Slide guitar master Arlen Roth has a great standard-tuning slide-guitar lesson posted at Gibson.com:
Playing slide guitar in standard tuning – as opposed to an open chord tuning – is very different, and quite difficult because you have to take extra care in damping the strings. When you play slide in an open chord tuning, you always [...]

Jimmy Bruno is not only a fantastic jazz player but also a renowned jazz teacher. His approach to learning jazz improvisation is a completely practical one. He simplifies chord scales by basically doing away with the traditional approach, which is to assign a chord scale to every chord (E.g. A ii-V in C is C [...]

Ernie Hawkens over at acousticguitar.com has written a wonderfully detailed introductory lesson about the guitar work of the Reverend Gary Davis, a master of the so-called “Piedmont” style of fingerpicking. He’s posted plenty of printable tabs with MP3’s in addition to several videos. One of the first tunes I ever learned on the guitar was [...]

Okay, so they’re attached to the body, but I couldn’t resist quoting Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movie.
Anyway, Eugene Cheong has designed a device named “Maestro” that you attach to your guitar that lights up frets via lasers on the fretboard in time with Mp3s stored on an SD card.
This via YankoDesign.com. Thing is, [...]

Back in the 80’s, when I thought nothing of spending 4 hours in my drummer’s basement jamming on Smoke on the Water, singing into cheap Radio Shack microphones, I would occasionally stumble across a PBS/BBC show called Rock School.
The idea of such a show was nothing short of revolutionary for me because I’d never seen [...]

Last week, I outlined the beginnings of a method I used to get my legato really cooking. The relatively simple (but not so easy to master) exercise I showed you really does goes a long way. The reason for that will become clearer as we once again get to work on our legato.
This week, I’m [...]

I learned something about my playing a long time ago. I’m not a super-fast picker like Paul Gilbert or Yngwie. Oh sure, I’ve worked at it. I’ve put in the time. But it ain’t happening. I’m just not wired up that way.
To compensate, I developed my legato technique, which means hammer-ons, pull-offs, and tapping. In [...]

Some say chord melody, some say chord solo. Whatever you call it, it’s all good fun. Here’s one I ripped off adapted from the end of Kenny Burrell’s first solo on the tune Bluescape. The chord work at the end stands up just fine on its own. It’s not very long, mind you, but I [...]

So, your kid is begging you for a guitar for Christmas, and you don’t know where to start. Or, maybe you’re looking to take it up yourself. No problem. Keep reading, and I’ll hopefully steer you in the right direction.
Guitars come in 2 basic flavors, acoustic and electric. Acoustic guitars, in the simplest sense, don’t [...]

In my opinion, modes are the most misunderstood category of music theory, especially among guitarists. Many guitarists have only a basic understanding of the modes, if any. You hear them sometimes, casually saying things like, “Oh yeah, well, modes are easy. You just start playing a major scale on any degree and that’s a mode.” [...]