Learn To Play Rock Guitar

Mindset reset...

Hey guys, What do you do when you’ve fallen down? You get back up and “drive on,” as we used to say in the military. Did you have to think about it? Probably not… You just pick yourself up, dust off, and get back to doing what you were do ...

Happy 4th of July

Hey Friend, Woo, looks like it's going to be a nice hot one today! What a great day to celebrate Independence - no offense, my British friends. Eh, water under the bridge, right? ;-) We don't have big plans, just going to hang out by the pool and ...

Can you rely on that tab or video?

Hey Friend, Another point I want to make about learning songs on your own is, you can’t always rely on tabs or a video to be right - so you need to trust your own ears to hear what’s happening in a song. We’ve got it good - great, in fact. Th ...

Figure it out… yourself.

Hey Friend, Naw, I’m not trying to be rude. But sometimes you’ve got to step up and take some ownership. There’s never been a better time in history to learn how to play a musical instrument. There are tons of paid and free online instructi ...

Music is flexible...

Hey Friend, Over the past couple months, we’ve looked at a bunch of different techniques to handle the picking side of playing. We tried simple patterns using only down and upstrokes, alternate and sweep picking, even fingerstyle techniques. I ...

Moving bass notes...

Hey Friend, Sorry, I ran out of time Friday as I was working on creating the exercise you’re getting today. It’s the dang j.o.b. - that thing is a total killjoy, I tell ya! I would much rather have stayed home and worked on this exercise for yo ...

Here’s a new pattern to try...

Hey Friend, Another quick one today… I’ve put together another simple Travis picking pattern for you to try out. This will force your muscle memory to break from the first pattern you learned last week. You may find this pattern easier than th ...

Would you like some chords with that?

Let’s try a simple pattern first, Friend ...

Hey Friend, Today, we’ll look at one of the simplest Travis picking patterns you can learn. This is the first pattern I learned way back in the Stone Ages (I turned 53 today…). As I mentioned last time, your thumb is in charge of the three lowe ...

Intro to Travis Picking

Hey Friend, There are many different fingerstyle techniques - way more than we’ll get into here. If you’re so inclined, you can read about the various styles in this Wikipedia article. To get you started with some basic fingerstyle patterns, w ...