Fingerstyle training: Outside In

This pattern sounds great in its own right and prepares your hands for other patterns.

You’ll see that the pattern uses all eighth notes, and that the second half of the bar is an exact repeat of the first half of the bar. It’s called outside in because your right hand is using the thumb,…

Essential Grooves Part 2

You can never have too much rhythmic confidence and range! You don’t want to be stuck with the same three strumming patterns for all situations, whether you want arrange your own songs or join in jam sessions.

When you’ve explored this material, you will be equipped to play at different speeds confidently. You will…

Creating Expressive Guitar Parts

This material will help you consolidate and expand the vocabulary that’s available to you for creating great-sounding guitar parts, and help you recall and access what’s available to you when you’re on the spot. It’s going to be useful therefore for any type of jam situation, and also for giving you ways of developing accompaniments…

Lead Guitar: Major Pentatonic String Pairs

One of the wonderful attributes of the guitar is that it is very effective as an instrument to provide accompaniment and an instrument to play melodies. You can play short melodies, longer tunes, riffs, alternate between melodies and accompaniments and even do both at the same time. You don’t need a lot of vocabulary to…

Essential Grooves Part 1

When it comes to developing rhythm skills, working to broaden the number of strumming patterns, grooves and feels we are comfortable with helps us in a variety of ways:

It means there are more rhythms that are available to you in your own composition and accompaniment choices.It becomes easier to hear and transcribe rhythms present in…

Triads Application And Training

Here we have all three types of triad – those with a root on string 1, those with a root on string 2 and those with a root on string 3. When you can use these, you have some very cool sounds at your disposal.

We’ll start by revising each one individually.

Here we have two…

Triads with a root on string 3

We can move around shapes with a root on string 1. We can also move around shapes with a root on string 2. And we have one more small moveable chord form – which has a root on string 3. With these three shapes, you can unlock a considerable portion of the fretboard. You can…

Sixteenth Note Rhythm

What do we mean by sixteenth note rhythm?

We have done quite a bit of down up strumming using 8th notes, or a 1+2+3+4+ count. Using this type of strumming, there is a maximum of 8 possible places in the bar where you can strum – there are eight arm movements, four downstrokes and four upstrokes. With…

Fingerstyle Training: Pinch pattern

This is a very frequently used variation where the thumb and middle finger pick at the same time on beat 1. It introduces a new rhythm. Instead of all the notes being the same length, the first is double length: quarter note followed by eighth notes.

We can also play a variation where the last…

2020 Song list

Listen through to all the songs on the playlist. There may be some you don’t know or haven’t heard recently that you’d really enjoy learning. Think about the guitar techniques needed, and what types of guitar sound you can hear. There may be some sessions where we look at sections from one of the songs…