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Top 10 Lessons of 2020

Top 10 Lessons of 2020
Top 10 Lessons of 2020

This year we looked into how to solo like Garcia, bend like the late Peter Green, and think deeper about the blues scale.

Grateful Dead-Style Solo Tricks

By Michael Palmisano
Learn how to connect triads in the style of Grateful Dead legends Jerry Garcia and John Mayer.


Rethinking the Blues Scale

By Shawn Persinger
There's way more than blues-rock fodder buried in the crevices of the most overused scale in music.

Spice Up Your Cowboy Chords

By Shawn Persinger
Just because you live on the low end of the fretboard doesn't mean you can't add melodic and harmonic interest to your progressions.

Pentatonic Escape Routes

By Paul DePauw
Don't be a prisoner of the pentatonic box. Time to break out!

Walking the Blues

By Jason Beaudreau
Eight ways to add excitement to your blues rhythms.

How to Learn a Song Like a Nashville Pro

By Annie Clements
Here's a fool-proof process for systematically embedding a song in your soul.

Hendrix Rhythms Made Easy

By Jon MacLennan
Understanding Hendrix's rhythm guitar style will help you create new, exciting guitar parts that add momentum to the song.

Blues Arpeggio Tricks

By Corey Congilio
A simple half-step slide is all it takes to spice up those vanilla arpeggios.

Peter Green's Magic Scale

By Jeff McErlain
Put some Green into your blues with the minor pentatonic major 6 scale.

A Beginner's Guide to Standard Slide

Arthur Rotfeld
Just because you want to slide, doesn't mean you need to retune.

See and hear Taylor’s Legacy Collection guitars played by his successor, Andy Powers.

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A rig meant to inspire! That’s Jerry Garcia with his Doug Irwin-built Tiger guitar, in front of his Twin Reverb + McIntosh + JBL amp rig.

Photo by Frank White

Three decades after the final Grateful Dead performance, Jerry Garcia’s sound continues to cast a long shadow. Guitarists Jeff Mattson of Dark Star Orchestra, Tom Hamilton of JRAD, and Bella Rayne explain how they interpret Garcia’s legacy musically and with their gear.

ā€œI met Jerry Garcia once, in 1992, at the bar at the Ritz Carlton in New York,ā€ Dark Star Orchestra guitarist Jeff Mattson tells me over the phone. Nearly sixty-seven years old, Mattson is one of the longest-running members of the Grateful Dead tribute band scene, which encompasses hundreds of groups worldwide. The guitarist is old enough to have lived through most of the arc ofthe actual Grateful Dead’s career. As a young teen, he first absorbed their music by borrowing their seminal records, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, brand new then, from his local library to spin on his turntable. Around that same moment, he started studying jazz guitar. Between 1973 and 1995, Mattson saw the Dead play live hundreds of times, formed the landmark jam bandZen Tricksters, and later stepped into theJerry Garcia lead guitarist role with the Dark Star Orchestra (DSO), one of the leading Dead tribute acts.

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For the first time ever, two guitar greats, John 5 and Richie Kotzen will be heading out on the road this year. The tour will launch October 16 and run through November, hitting markets across the U.S.

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AEROSMITH guitarist and songwriter JOE PERRY is set to return to the road for a series of August performances with THE JOE PERRY PROJECT. The 8-date run kicks off August 13 in Tampa, FL and wraps August 23 in Port Chester, New York, with an August 19 performance in PERRY’s Boston hometown (see the itinerary below). For the North American trek—which marks the first solo shows for PERRY this year—the legendary guitarist will be joined by his Aerosmith bandmates Brad Whitford (guitar) and Buck Johnson (keys), along with The Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson (vocals), and Stone Temple Pilots’ Robert DeLeo (bass), and Eric Kretz (drums).

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