In this week's guitar lesson, you'll learn how to play a Western Swing style lead by playing the chord changes (changing scales to match the chords). This is designed to teach you how to play more melodic and interesting sounding leads when improvising. … [Read more...]
Slow, Country Lead and Rhythm Guitar Lesson in the key of D – EP274
In this week's guitar lesson, you'll learn how to play a slow, country rhythm and lead over a simple chord progression. Most country guitar lessons online tend to focus on fast, chicken picken' techniques, but this is more in line with what a slow country pedal-steel player might perform. I'll refer back to the CAGED System in quite a few spots as well so this is a nice refresher to last week's EP273 lesson on CAGED. … [Read more...]
Bluegrass Style Lead Guitar Lesson – Designed to Help Coordination and Speed – EP234
In this week's guitar lesson, you'll be learning a fun bluegrass lead that includes elements of country and blues as well. This lesson serves 2 purposes. 1) You'll learn several new licks and how use them when improvising. 2) You'll learn a couple of fast runs that are designed to help improve overall speed and coordination. Much more fun than practicing a boring a drill :) … [Read more...]
Western Swing Style Melodic Lead – Playing The Chord Changes – EP229
In this week's guitar lesson, I'll show you how to create melodic sounding solos by targeting chord tones when improvising. You'll be "playing the chord changes" which means changing scales to match each chord change. Most of the notes you'll be learning are pulled directly from chord shapes (not scales) which makes it easy to visualize where you can play on the neck. … [Read more...]
Western Swing Style Rhythm Guitar Lesson – EP185
In this guitar lesson, you'll learn how to spice up your rhythm playing with some jazzy sounding chord substitutes. Western Swing is a great format for this because it combines, blues, jazz, and country and creates techniques that can be applied to any of those styles. In addition to explaining the theory behind the chords, I'll break down the rhythm pattern. The MP3 jam track for this lesson comes in 2 tempos as well. … [Read more...]