Use Vibrato to Make Your Classical Guitar Music Come Alive

Author: Emre Sabuncuoglu

Would you like to make your music vibrate with the pulse of life? In order to move the soul, music must reflect life itself, celebrating life’s joys and mourning life’s sorrows.

Vibrato, a method of slightly varying the pitch of your guitar, brings your music to life by employing specialized left-hand techniques to cause a string or strings to vibrate at a varied pitch. Read more »

Electric Guitar Technology 101

By: Kenny Auyoung

It is a curious paradox of the music industry: guitarists, particularly rock guitarists, are often thought of as trendsetters when it comes to fashion and culture; but when it comes to their instruments, they are notoriously conservative.

Innovations such as active electronics, guitar synthesizers and Steinberger’s intrepid steps into the field of headless instruments in the 80′s have failed to make much of a dent in the market. Gibson and Fender continue to dominate the electric guitar market much as they did in the 1950′s and 60′s.

Even with the entry of new competitors into the market over the years such as Ibanez, Paul Reed Smith and Charvel/Jackson, the electric guitar has remained essentially unchanged with one to three magnetic pickups and a mess of wires connecting them to the controls. But things may be about to change! Read more »

You Can Learn How To Play The Blues

by Ed Haas

The blues has influenced almost every genre of music. All the great guitar players of our time have been influenced to some degree by the blues. The music theory involved in playing the blues is rather simple, but the feeling that can be applied to playing the blues is what makes it so popular.

The 12 bar blues progression:

If you want to learn how to play blues, you need to know the 12 bar blues progression. Just as its’ name implies, it is made up of 12 bars (measures) of music. the 12 bars just keep repeating. The most common chord progression would be the I, IV, and V chords of the key that you want to play in. Read more »

3 Simple Steps For Holding A Guitar Pick

When you first start learning guitar dropping the pick into the sound hold can be very irritating.

It’s not uncommon to be strumming along, just getting into a grove and then slowly feel the guitar pick slipping from your fingers. The next thing you know the pick slips and falls into the one place you don’t want it to go – the sound hole.

Even if you’re lucky enough to miss the sound hole it can still be an ordeal trying to find your guitar pick on the floor because they seem to magically blend in so well with everything.

This can be an infuriating problem especially when you start to get the hang of the more difficult stuff like changing between guitar chords and guitar strumming patterns. Read more »

Beginner Guitar Scales Lesson Made Simple

Author: Guitar Lessons for Beginners

Most popular music, whether it’s rock, blues, or even country, is based on a few common scales, so we’re going to start with those.

Specifically, we’ll look at the major and minor scales, and the major and minor pentatonic scales. These are fairly simple guitar scales that are extremely useful in a wide variety of musical contexts. Read more »