My Online Guitar Lessons

My guitar teacher put it this way, “In performing, you want to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses…in practicing, you want to find your weaknesses, and work through them until they are no longer a weakness.”

He asked me to play some songs I had been working on, while he analyzed and pointed out my weaknesses. While at first putting me on the spot, I played some riffs I was practicing for him, and he noticed a few things:

1) My timing - Something I had told him was my weakness before playing. The thing was, my timing wasn’t off because I can’t keep a beat, but I was being timid with my picking hand. First of all, I had been using a hard pick to try and speed up my picking. The only trouble was I wasn’t being aggressive in my picking. In trying to minimize my picking movements, I had lost my timing and tone with the hard pick. He then handed me a .60mm Dunlop, which is like a sheet of paper compared to the Dunlop Jazz III’s I was using before. He then told me to exaggerate my picking movements and play as aggressively as possible while maintaining tone. When making more deliberate movements, my timing had actually improved. The thinner pick forced me to work harder, as well as being able to control the aggressiveness of my picking more than with the thicker pick.

2) Left hand speed - Something every guitarist wants to improve, as you always need to play just a little bit faster. There are many exercises which can help build left hand strength and speed, which I fully recommend. However, if you’re not doing them right, they can actually be more detrimental than good. I have a disease in my playing I like to refer to as “flying fingers”. Not flying as in really fast fingers, but flying as in the fingers that aren’t fretting a note like to “fly away” from the fretboard. This distance between the fingers not playing a note and the fretboard slows down my playing a lot more than I thought it did. Keeping the fingers close to the fretboard, even when they aren’t playing a note is something many guitarists need to focus on.

3) Practicing with distortion - Don’t. No cheating allowed when practicing scales and hard riffs. You’re giving yourself the illusion of playing it right when you might be sacrificing tone and accuracy. I have been guilty of this for quite some time, but playing everything clean helps me to see my mistakes and weaknesses as they really are. It is frustrating at first trying to get it perfect without any fancy effects to make you sound better. But this way if you practice to perfection clean, once you add the distortion and effects, you’ll be a much better player.

I challenge you to sit down and either record and critique yourself, or get someone else to analyze where your weaknesses might be, so you can really focus on practicing through - not around - your weaknesses.

Just read an awesome post on learnguitarnow.com’s blog about the 5 mistakes made by beginner guitarists by John W. Truggle.

His 5 points were:

1. They don’t practice with a metronome.
2. They don’t play on the tips of their fingers.
3. They try to play too fast.
4. They don’t practice what they can’t play.
5. They don’t play in front of people.

I touched on a few of these in my learning to shred is like working out post, just not as detailed.

Check out the rest of the post here.

Today, Ig (over at igblog.wordpress.com) had an interesting post regarding the theory of deliberate practice by a Florida State University professor. The theory was that practicing for 2 hours every day for 10 years straight would make you an expert in the field. With measured disciplined practice over a long period of time, ‘expert’ status would be gained in that field.

However, what determines being an expert? Nothing is more stubborn than the knowledge of an expert. If someone ever believes they have arrived at some point, they can never grow. True success is a journey, not a destination. Everyone will have their own opinion about results, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

While I believe that true ‘natural gift’ comes from the self-discipline to practice longer and harder than anyone else, Stratoblogster had an interesting spin on things. He said that there are many extraneous variables that came into play to guarantee success, and would tend to agree. Obviously putting in 2 hours a day for 10 years on the guitar would have viable results, but what really determines results is not that someone spent thousands of hours playing, but what someone put into those hours.

This goes to show that a rigorous playing schedule can bring about many different results. This does not mean guaranteed success as a professional musician; but remember success is a journey, not a destination. Success to each person depends on their goals, dreams and aspirations. While anyone who practices for that many hours will indeed improve, their level of discipline, proper teaching, and determination is what is going to separate them from the crowd.

How can one become successful as a guitarist then? Well, what’s your idea of success? If you want to grow in your guitar journey, certainly daily disciplined practice over a long period of time is going to help you grow. Success is made up of successful days, which make up successful months, successful years, and so on.

