rock

Intermediate

Intermediate

  • Learn how to create twisting “outside” licks.
  • Develop a keen sense of weird phrasing.
  • Understand how to target chord tones.
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Great music tells a story. It builds on a plot and holds the listener’s attention as the story unfolds. We are especially moved by soloists who bare their souls and who keep us riveted with every twist and turn from their narrative. Pentatonics are the backbone of modern guitar vocabulary. Partially because they just sound good, but also because they lay so easily on guitar. There are several ingredients that make a guitarist sound brilliant, but one of the most important is chromaticism. Could there a be a way we could combine these two? Let’s find out.
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Sometimes slow and steady doesn’t win the race.

Advanced

Intermediate

• Develop a better sense of shred.

• Understand how to phrase in odd-numbered groups.

• Create blistering pentatonic lines in the style of Joe Bonamassa and Eric Johnson

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Since blues playing and improvisation is based around vocabulary, you can’t just throw in intervallic fusion lines or neoclassical sweep arpeggios and expect them to fit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for experimenting with sounds from different genres, but you’ll want to pick the right moments to work in these ideas. Having a strong foundation in the blues will ground the listener and make the experiments pop out more without alienating them. So, let’s look at a handful of shreddy blues licks that you can throw down at the next local blues jam without (hopefully) drawing the blues purist’s wrath upon you.
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Take off the training wheels and burn through these pentatonic licks.

Advanced

Intermediate

• Develop a deeper sense of subdivisions.
• Understand how to use alternate pentatonic scales.
• Learn how to balance different picking styles.

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Pentatonics are certainly well used (maybe overused?) by guitarists. There’s so much you can do with them and there’s a lot of great music to be found within our beloved five-note scale. My aim is to go for the whole “sheets of sound” thing that was popularized by John Coltrane and later adapted to guitar by players like Allan Holdsworth. However, the technique arms race has slowed down over the last few years, with modern players opting for interesting lines that focus more on cool rhythms and unexpected intervals. Let’s get to it.

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