitcake your Aunt gives you every Christmas of music right? She says you need to have it, but you never want it. Here are the facts, theory may seem boring and hard, but it is vital in creating music, and can be quite fun when understood. I am just going to scratch the surface on basic theory that will help you get up and running immediately with writing music. Theory gets so ridiculously deep, and there are many websites out there I will refer you to if you are interested in diving any deeper into this vast ocean known as theory.

Anyways, on with this musical alphabet business. First, we must understand the term “musical interval.” A musical interval is essentially the difference of pitch between two notes. This interval is defined in two things; tones and semi-tones. A tone is also called a whole step, and actually equals 2 frets on the guitar. A semi-tone (or half step) is equal to 1 fret on the guitar. It’s vital for a new guitarist to learn most, if not all the note names on the low E and A strings (top two strings). This is because from those notes you can develop pretty much every major chord. (There is a great free program that can help you with memorizing the notes on your fretboard called Fretboard Warrior, you can download it here.) Go up the fretboard on your low E string fret by fret, and notice the difference between the spacing of one fret and two frets. Every single time you move up a fret, you are going up a semi-tone, and every time you move two frets up, you go up a whole tone. In the next lesson we will take our newfound knowledge and apply it to the C Major scale— the starting point in our musical journey. Looking forward to seeing you soon.