So what’s that mean for us today? It means that right now you need to pick up your guitar, give it the attention it deserves (Ig has also declared it Hug Your Guitar Week), set yourself some daily practice target goals, and record yourself or find another way to measure your progress.

Shredding is something a lot of guitarists want to learn. They seem drawn to the lightning fast speed of professional guitarists, and just dream of the day they can play that fast. However, they don’t take the necessary steps and do the work required to get there.

While playing insanely fast isn’t musicianship, playing faster is something everyone wants to learn. Increasing your playing speed on the guitar is a lot like working out. If you went to a gym, you wouldn’t be able to just bench press 300 lbs right away. The other people you see there that are much larger than you have worked long and hard, slowly increasing each day to be able to lift the weight they do. They all had to start somewhere to get where they are, and guaranteed they didn’t start at 300 lbs. They started lighter, slowly adding on weight.

Many people think that all they need to do is move their fingers faster. Well in some way that’s true, but what if a personal trainer said to you “all you need to do is push harder and you should be able to move 300 lbs” on the first day of working out. Your muscles in your finger are just like any other muscles. While, for example, your legs get daily use as you walk around, if you want them to get stronger, you need to push them harder doing various exercises depending on the results you want to achieve. Your fingers are no different. While they may be exercised with regular guitar playing, certain exercises are needed if you want to see drastic improvements.

There are many exercises you can do to increase your playing speed, the main one being scales. Before I show you a few exercises there are 4 steps that must be understood. When doing your exercises, these are your priorities, do not go onto the next until you have mastered the one before it:

1) Accuracy – This is number one because it is often the first thing sacrificed for speed. Every individual note must be perfectly clear. Don’t wuss out either. Since you’re going to make mistakes, make them loud so you can hear exactly what they are. Don’t play soft and quiet or put only a little bit of effort into it. For more accurate playing, try playing on the very tips of your fingers, curling your fingers so they hit the fret straight on.

2) Smoothness – Smoothness is getting rid of the ‘pause’ or ‘gap’ between each note played. Each note should be successive and strung together in a clean run. This comes after accuracy because if each note is accurate, it is easier to have a clean sounding run.

3) Aggression – Aggression is where you over exaggerate and emphasize each fretted and picked note. It’s where you put your heart and soul into each note and really give it your all. However, this comes after accuracy and smoothness, because you don’t want to be aggressively sloppy and full of mistakes.

4) Speed – Notice how this is the final step in playing faster. This is because if you do all the previous steps correctly over and over and over again, the speed will come. If you have got all the steps down before this one at a comfortable speed, slowly increase the beats per minute on your metronome and redo the whole process.

When I would workout at the gym, I had a journal where I recorded every exercise and weight to measure and track my progress. To do this in your guitar playing, use a metronome to keep track on how you are doing in your exercises by bpm (beats per minute). The metronome should be a guitarist’s best friend. Many guitarists feel that the metronome is unnecessary. I felt this way myself until I decided I wanted to improve my playing speed. It really is the best way to measure if your playing speed is improving. It is also the best way to improve your timing and song learning ability. If you don’t want to go out and buy one, there is a free one online here. There will be downloadable pdfs and guitar pro files available on the downloads page with a few exercises that I use for warming up and finger strengthening. With all these exercises, start at a slow pace ie. 60 bpm, playing two notes every beat.

Before ever starting my guitar lessons, I was asked what I would prefer to be taught and in which direction I want to head in. Since I was starting up a band in the summer, I inquired about songwriting. My teacher gave me a brief outline on writing lyrics and melody lines, gave me a chord progression to work with, and told me to write.

This type of forced writing took me outside of my comfort zone—not expecting a killer hit single—but getting used to writing lyrics, putting melodies to them, and making them work over progressions.

He told me to start with the end goal in mind; choosing a subject, mood, key, pace and style I was aiming for. I just threw out some random ideas; my subject was going to be about a car, it was going to be a jazzy style, in a minor key, and at a moderate pace.

