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LESSON PREVIEWS
Starting out: The Second-Most-Important Thing After knowing how to tune your instrument, the single most important thing for the rock guitarist to know is the power chord. The shape is easy and comfortable and is the same for all keys. You will get more mileage out of power chords than any thing else you will ever learn. Power chords are most often played with the lowest note on the E or A string, more rarely on the D - or higher strings. They will sound a bit more full if all three notes are played, but since it is common to play only the two lowest notes, especially when playing fast, the highest note for each chord is written in red below. Power chords sound best with at least a small amount of overdrive or distortion
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| Pattern Arpeggios One of the best ways to learn a new scale or pattern, to burn the shape into your brain, is to play it as arpeggios - sort of like paying every-other-note in sequence. Below shows this method with the aeolian mode in A (natural minor scale), three notes per string. After you get this one down, learn the next pattern in the diatonic sequence -B locrian - and play A aeolian acending followed by B locrian decending. An extended version of this exercise is in my daily warmup routine.
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| Breaking out of the Box To start playing without restricting yourself to the scale boxes, take a mini-box out of the larger box. I.e., use a small chunk of the large pattern consisting of only two or three strings. Limiting yourself like this can actually help fuel your creativity, forcing you to do more with less, so to speak. To increase your range, you can transpose the mini-box by octaves. You can repeat the same - or similar lick an octave higher or lower for a call-and-response effect. The example below uses a 5-note mini pattern taken from the blues scale in D.
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You just have to hit the right notes at the
right time and the instrument plays itself!
-JS Bach
