L. Taylor Guitar Tuition

  Review of Cort’s CR-Custom, Les Paul style guitar. View on Cort’s website: http://www.cortguitars.com/uk/product/cr-custom-2

Given the definition above, we would be safe to make the assumption that a Pentatonic Scale is one comprising of five notes. We would also be correct. Scales are fundamental to music, both in composition and improvisation. Chords within a song are usually made up of notes taken from the scale, and solos or melodies use those same…

Intro To The Modes

Before getting into modes it is advised that you have a strong knowledge of music theory in regards to the following topics: Full, 7-note, Major and Natural Minor Scales. Relative Major and Minor Scales – can you work out the relative Major scale of any given Minor? Scale Construction – do you know what kind of 6 is in a Minor scale? Do you know what a perfect interval is? If you’re comfortable…

Basic Barre Chords: Roots on E & A Strings

      Barre Chords are the same as Open Chords, in that they contain any amount of three or more different notes. The difference is that Barre Chordsdon’t make use of any open strings. With these chords, your first finger will do the same job as your guitar’s nut, and your other fingers will play notes above it. One reason for this…

Another blues-rock lick for your guitar repertoire.

Below is the tab for this lick, divided into sections. You'll notice that Fig 1 is repeated in bar 3. I'm playing this at 100bpm, so I'd recommend playing slower than this at first, (it's fine to play at any speed to begin with, no matter how slow, then work your way up to 100bpm, maybe even up to 130bpm.)

Lesson for the advanced string-bend technique or pre-bending, (having a note bent before you play it). This can help you emulate a whammy bar, or develop a Mid or Far Eastern flavour to your playing.

Example 1

Example 2

Tutorial for Over Bending, and advanced string bend technique. 

Link to Doug Aldrich solo

In this lesson I examine how the Circle Of Fifths is created, and offer some ways to commit it to memory. Below is a printable image of the Co5s, I strongly encourage you to print it out and put it somewhere you spend ages looking - above your bed, next to a bathroom mirror, etc. 

Inspire yourself: How to not suck.

A stable blues / rock / metal trick that you will have heard at some point as a listener. If you need to, refresh your memory on the Bm scale and the ideas outlined in my first String Bending lesson. 

For the first bend you'll want your first finger fretting the target pitch, which is at the 9th fret of the B string. Your second or third finger will start on the 7th fret of the G string.

In the example below, notice that the letter "b" is used to indicate a string bend, and the number that appears in brackets next to it is the location of the pitch you're aiming for. This is what we call a Full-Tone Bend.

Here you'll want your first finger fretting the target pitch again, which is the 9th fret of the E string. This time your third or fourth finger will start on the 8th fret of the B string.

This is the same deal as the previous bend, it's just taking place on a different fret. You can also apply some vibrato once you've hit your target pitch, as indicated by the "v".

Remember, when you bend a note, usually the listener will hear the target pitch as the one that's been affected rather than the starting note, which is pretty much the opposite of what we're experiencing as the performer. It's important to get around this idea early on as it can hold you back later.

That being the case, you shouldn't worry too much about the starting pitch of your bend - provided the target pitch is solid and you've got good intonation, no one will really mind where the note started. 

Once you've got solid intonation and your fingers are getting used to the idea of doing a silly amount of bending work, try playing around with slackening-off the bend here and there, or really slowing it down you to get a very tense pitch raise. Add vibrato here and there as well for a bit more flavour.