NEW on Kindle! Woodshedder’s Guide to Guitar Scales
We bypass traditional (and outdated) scale systems that have you learning anything from five to seven or more patterns per scale (as this is both time-consuming and unnecessary) and grouped scales in a way that makes them far easier to digest, woodshed, and have the results show up in your playing relatively quickly.
Latest articles and lessons
When NOT Breaking Out of the Box is a Good Thing
You’ve probably seen a ton of stuff on the internet, and particularly on YouTube, about ‘breaking out of the box’, which basically means you’re stuck in a scale pattern and want to somehow break free of it to play more interesting stuff. The internet suggests a variety of remedies for saving you from boring yourself…
An Alternative to the 5 Pentatonic Shapes
The 5 pentatonic shapes are a staple of learning rock or blues guitar, though truth be told most guitarists generally use 3 of them at the most. In our latest book, ‘Woodshedder’s Guide to Guitar Scales’, we reduced the number of pentatonic shapes to just 3, the effects of which can be good for your…
The One Thing You Should Learn from Yngwie Malmsteen
Yngwie Malmsteen is somewhat of an enigma in the guitar world. You may love him or hate him, and he certainly has his fair share of critics, but there’s just no denying that he is incredibly good at one thing: being Yngwie Malmsteen. From this one seemingly superficial fact, we can derive a whole host…
A More Practical Way to Learn Triads
I’m constantly looking for more practical ways to learn things on guitar, especially the tedious stuff like scales, arpeggios and triads. Triads are a great place to start but as so often happens, the rote learning of shapes doesn’t always translate to practical use when you want to incorporate them into your playing. In this…
Hack #13: Blues Scales: Start with Mixolydian
This is an excerpt from 25 Guitar Scale Hacks, check out the full eBook here. If you’re getting into blues soloing, you’re probably already familiar with the minor/major pentatonic and blues scales. While these scales are of course the bread and butter of blues improvisation, it’s worth considering the Mixolydian mode and working back from…
Practicing Without Patterns
As you may have already gathered, any chord, arpeggio or scale can be written out as a sequence of intervals. This information is often lost on guitarists in favor of using a movable pattern, but the problem here is that we overlook the information inside the pattern i.e. the intervals. This is a double-edged sword…