There are many ways to learn guitar and one of it is by joining an online guitar tutorial site like JamPlay. With the membership fee as low as $19.95 you can get unlimited access to the guitar lessons, name it metal, rock, blues, bluegrass, classical, fingerstyle, country, jazz, celtic and many more. Whatever your choice is you will be satisfied with the video and tutorial quality they offer. They even have guitar lessons for Christmas in case you are planning something to show off for the big day.

Should you plan to join the membership program please be aware that you can easily get distracted – like kids in a candy shop – there are so many high quality guitar tutorials available and if you don’t pay attention to your main focus you will be ‘lost’!

Related posts:

1. Guitar Lessons DVD – Better Than Free Online Lessons?
2. Finger Picking Lessons

Most guitar newbies tend to look for free online guitar tutorials but unfortunately it’s very hard to find a good site that can teach you the well structured a to z beginner guitar lessons. A lot of time, money and efforts are needed to create a good guitar tutorial and this information can be found only either in the paid membership guitar sites or in high quality guitar lessons DVD so if you are serious about your guitar playing you have to take this route.

I by no means am a good guitar player and I still purchase some real good guitar lessons on DVD, rock guitar lessons DVD to be precisely because that’s my weakest part. Below is a picture of some of my collection from Will Landrum (Interfocus Music Inc.):

guitar lessons dvd

Here is the FREE online lesson sample you can find online done by Will Landrum:

In his guitar instructional DVD series Will Landrum broke the theory into parts that most beginning guitar players want to know.

The Powerful Modal Theory and Soloing tutorial is a must for people who want to learn about rock guitar solo. Will Landrum covers modal scale patterns and theory and how to apply modal theory to your solos. These information can boost up your solo higher. If you have been trying to do solo but end up stuck in the rut playing the same pentatonic scales and notes over and over again you may want to consider buying this tutorial.

The next video guitar lessons I purchased from Will is called Sweep Picking and Arpeggios. Here he teaches how to execute the arpeggios in light speed sweep picking. Sweep picking is the right hand execution method (assuming you are playing guitar right handed) and arpeggios are set of notes in chords played individually by the fretting fingers. Again if you are looking into lead guitar lessons this tutorial will give you a lot of idea.

The third guitar lesson video is called Essential Rock Guitar Techniques. You will learn how to do hammer ons, pull offs, trills and right hand tapping fundamentals, string bending and ghost bending, natural harmonics, tap harmonics, artificial /pinch harmonics and other techniques such as string picking, string muffling, string silencing, vibrato and volume swells – all the guitar gods’ skills you need to know.

Will Landrum produced his album called Living Digits in 2006. I got the CD together with another video tutorials showing how he executed the melodies, riffs, licks and chops from the album. Cool products!

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1. Guitar Arpeggios with Sweep Picking
2. Learning Guitar Online
3. Easy Beginner Guitar Lessons Approach

Today we’ll watch the ska guitar video tutorial presented by Lawrence Katz of GuitarTricks.com.

Welcome to the world of Ska Guitar!

Ska is a style of music that can be described as “Upbeat Reggae.” It has influenced classic rock bands like The Clash, as well as more modern bands like No Doubt.

Here we’ll look at a rhythm guitar technique that describes the basics of Ska.

This is the first example in a five-part series. We’ll work on a basic Ska rhythm, playing on the upbeats. Keep the right hand loose and moving in an up-down motion. Focus on the upbeats.

Keep a soft, clean tone with an out-of-phase pickup setting. A guitar with single coil pickups is best for this (a Fender Stratocaster or similar) but you can also use a guitar with humbucking pickups, if you use the middle position on the pickup selector.

You’ll need to mute notes with the left hand on your down strokes. Keep the notes very short!

Don’t dig into the strings too hard or rake across them strongly with your right hand, or you will sound like a washboard. Always keep it light and loose!

Related posts:

1. Finger Picking Lessons

OK, let’s get back to our lessons.

This four-step fingerpicking pattern is a powerful building block for fingerstyle guitar.

For this pattern, play the sixth string (Low E) with a downward pluck of your thumb. Next, pluck upwards on the first string (high E string) with your middle finger. Next, pluck downwards on the third string (G string) with your thumb. Lastly, pluck upwards on the second string (B string) with your index finger.

This pattern of four steps constitutes one half measure of music in 4/4 time. The count is: One And Two And. To complete a full measure, simply play the pattern again, with this count: Three And Four And.

Repeat this pattern over and over, trying to maintain a consistent rhythm, and gradually building up your speed.

COMMONLY ASKED FINGERPICKING QUESTIONS:

Q: I see you are using only your thumb, index, and middle fingers? I’ve seen some players use three fingers, plus the thumb. Which is correct?

A: There is no absolute right or wrong to this. You’ll hear opinions on both sides of the aisle. My personal preference is based on the tradition called “Travis Picking” named for guitarist Merle Travis. I personally feel this pattern of finger moves, which uses the thumb twice within the pattern, opens up more rhythmic possibilities as you get into more advanced techniques.

Q: What is “TRAVIS PICKING?

