Worlds biggest guitar lesson
Heres an interesting projuect. Steve Vai will give the biggest ever guitar lesson online at 6.30 pm GMT on the 3rd of March…more details at
Berklee Music Online
Favourite Guitar Albums
I thought I’d write a couple of lists of my favourite guitar albums. In a strange anomaly, my favourite instrumental album of all time would be a piano record: Una Mattina by Ludovico Einaudi -my ultimate desert island disc. Anyway onto the guitar records…my criteria for these tends to be the albums ‘ worked out most songs from. I’m also more interested in great playing and original parts as part of a song rather than for there own sake, so these albums also tend to contain really good songs (in my opinion anyway).
Here we go:
Rhythm Guitar – free download
Rhythm Guitar – by far the most important aspect of guitar playing. For instance name one great soloist who was not also a great rhythm player. Jimi Hendrix – developed a whole new style of rhythm playing (little wing, and almost everything else he recorded). Hendrix spent years playing rhythm guitar on the ‘Chitlin Circuit‘ for Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson among many others. Eric Clapton – Check out any of Claptons live recordings, but I dont think he’s ever been better than on the Bluesbreaker with Eric Clapton album. Rory Gallagher – A good shout for the best ever popular music guitarist. He could do it all; fingerstyle blues and ragtime, searing solos and great rhythm on electric, acoustic and mandolin. My favourite Bert Jansch…his style is all about rhythm with an attack on the guitar verging on violent, Neil young, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Ray Vaughan the list could go on forever, but the point being, the easiest way to become a better guitarist is to work on rhythm.
Changing Strings
I’d been thinking for a little while about writing a couple of guides to changing strings and reading tablature, that sort of thing, but then I found a couple of web pages that deal with these things really well. For a cracking guide to changing strings on an acoustic you cant go too far wrong just here: Guide to changing strings
And here’s a good guide to reading guitar tabs
starting from guitar scratch
All you need is 3 chords and the truth, according to legendary Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard anyway, which is almost the same as learning to play the guitar from scratch. All you really need to be able to play 99.9999% of songs ever written are 5 major chords: C, A, G, E and D and a couple of minor chords too: Em, Am and Dm. A bit of rhythm doesnt go amiss either, so when you have your fingers on one of these chords (try a G), count to four and strum on every number…then add two strums a number, but slowly, as you don’t want to leave a gap when you change chord. Try changing from the G to a C and then maybe a D, and this is really is all there is to it.
Rocket Science Banjo
First post of a new blog on the site…i’m going to use it to recommend various guitar, and banjo websites, events and that sort of thing. So, the first one up is probably the best music website i’ve ever found and its called Rocket Science Banjo. Its purpose in life is to provide an online way to learn frailing or clawhammer banjo, something I cover in lessons, but this is done so well, I want to highlight it. Tony Spadarro runs the site and has been a clawhammer player for many years, and offers a dree download of a 200 odd page PDF that covers in a lot of detail from the basics up many clawhammer styles. The PDF comes with audio examples, and the cost is free…theres a button to make a donation, which I did, and I then got a personal email from Tony with several hundred more tabs and resources.