Learn Electric Guitar

Learn to play the electric guitar

Archive for December, 2008

An early christmas present

Another alternate picking exercise:

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This is a bit different to the exercises I posted before – instead of being based on a blues scale, it involves a suspended second arpeggio shape repeated across the strings and descending chromatically. Be careful to practice it very slowly to begin with, and speed up [...]

Lessony goodness

I haven’t added any exercises here in a while.. though I do plan to get one more post on alternate picking exercises before christmas.  In the meantime, check out these licks from Jon over at Guitar Noize.
He’s written up some string skipping exercises, they are written out legato though as he suggests, you could have [...]

At what age should you learn electric guitar?

I was looking at my website stats just before and I saw that someone had arrived here by searching for the phrase: “what age to learn electric guitar”, and I thought to myself “well, just about any age really.”
Small children can have problems with full size electric guitars, getting a 3/4 size or 1/2 size [...]

Don’t just sit there tweaking your knob all the time

Do you ever sit down to practice.. tune up.. plug your guitar into your amp.. start playing and then think “i’m sure it sounded better yesterday“?  So then you start switching pickups, play with the gain knob.. okay, that’s sounding harsh now, I’ll wind back the treble.. okay it needs a bit more attack, I [...]

So why would you learn to play other people’s songs?

An interesting comment from blog reader ’stevo’ on my last post on learning to play other people’s songs:
    “why would you wanna play other people’s songs? just develop your own voice”
There’s so many different ways of responding to this, because different people have different reasons for wanting to learn other people’s songs.
I’ve always spent most [...]

Learning other people’s songs on the electric guitar

Hey, been a while since I’ve posted.. I’ve been a bit distracted from this because I’ve just joined a new band.  It’s a 5 piece doing covers of hard rock and old-school heavy metal songs.  I’ve had about 30 new pieces to learn, and some of them are really stretching the limits of my technique.  [...]