He gave me a neat little minor chord progression to work with, and I just used a simple minor scale and plucked out a simple melody line. The lyrics were nothing astounding, but he helped me with some ideas. He pointed out which words needed to be accented when sung, as well as the importance of ending on an expectant note when ending a verse or chorus and leading into the next phrase.

There is a well-known phrase out there that goes something like this:

Tell your audience what you’re going to tell them.
Tell them.
Then tell them what you told them.

This applies especially well in lyric writing. There are a whole bunch of more forced writing exercises you can do to help improve writing, but most importantly, you must have a reason for writing.

“…It may seem like an odd thing to do, but it’s worth asking yourself exactly why you bother to write words for your songs at all. Different people will come up with different answers to this question. Some write words to their songs because they have ideas, opinions or stories that they want to be heard by an audience, or because they want to make their audience feel particular emotions, or because they want their audience to identify with them. Others write words because it’s conventional for the style of music in which they’re working to have lyrics, or because the human voice is an important musical instrument in that style and it needs to have some words to sing.” — Sam Inglis, Understanding And Writing Lyrics: Part 1

Check out the rest of this great article here.

There are many great places on music forums for writing lyrics as well as melody lines. The simple and pretty obvious way of creating your own stuff is first looking at some of your favourite artists’ melody lines and lyrics. Pick them apart and see how they do what they do. Listen to your favourite song over and over again, hum or sing the melody line, pluck it out on your guitar and see what key it’s in.

Another great idea is to keep a notepad and personal digital recorder with you or nearby. An aspiring artist should always be ready, and you can never be sure when something will inspire you to write. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but if it isn’t written down or recorded right away, it’s the same as never having one in the first place.

In my basic guitar theory lesson 2, we learned the pattern that every major scale was based on (remember the WWHWWWH), and in lesson 3 we learned that the 6th note of the scale was the relative minor. Knowing this, we have a new pattern for our minor scale. Before, the C scale (CDEFGABC) had the first formula applied to it. Now that we know that A minor is the relative minor of the C scale (6th note in the C scale), there is a new formula for the A natural minor scale (ABCDEFGA) is – WHWWHWW.

We know that each note in the scale has a certain number value (also called degrees or intervals) assigned to them. Since there are three types of minor scales—natural, melodic, and harmonic—the thing that makes them different are their intervals. The natural minor scale degrees compared to the major (C Natural Minor compared to C Major) would be

C Major:   C D E F G A B C
Intervals: 1  2 3 4 5  6 7  8

C Natural Minor: C D Eb F Gb Ab B C
Intervals:              1 2  b3 4  5   b6 b7 8

The natural minor has flattened 3rd, 6th and 7th notes compared to the major.

C Major:   C D E F G A B C
Intervals: 1  2 3 4 5  6 7  8

C Harmonic Minor: C D Eb F G Ab B C
Intervals:                 1  2 b3 4  5  b6 7  8

The harmonic minor has flattened 3rd and 6th notes.

C Major:   C D E F G A B C
Intervals: 1  2 3 4 5  6 7  8

C Melodic Minor: C D Eb F G A B C
Intervals:              1  2 b3 4 5  6 7  8

The melodic minor has only a flattened 3rd note, however that is only when going up the scale. Going down the scale, the melodic minor is the same as the natural minor.

Here is the most common natural minor scale pattern that I use, the tonic notes filled in.

Practice makes perfect.

Each of the previously mentioned CAGED method chord shapes has a corresponding major scale pattern, that include all of the notes played in the different chord shapes.

The most common of these patterns is the fourth one, the root notes being the ones that are filled in. The root notes are where you start the scale, the key of the scale depending on the root note started on. Although the 4th pattern (E chord shape) is the most common, while the other patterns are helpful if the root note is not always on the low E string.

Scales are essentially what melody lines are created from. Try listening to your favourite songs and identifying which key it is in by which notes in the scale are used. Take the most familiar pattern (number 4) and try and find the key of the song. Looking at our first lessons, we can see that once you find the key, you can find which chords are in the song, and in no time flat you should be able to identify either the melody line, or the chord progression.

Practice some solo improvising using the notes in the scale patterns over its corresponding chord or a simple chord progression. Sometimes you can stay in the same scale pattern throughout a chord progression, while other times you might need to switch scale patterns to the corresponding chord.

