As a guitarist for the past thirty-odd years I’ve spent my share of hours working on techniques. From the extremely tedious, mechanical, madness-inducing, spouse-annoying picking drills with a metronome, to the more musically fulfilling – and ultimately more useful – endeavours, such as working out songs, learning chords or melodies, and so on. No matter […]
Basic Slide Guitar
In this post I’ll give a short introduction to basic slide guitar technique, tuning and phrasing. There’s a YouTube video further down that shows some examples. As always, I’d love to hear from you, so don’t be shy – leave a comment. Guitar setup Tuning I usually play slide guitar in one of two open […]
New Article: Nice Chord Voicings
Yes, there’s actually a new article, and it’s about some chord voicings that I think are, er, nice. Basically it’s about how you can alter some well known triads and get a lot more out of them in terms of colour. An added bonus is that these voicings can easily be adjusted and in turn […]
How To Become A Better Guitar Player
I’ve just writtten an article about how to improve your playing by self-assessment. In short, it’s about honing your critical listening skills and relating them to specific goals you have for your playing. As I say in the main article: What kind of noise do you want to make? Read the full article here: Improving Your Guitar […]
Troy Grady to the Rescue
When I started playing back in 1987, I was infatuated by technique. I loved Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai, and the defining property of “good” music, was that it demanded good dexterity. All other variables were of minimal importance. I stopped caring about songs, and bought records based on the guitar solos, not the material. […]
Using the volume control on your guitar
Marshall amps traditionally sound very good with the volume control at less then maximum The humble volume control on your guitar is one of the most under-utilized controls in all of electric guitardom. Most people see us guitarists (deservedly so) as volume-dependent, knuckle-dragging oafs, who can’t play a single note without having 120 dB SPL […]