True Fire Tag Jam#1 - Blues Guitar Jam

The folks at True Fire have a new series going where you can jam with instructors from their site. Basically they get users to jam along with backing tracks on guitar and then are going to create a mash up of all the players together. The first track is with Larry Carlton over a blues in A similar to Stormy Monday. Here is my submission to the True Fire Tag Jam.
If you want to grab your guitar and give it a whirl you can check out the details here. Hurry though submissions wrap up in two days but you can still practice your blues guitar licks with this great backing track.
http://truefire.com/tag-jams/index.html?

And A cow Jumped over the Moon: Guitar Exercise

OK here is the second part of the guitar exercise. Not really jumping that far around the fretboard but the intervals can be pretty large given the repeating open high E that is used as a pedal point in the second part. Again strive for an even tone, rhythm and volume between the open and fretting notes. To give the lick a little bit of a neo-classical tinge I've added the G# from the ever popular ( see Yngwie and 80's and Yngwie in the 80's) A harmonic minor scale. Cheers.

Here is the guitar tab with both parts.

A Total Eclipse of the Moon - Guitar Exercise

Ok this guitar lick has nothing to do with the Lunar eclipse today other than the fact that I came up with the lick while watching streaming coverage online of this event. The guitar lick makes a great alternating picking exercise. It is played with 16th notes solely on the high E string. Strive for an even tempo and practice along with a metronome.

Here is the guitar tab:

Paint By Numbers Creative Guitar Part Two

In our last post we looked at a piece of guitar tab with no notation and I asked interested guitarists out there to create their own guitar licks using the notes provided. Here are a couple licks using the notes and sequence of notes from the first part of this post.  If you want the powertab notation you can DM me on twitter @jimifan

Here are a couple of different licks using the previous notes:

Win Win - Guitar Tab From Songsterr

Guitar tab gets a bad rap sometimes. I know I am guilty of taking shortcuts and don't spend enough time ear training but sometimes it is nice to pick up a guitar, grab some tab and just play a few songs. I think as with many things in life and music moderation is sometimes the best choice. A primary deficiency with a lot of internet guitar tab is the lack of rhythmic notation. Modern rock guitar can be notoriously difficult to correctly convey the appropriate rhythm. Songsterr is a relatively newcomer to online tab that solves this problem by tabbing out the rhythm and also giving you the option of hearing the tab. This makes the guitar tab much more useful. If you use this referral link below you  (and I) get two free weeks of their PLUS service that allows access to added features on the site.

http://www.songsterr.com/a/wa?ref=165148

Paint by Numbers - Creative Guitar

Ok in this guitar lick I'm going to force you to add your own rhythm kind of a musical paint by numbers. So here is the guitar lick but with no rhythmic instructions or notation, or slurs or legato notes.

See what you can come up with and I will post the notation indicating my original guitar lick based on these notes later.

Guitar Exercise 8ths and 16ths

This guitar lick expands on a lesson Paul Gilbert wrote in the latest Premier Guitar see a few posts back for the link. In this guitar exercise I am using just four notes notes D and C and A and G  in two different locations on the neck. The first set is the D at the third string 7th fret and the C on the 5th fret the A and G are on the same frets just on the fourth string. The second position for these notes is the 7th fret G string and 10th fret 4th string for the D and C and again up to the 4th and 5th string for the A and G notes. Now in this exercise you are going to play D,C,A,G first in eight notes with a downstroke and then the same combinations for 16th notes. Then you switch to the next position and do the same just begin with an upstroke. Start slowly with a metronome and see if you can alternate two beats with eighth notes and 2 beats with 16th notes.

A great lick that starts off with the first sequence is a solo section from the live version of "Suicide Solution" by Ozzy and Randy Rhoads. A more recent song that also uses a similar sequence is "Ravenous" by Arch Enemy.

Ok here are the notes in the two positions shown in guitar tab: