Above: Four guys with a steady sense of time (L-R) – Doug Smith, Mason Williams, Mark Hanson, and the late Nokie Edwards of the Ventures. At the 2005 Grammy Awards in L.A. — Many students – and some professionals! – have trouble keeping a steady tempo. (“That darn metronome – something’s wrong with it!”) Speeding up is usually the problem, although dropping or adding beats happens, too. For some developing musicians, counting out loud as they play can help, but, in my experience, students often can’t count out loud while playing, or the counting simply speeds up along with the guitar playing. Here’s a […]

The simple secret: Relax your fretting hand before you move to the next position. This is a subtle move, but can make a huge difference in the clarity and efficiency of your playing. There are two advantages to relaxing your fretting hand before/as you move: 1) it MUTES the strings as your fingers leave the strings; and 2) it avoids sounding the strings due to “pull-offs.” In other words, by relaxing your fretting-hand fingers as you release a chord you avoid sounding a potentially wrong note as you move to the next position. The Exercise: Get a feel for this […]

This question came from a student: In your books Art of Contemporary Travis Picking and Art of Solo Fingerpicking you use an asterisk after the chord name: G*, for instance. What does this mean? In my publications, the chords with an asterisk are a different “voicing” or fingering from the norm. For instance, G and G* are both G chords, but use different fingerings to produce the notes I want at those points in the arrangement. An asterisk (*) is simply meant to guide you from the notation/tab to a particular chord grid diagramming the required fingering. For instance, only […]

Here’s another installment concerning ‘half-diminished” chords. Remember that “half-diminished” and “minor-seventh (flat5)” are synonymous. So far we have used three-fingered shapes combined with an open string to produce the four-note “minor-seventh (flat5)” sound. This time let’s find a four-fingered version of it. We’ll get to the theory eventually. If you are familiar with my arrangement of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” (from my Great American Songbook CD and Book), you already know a B half-diminished chord. In that tune, I use it as a II chord in a II-V-I chord progression in the key of A-minor. It has an […]

I received a nice email from a student who attended a recent workshop at Dusty Strings in Seattle. The specific workshop topic involved an “easy” way to visualize the guitar neck. His post-workshop question dealt mostly with developing an effective practice regimen. I have also included some other thoughts on how to become a better guitarist and musician. Learning to know the neck of the guitar is akin to a piano player being able to play in higher octaves. This is easy for a pianist, as each octave on the piano looks the same. Not so for the acoustic guitar, […]

In the classical guitar world, fretting the bass string with the thumb is frowned upon. This is understandable for at least two reasons: classical guitar necks generally are wide, making it hard to fret with the thumb and fingers simultaneously; and Segovia figured out how to play the great repertoire without it. But with narrower neck guitars and long fingers, fretting the sixth string with the thumb can offer a guitarist a decided advantage. A main one: guitarists can fret five-note chords that classical guitarists can’t get. Another one: in ragtime styles in the key of C, a barre F […]

Fingerstyle Guitar is a great brain developer, a great motor skill developer, and a great way to enjoy life, and to help others enjoy theirs! Since most musicians spend a majority of their time playing alone, fingerstyle guitar offers the perfect multi-voiced, piano-like approach to playing solo guitar. It usually features a melody, accompanied by a simultaneous bass line and mid-range harmony notes, all played by one person on one instrument. Like a mini piano! I have written many books and DVDs helping the aspiring guitarist learn to fingerpick patterns, to subsequently break the patterns, use alternate tunings, and generally […]