3-Note 7th Chords

An Introduction to Jazz Comping

How Chord Symbols Work

I’ve seen this subject trip up a lot of people. There are a lot of rules, exceptions, and disagreements. In addition…

Recognizing Intervals Visually on Guitar

As I began to study guitar seriously in college, I had a decent understanding of how…

First String Index Finger Vibrato

This is one of the most difficult phrasing techniques to do well on guitar. Index finger vibrato on the first string requires moving the string only in the upward direction (otherwise you pull the string off the fretboard if you pull downward). It’s also difficult…

Recycling Chord Shapes

We tend to think about chords on a one-to-one basis, meaning one chord shape has only one use. However, if you start…

A reflection:

When confronted horrific events in history and in present times we often could never imagine how anyone could ever do such a thing, or be complicit and stand by and do nothing when something could have been done. We cast ourselves as the “good guy” in our mind’s eye, thinking about how we would have done the…

Advanced Triad Arpeggios

Some of my favorite practice exercises lately have been going back to basics. I’ve been practicing regular ol’ triad arpeggios across all strings and it’s had a noticeable affect on my technique and my improvising.

Improvising over V7 chords

I think it’s important to have some personal ways of approaching different musical situations. As an example…

From scales to improvising

Some thoughts on making the jump from playing scales to improvising in no particular order.