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…
Category: Improvisation
The Memorization Trap
By far the quickest way to get stuck in a rut with your guitar playing is the memorization trap. What do I mean by this? If you peruse any of the well-know guitar forums, you’ll no doubt have seen people…
From Multiple Scales to Multiple Chords
A couple of days ago we looked at How to Easily Learn Multiple Scale Patterns in parallel using just three different scale patterns/positions. In this lesson, I’d like to revisit those scale patterns and give you an easy way of…
How to Easily Learn Multiple Scale Patterns
This might not be everyone’s cup of tea but if at some point you want to get into jazz or jazz fusion, and are into the scalar approach, you’ll need a way to learn multiple scale patterns without tearing your…
Pentatonics Pro – All 330 Pentatonic Scale Combinations
Pentatonics Pro is a side project I’ve been working on for a while now which involved mapping out the 330 possible pentatonic scales into a collection of scale patterns (combinations of 5 intervals) along with a method to explore them…
How to Play Flowing Eric Clapton Style Pentatonic Lines
There’s no doubt about it, Eric Clapton is possibly one of the most influential guitarists of all time and while he tends to get overlooked these days in favor of the the more technical players, there’s a lot you can…
Blues Soloing Tricks: How to Easily Jazz Up Your Blues Soloing
It’s been a while since we’ve looked at blues soloing, so I thought I’d add to the Blues Soloing Tricks series of posts with a quick lesson on using the upper chord extensions to get a jazzier sound in standard…
How Not to Get Lost When Improvising Over Little Wing
A common problem among guitarists is getting lost while improvising. There are many reasons for this, the most notorious one being an over-reliance on patterns. Patterns are a double-edged sword on guitar as they lend themselves well to getting you…
10 Ways to Better Improvising
Sometimes all it takes is a suggestion or a new perspective to jump-start your improvisation skills or give your solos a new lease of life, especially if you’re stuck in a rut. As guitarists we tend to fixate on scales,…
Two-Note-Per-String Major Scales and Modes
Here’s an interesting concept for you to try out. I remember playing around with it unintentionally when I first began to look at major scale patterns and their modes across the whole neck to see how they laid out. I…