I’m Graham Tippett — guitarist, author, and the person behind Unlock the Guitar.

I studied music in the UK in the early 2000s, where my instructors included Guthrie Govan, Dave Kilminster, the late Eric Roche, Pete Callard, and Jamie Humphries. What that experience gave me, beyond the obvious, was a deep scepticism of the way guitar is typically taught — and a drive to find better approaches. The problem with most guitar education is that it hands you patterns and shapes and leaves the rest up to you. What you end up with is a collection of things you can play but no real understanding of the instrument underneath them.

Over the past decade I’ve published 50+ guitar books on Amazon Kindle and paperback, covering scales, modes, arpeggios, improvisation, chord theory, alternate tunings, ear training, and more. The flagship series — Hacking the CAGED System and the 2 Position Guitar Scale System — are built around the same principle: the minimum you need to learn to get the maximum musical return.

The free PDFs cover modes, melodic minor, pentatonics, 3NPS scales, chord tone soloing, and more — all free, no sign-up required. The apps — Fretboard Printer, What Key Am I In?, and Notes on the Neck in 12 Days among them — are built around the same philosophy: practical tools that do something genuinely useful rather than features for their own sake.

And there are 200+ free lessons on the site covering everything from Arabic guitar scales to Allan Holdsworth’s approach to chord-scale theory — the same material I’ve been teaching and refining for over 20 years.