This lesson will show you how to play a walking bass line accompanied by little chords. This is a 12 bar blues progression in Bb with a swing feel to it. To play this, you will use your thumb (P) to play the bass line and your index (I) and middle (M) fingers to pluck the chords. Work on this slowly. Once you have learned it, work on speed and also try to interpret it differently. The fingerings indicated above and below the tab represents how I feel most … [Read more...]
Guitar Lessons: Learning the open chords, part 2
Like in part 1, in this lesson we will work on shifting between chords. These shifts are a little trickier but with some practice you will be playing these chords in no time at all. Click here if you're not sure how to read the chord blocks. Click on the diagrams for an MP3 audio example. 1) We'll start by playing the A Major, A Major7 and A7 chords. Play the A Major chord. Strum it trying to have each string ring cleanly. Now remove your first … [Read more...]
Basic Music Theory Lesson 7: Chords, Harmonizing the C major scale adding the 7th note
Just like we did in lesson 6, we are again going to harmonize the C major scale except this time, rather than just using triads (3 notes) we are going to use 4 notes. To harmonize the scale, we simply take the 1st 3rd, 5th and 7th notes of the C scale and spell them out. C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C C E G B Then we start again from the 2nd note in the scale and count the 1st, 3rd , 5th and 7th notes from that point. C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D F A C … [Read more...]
Basic Music Theory Lesson 6: Chords, Harmonizing the C major scale with basic triads
In this lesson, you are going to have to start using some of the concepts learned in lessons 1 - 5. What we are going to do is "harmonize" the C major scale. To harmonize the scale, we simply take the 1st 3rd and 5th note of the C scale and spell them out. C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C C E G Then we start again from the 2nd note in the scale and again count the 1st 3rd and 5th note from that point. C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D F A Again from the 3rd note in the scale, count the 1st 3rd … [Read more...]