Hello

I hope to make this blog a useful place for you to visit often, to learn about playing guitar, and music theory, especially as applied to the guitar.

Bring your questions about music theory, and I will do my best to answer them, in a way that makes the ideas clear.

I have been playing guitar for more than twenty years, I am primarily a self taught guitarist, although I have worked with a few teachers, but not until I was an intermediate level player.

I have tried many different learning tools, books, cassette tapes, videos, dvd’s and lately, online teaching sites.

I will be sharing what I have found to be the best learning materials and sites, to make you a better guitar player, in the shortest possible time.

The biggest idea I would like to get across about learning guitar, online or with a teacher, or any other learning materials, is that buying every thing you can find about learning guitar, or paying the best teacher in the world for private lessons, will not make you a better guitar player, unless you open up your guitar case, take out the guitar, and actually play some guitar!

I believe that playing music should be fun, (they don’t talk about “working” music, it’s playing music.) And, I will try to help you enjoy learning everything you want to learn.

Bass players are also welcome; I only recently started learning bass, about six months ago, so I am still a beginner. But many ideas that work on guitar, work on bass, also. And, music theory is the same, no matter the instrument; it’s only the application that changes. (I mean that chord, scale and mode theory is the same, but you can’t play guitar chords on a flute, for example.)

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I didn’t start learning to play guitar until I was in my mid-20s. I had never had any kind of musical training before; and found it very challenging to tune a guitar.

I had many friends who played guitar, all of whom began lessons when they were very young. They all agreed that I was tone deaf, and should give up.

I could not believe that I was tone deaf, but I continued to struggle learning to tune the guitar.

The first electronic tuners were available on the market at this time, but the cheapest one was over $350. At the time, my gross pay was $90 a week. Because of my other expenses, rent, food, gas, etc. it took me over six months to save up $100 to buy my guitar. Paying more than $350 for a tuner was out of the question.

I saw that a local community college was giving a class in piano tuning, for much less than the cost of the tuner, and I contacted the man who was teaching the class, and arranged to meet with him. I explained my situation, and inquired whether or not his class would help me.

He told me that just by listening to my voice; he could tell that I was not tone deaf. He further explained that being tone deaf was an extremely rare condition, and that if I was in fact tone deaf, my voice would be an absolute monotone, because I never would have heard any inflections when I was learning to speak.

He then told me to close my eyes, played two different notes on the piano, and asked me how many different notes he had played. He told me not to worry about identifying if one was higher or lower, just how many different notes. I told him two, and he repeated this several times, occasionally playing the same note twice. I was able to tell when he played different notes, and when he played the same note several times.

He told me that the little exercise was to prove to me that I was not tone deaf, since as I mentioned earlier, he had already said he could tell from my voice. He said that my problem was an uneducated ear, and encouraged me to take his class. I did, and by the end of the class, I could tune a guitar perfectly by ear. (I also knew how to tune a piano, although I have never practiced piano tuning since.)

It is unfortunate that people use the term tone deaf so carelessly, especially with young children, who are very impressionable. I meet a lot of people who believe they are tone deaf, most of them having been told so since childhood. I have never met anyone who was actually tone deaf though.

So I am going to assume that you only believe you are tone deaf, and suggest that you may have to work a little harder at ear training, but that it is completely possible for you to learn how to play guitar. And putting a little extra work into training your ear will also improve your appreciation for music in general.

I would like to recommend trying the ear training program PurePitch, which comes with a 2 month money back guarantee. I would have wanted a similar program when I was first starting out, and have found it improved my ear, even after more than twenty years of guitar playing. It can be ordered here: Buy PurePitch.

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It’s a downloadable application you can use on your computer (they have just come out with a version that runs on Mac’s) to slow down music without altering the pitch.

I am very pleased with the program, it is easy to use, and slows the music without noticeably altering the pitch. It does get a little strange if you try slowing the music to 10% of it’s original speed, but it still works.

I find it helps me learn new riffs and solos faster, because I can hear the music played at the correct pitch, and a slower speed until my fingers have it. Then I increase the speed gradually, and let my fingers catch up. It makes it easier to learn correctly. I have found that sometimes when I am trying to learn something new at the original speed, my fingers find it hard to keep up, and I end up playing sloppily while I try to keep up. Then, I have to work at cleaning it all up, to sound good. But by learning at a slower speed, I can get the fingerings right from the start. It’s a great time-saver.

