Learn to tap on the guitar and make sure you sound good!

Guitar Speed Exercise - Finger Independence - Get that PINKY Working

I've a number of guitar students who have recently been asking specifically for lessons on how to build speed, so I thought I'd share a number of the useful exercises here. Firstly, let's address the elephant in the room - Speed is not the be-all-and-end-all. I know a lot of people are not into speed and think that it can actually detract from a piece of music rather than enhance it. But for me speed for speed sake is not the goal, nor should it really be anybody's, in my opi

Continuing with our in depth look at the Dorian Mode, in this Guitar Lesson we're looking at the Dorian Pentatonic scale - Get the Sound of the Dorian by Changing Just ONE Note!

Using the Dorian mode on the guitar. Start to learn and incorporate the sounds into your playing. Licks and tips to improve your playing.

In this lesson we look at an easy way to navigate the neck, to help break out of those scale boxes and allow you to use licks and scale fragments you already know in new places. Learn to play anywhere on the guitar with ease. This one is called 'The Octave Jump'. You can get tabs for this as well as other great stuff like extended jam tracks, scale maps, guitar pro files, original music and more: www.patreon.com/samgoffen The Tab is just under the video below.

We've already looked at how chords are made, and so understand that a chord tone is generally the 1st, 3rd or 5th note in a scale, and it's these notes that a basic major, minor, augmented and diminished chord are made from. These types of basic chord are called 'Triads' as they use only 3 notes.

This 5 minute lesson first shows you where to play this really important scale shape, and then applies the chord tones that we learnt in the last lesson to this scale shape.

For many years, I played the guitar without understanding how chords were made, which notes were used, or where they were on the fretboard. I used scale shapes, fingering patterns and other ways to negotiate the fretboard, which I found easier to understand than music theory, especially as I'm a very visual learner. So for me, YouTube videos, diagrams, scale maps and so on were easier for me to get my head around. However, I found that although I could play in all the main mo