The best way to practice these scales is just to play them over and over and over and over again. Work on hitting each note cleanly before ever trying to build up speed.

I had another lesson this week with my teacher, this time getting a little more in depth with some chord patterns. I learned that there are five different chord patterns that when shifted up and down the fretboard they become another chord. These different patterns allow you to keep lateral fretboard movement to a minimum, essentially maximizing your playing speed.

The five chord types are as follows: C chord pattern, A chord pattern, G chord pattern, E, and then D. Each of these chord patterns is either based on a root note on the low E or A string, which is why it was essential—as mentioned in previous lessons—to memorize the notes on those two strings. These chord patterns are often called the CAGED method, and are very helpful if you want to play either the same chords in different positions on the fretboard, or different chords in the same relative 4-fret region.

If we start off by taking our open C chord shape—where our root note (C) is on the A-string, 3^rd fret—we can slide that same shape up our fretboard, and depending what note on the A-string we are on, that will determine the chord. However, when you slide the C chord shape up, you must barre the bottom 3 strings with your index finger and use the other ones to finger the C chord shape. So it would go from:

Open C chord shape

0
1
0
2
3
X

To

C#

1
2
1
3
4
X

And so on, all the way up the fretboard—the chord depending on which note on the A string you are on.

Moving on to the open A chord shape:

0
2
2
2
0
X

Which would shift up the fretboard to

A#

1
3
3
3
1
X

And so on, all the way up the fretboard—the chord depending on which note on the A string you are on.

The A chord shape is also known as your “powerchord” shape, where you only play the notes of the chord that are on the A,D,G strings.

The open G chord shape is:

3
0
0
0
2
3

And would shift up the fretboard to

G#

4
1
1
1
3
4

And so on, all the way up the fretboard—the chord depending on which note on the E string you are on. This shape is a tricky one to accomplish as you have to barre the middle strings while forming the G shape with your first, middle, and pinky finger.

The open E chord shape is

0
0
1
2
2
0

And would shift up the fretboard to

F

1
1
2
3
3
1

And so on, all the way up the fretboard—the chord depending on which note on the E string you are on. This chord shape is also known as a “barre” chord.

And finally, the D chord shape is

2
3
2
0
X
X

And would shift up the fretboard to

D#

3
4
3
(1)
X
X

This time, the root note depends on where you are playing on the D string, or also, the root note can be found two frets down, and on the low E string.

To practice these different chord shapes, I took a single chord, and tried to find the five positions on the fretboard to play it. When you know which chord shape you are in, the next shape moving up the fretboard is the next letter in our CAGED acronym.

For example, with the C chord. Starting with your open C chord, the next C chord up the fretboard would be the A shape. This A shape is two frets up from the first shape, the root note found on the 3^rd fret on the A string. (This was also the same fret for our root note in our open C chord, and is the note that starts each chord shape.)

The next shape where the C chord is found on the fretboard would be the G shape, now using the low E string for finding the root note. This would be on the 8^th fret of the low E string.

The next chord shape would be the E chord shape. Once again, the root note for the E chord shape is found on the low E string, and is actually the same root note as for the G shape—the 8^th fret on the low E string.

The next shape is the D shape, which can be tricky to find. The D shape chord’s root note is based on the B string note. The root note on the B string is actually 5 frets higher than the root note on the low E string that was previously played in the E chord shape.

Once I knew and recognized how to play a C chord in all five positions, I moved on to another chord and learned the positions. Breaking it up into pieces helped me learn it easier, instead of trying to find all the different chords in all the positions at once.

No matter which chord position you are in, the C-A-G-E-D pattern is a continuous loop. This means that if you are playing a G chord in an E chord pattern, the next pattern up the fretboard would be a D chord shape, then a C shape and so on. This also works going down the fretboard. If you are playing a F# in a G chord pattern, the next pattern going down the fretboard would be an A pattern, then a C shape, and then a D shape, and so on.

Check out this blog for any more help or clarity with the CAGED system here.

For a visual aid on the CAGED method, check out this video.

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.