There are some videos on the site that show you how easy it is to use the software, (although I found it very intuitive and was able to use the software without watching the videos, I checked out the videos before I wrote this review.) They are available for anyone who wants to see how the software works, you can see them without buying anything, if you want to know more about the software. The videos show you how to use the software, and what it is capable of, including the many different types of audio files it supports.

The publisher of Riffmaster Pro is currently running a special, so you can get the software for only $29.00, which is 40% off the regular price. i do not know how long the special price will be available. If you are looking for a great learning tool that slows music down without altering pitch, I highly recommend Riffmaster Pro 3.

(I have used Riffmaster Pro primarily to slow down guitar music, but I also have used it to learn some flute solos; it works for other instruments than guitar.)

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Many guitarists are intimidated at the thought of improvising music and tell themselves that improvising is something you can do only after many years of study at the feet of some “master” somewhere.

Improvising music on the guitar does not have to be so mysterious, and I hope I can shed some light on how to begin spontaneously creating music on the guitar.

One of the challenges to the beginning improviser is the sheer number of possibilities of what you can play on the guitar. You have six strings, and access to anywhere from 12 frets to as many as 22 frets or more on some electric guitars. Many notes can also be played in multiple locations along the guitar neck. (For example, the note on the open high E string is the same note as that played at the 5th fret of the B string, and the same as the note played at the 9th fret of the G string and the 14th fret of the D string and the 19th fret of the A string. The timbre of these notes differs slightly, especially between the wound and plain strings, but they are all the same note.)

A simple way around this problem is to impose some limits on yourself when you are learning to improvise.

The easiest limitation is to start using only one string, this eliminates many of the possibilities, so you don’t have as many decisions about what to play next. If you know any scales or modes, you can also select one of those, but stay on a single string. You can also limit yourself to moving only one note up or down at a time, meaning that you don’t make any wide skips along the string. (For example, if you are playing in the key of C, and you start on a C note, the next note you play can only be a D or a B, depending on whether you want to play a higher or lower note, since the C scale is C D E F G A B C.)

To begin, just noodle around within these limits (as suggested above) until you feel comfortable with the single string, and listen to the melodies you are making even with such a limited musical palette. When you feel comfortable, try playing over a simple chord pattern.

A 12 bar blues is a good place to start. You can play it in any key, the simplest 12 bar blues pattern uses the I, IV, and V chords*, in the key of C that would be C, F, and G (or G7), actually any of the chords could be 7ths, but keep it simple to start. The pattern uses the I chord for the first 4 measures, then the IV chord for measures 5 and 6, back to the I chord for measures 7 & 8, the V chord for measure 9, and the IV chord for measure 10, and back to the I chord for measures 11 and 12. In the key of C, it would look like this: C C C C F F C C G(7) F C C, where each letters represents a single measure or bar of music.

Play a simple rhythm, slowly at first, use simple down-strokes, one per beat.

Here is a visual representation that might make it clearer:

   1     2     3      4

  C  |  C  |  C  |  C  |

//// |//// |//// |//// |

  5     6      7      8

  F  |  F   |  C  |  C  |

//// |//// |//// |//// |

  9     10    11   12

  G  |  F   |  C  |  C |

//// |//// |//// |//// |

Each slash represents one down-stroke, so this shows a 12 bar blues with four beats per measure, called 4/4 time, or common time. The letters represent the chords you are playing. Record yourself playing these chords, slowly, and play faster only after you are comfortable improvising over the slower changes.

When you begin improvising over these chord changes, focus on listening to how the individual notes sound against the chords. (That’s one reason to start slowly.) At first, only play single notes on the beats, (count 1 2 3 4), when you are comfortable with that, try adding notes between the beats (1and2and3and4and), but you don’t always need to play 8 notes for every measure; try varying what you play. Remember to listen to what you are playing, and the chords you are playing against.

Play with this exercise for a few weeks and you will begin to see a big improvement in your playing, as well as in your ability to hear what other guitarists are doing when they solo.

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