13
MAY
2014
MAY
2014
0
Musical heroes
We all have our musical heroes.
Usually we discover them early on in our guitar playing experience.
Heroes can be a wonderful guiding light that give us something to aim for, and drive us on to take our guitar playing to greater heights.
Sometimes it’s our heroes that motivate us to take up guitar playing in the first place.
Musical heroes can also seem to be an alien breed though. This is particularly true when we view them through the lens of the ...
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28
NOV
2014
NOV
2014
Arpeggios are the notes that make up a chord when played in succession, as oppose to at the same time.
They are just as valuable a resource for creating music as scales are, and in a way arpeggios are mini-scales of just three or four notes.
There are as many arpeggios as there are chords but in reality, we only need to learn a moderate number of them in order to meet most requirements.
So, which arpeggios should guitarists learn?
Triads
- Major and minor – ...
18
OCT
2013
OCT
2013
A common quote about reading music
“…and do you know, [insert name] can’t even read music? Isn’t that amazing?”
We’ve all heard this line or something very similar to it.
To someone that dabbled in learning classical piano or violin back when they were at school, it might seem that the ability to read music is essential. But really it’s nothing more than a method of communicating information.
So, do guitarists need to learn to read music? This depends primarily on two things:
- The style of music they ...
29
MAR
2013
MAR
2013
Why should we learn guitar licks?
“Isn’t it better to just improvise?”
The thing to recognise about improvising is that nobody does it in the purest sense of creating entirely original phrases spontaneously.
In reality an improvised solo is a combination of phrases (aka ‘licks’) that the performer has already picked up in the past; glued together with some improvisation.
Some guitarists may claim that they have never consciously sat down and learned and guitar licks.
That may be true, but we have all absorbed ...
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12
MAR
2013
MAR
2013