A: The signature “Travis” move is that alternating thumb beat – the fact that your thumb does double-duty, alternating between the bass note, and the third string (or a variation of that) of the guitar. That provides a steady rhythm against which you can then add ornamentations, syncopation, melody, etc. Some students ask why they can’t do these same patterns using three fingers, and the thumb on the bass note only. Technically you may be able to, but in so doing you compromise that steady “thump thump” of the Travis-style thumb beats.

Q: Is it necessary to have long fingernails to play fingerstyle guitar?

A: No. My personal preference is to have long-ish nails on the thumb, index, and middle fingers of my right hand. However, many players prefer to play with short nails. There is a difference in tone when using nails vs. not using nails. With nails, the tone is a bit crisper, without nails, it is a bit more muted. It’s a matter of personal preference.

A NOTE ABOUT THE LESSONS IN THIS SERIES:

This lesson is part of a tutorial called Acoustic Fingerpicking for Beginners, Level 1. These lessons were designed to be followed sequentially, with new skills and practice exercises building one upon the next.

The Acoustic Fingerpicking tutorial series also builds sequentially, from Level 1 to Level 2, and so on. If you are new to fingerpicking, this series will take you from the fundamental basics, and all the way through to a solid foundation of fingerpicking skills useful in playing folk and popular music.

You should feel free to proceed at your own pace, and to jump around within the tutorials, as you wish. You may want to return to various lessons from time to time to make sure you are on the right track before moving to more advanced skills.

Related posts:

1. Guitar Picking
2. Ska Guitar Anybody?
3. Guitar Arpeggios with Sweep Picking

I am currently preparing a mini course of Blues Solo Lessons and would like to share this tutorials for the first 500 people joining my list. These seats theoretically can be easily gone in one day only because the current visitors of this blog is varying from 1,400 to 1,800 people per day. If you are interested please sign up using the form below:

The plan is to feed your e-mail by videos and guitar tabs for a 7-day period. . It’s simply lessons and you will love it if you are looking for free blues lessons. Your e-mail will be 100% safe so I encourage you to sign up. Note that I still need 2 or 3 days starting from this date to get the all the lessons ready, once they are set you will receive them automatically.

Why I make this mini course?

Most of the beginner-guitarlessons blog visitors found this blog after googling for blues or how to play guitar solo keywords. I believe by providing a set of guitar lessons I can give something valuable to my blog readers.

If you are a totally beginner this lessons will NOT be easy for you to start with, instead I suggest you take my other mini course for beginning guitarists which form you can find on the right sidebar of this page.

Cool?

-TJ-

EDIT: All seats taken and we no longer deliver this course by email. A new post will be made should we make another mini course in the future.

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1. Blues Guitar Lesson – 4 Notes Improvisation
2. Beginner Guitar Lessons – Introduction
3. New Look, Hope You'll Like It!

This blues guitar solo effectively utilized the two thinnest strings only, the E and B at fret #8 and fret #10. You will need to apply the string bending technique on this solo. If you don’t know how to bend the guitar strings we will talk about it in the future post. Hamlin played the blues in A Dominant 7 but used the A Minor pentatonic scale in this lesson. Note that the four notes he mentioned were G, A, C and D. Because C is actually a note belongs to the A minor scale he raised the C by bent it half step to C# to become the major third note belongs to the A Major scale. The chords he played were A7, D7 and E7 which were a chord family of the A Major chord. Blues and rock ‘n roll music commonly use dominant seven chords (meaning they use major chords like the video lessons here) but most of the time the lead guitarist use minor pentatonic scale instead of major pentatonic scale. That is the beauty of the minor pentatonic scale and I hope you can see now how important it is to master this scale before learning other scales.

Download the 4-note-solo video lesson and see how you can utilize 4 notes to play a blues solo.You will need a Windows Media Player to play the file which is normally already available in your computer. In this video Hamlin explained how to build a blues solo with 4 notes only but I would say that actually there were at least 5 notes played because one note (D on the 1st string, 10th fret) sometimes was full-step bent to E note. Bending a note by full step means you have to bend the string to reach a note that is two frets higher than the original note, for example from C to D, D to E, F to G, G to A and A to B whilst bending a note by half step will give you a note that is one fret higher, i.e. from E to F and B to C.

If you are new to string bending technique you will find that it’s not easy to bend the string even by half step only but don’t worry because I will post some tricks to make it easier for a guitar newbie.

Try to play the solo by yourself and see if you can repeat what Hamlin did on the video. If you find it difficult you can download the 4-note-solo.pdf for your guidance. You can ignore the musical notation if you don’t want to and read the guitar tab only to see where you should place your fingers on the guitar fretboard.

If you find this free guitar course is useful and are interested to learn more about how to play blues guitar solo you may consider to join Griff Hamlin‘s blues secret tutorial.

Happy Bending!
-TJ-
Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin

PS: To save the video and PDF files to your computer please right hand click your mouse on the links and click Save Link As (Mozilla FireFox) or Save Target As (Internet Explorer).

Related posts:

1. Basic Guitar – How to Play Notes Confidently
2. The Pentatonic Scale
3. Blues Solo Lessons