Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Free Online Guitar Lessons, Tools And Resources
Join our quest for free guitar lessons, videos and info on guitar playing!


Guitar Tricks - The Learning Guitar Player's Resource

As a guitar player you have probably trawled the internet looking for guitar lessons. Whether or not you want to learn to play guitar for free, your vision probably involved learning songs form tabs as well as getting as much theory and technique exercises you can handle.
Ten years ago a guy named Jon Broderick went looking for websites featuring high quality guitar lessons and, the legend goes, he had so little success, he went and made his own. The outcome was Guitar Tricks, another site that gives you access to their lessons in return for a monthly subscription. Not unlike Jamplay, but Guitar Tricks has been collecting guitar lessons for ten years, plus they have a collection of twenty-four free guitar lessons that you can try. Your free lessons are of the same quality as the lessons you get with your monthly subscription, taught by the same teachers who conduct the lessons for subscribers to Guitar Tricks.
Your membership of Guitar Tricks gets you full access to a buttload of tutorials, sheet music, video lessons and backing tracks. Not only do you get the benefit of the Guitar Tricks guys' years of archiving guitar lessons but their content is updated every day.
Guitar Tricks has a forum that holds the records of questions and answers between thousands of guitarists. Would you believe there's over two-hundred thousand posts? And not only that, you can also have feedback from the Guitar Tricks teachers on any nagging question your brain can formulate.

Blues Guitar Theory

Posted on | | 1 Comment


There’s not much theory connected with blues guitar but there certainly is a lot of discussion and a great deal of misunderstanding. Look at blues in the key of E. Some guitarists assume that the basic scale for playing blues music in this key would be the E minor pentatonic with flattened fifth. Your chords would be E, A and B or I IV and V. The fact is that most blues guitar players use a mixture of scales when they play solos.

The Mixolydian scale is similar to the major scale but it has a flattened seventh and the root note is the fifth note of the key you are playing in. So if you are playing in the key of E the Mixolydian scale starts at B.

You can get some understanding of how to use the Mixolydian scale in blues improvisation by playing the major scale a perfect fifth below the chord you are playing. So to use the Mixolydian over an A chord you play the D major scale, but beginning with the note A.

Here’s a video featuring the Mixolydian scale:

It’s really better to approach the blues through playing rather than theorizing. Once you are able to play basic twelve bar blues using the minor pentatonic scale, you should learn some turnarounds which are the bits at the end of the twelve bars that set you up for the next verse.

Here is a turnaround in A . . .

Start by trying to imitate what you hear on records. Even if you think your solos don’t sound very good, you will be amazed at how much better they sound once you have mastered a few turnarounds.

When you are learning the art of improvisation you can play single notes on a guitar or you can play chords. For a solo guitar player there’s a choice between playing an improvised solo over a chord progression or you can play single note melody accompanied by base notes on open bass strings. Here’s a video guitar lesson featuring the minor pentatonic, the blues scale and the mixolydian mode:

Playing a single note tune accompanied by bass notes on one or two open strings helps train your ear and, with regular practice, gives you the knack of letting the notes follow each other under your guidance. The intensity of performing with other musicians in front of an audience often kills the most valuable quality an improvising guitarist can develop – the ability to listen to and respond to the music that the singer, bass player, drummer and rhythm guitarist are making.


Incoming search terms for the article:

Technorati Tags: ,

Category: Free Lessons
Tags: >

Comments

One Response to “Blues Guitar Theory”

  1. anuj
    April 16th, 2009 @ 1:23 pm

    some great lessons on this site!!!
    i am already on my third lesson and i cant stop watching these great vidoes and reading these great lessons…
    You guys have put up an amazing site here thanx a lot for helping

Leave a Reply





Subscribe in a reader

  

Privacy Policy