Table of contents for April 2018 in Guitar Techniques

SHAUN BAXTER One of the UK’s most respected music educators, Shaun has taught many who are now top tutors themselves. His Jazz Metal album is considered a milestone. JON BISHOP Jon is one of those great all-rounders who can turn his hand to almost any style. No ‘Jack of all trades and master of none’, he nails every one with ease! PHIL CAPONE Phil is a great guitarist who specialises in blues and jazz. He teaches at ICMP in London, writes for GT and Total Guitar and has published 10 top tuition books. CHARLIE GRIFFITHS Guitar Institute tutor Charlie first came to fame in Total Guitar’s Challenge Charlie series. He’s also one of the UK’s top rock, metal and fusion guitarists. PHIL HILBORNE The UK’s original magazine guitar tutor, Phil’s…

TINA K “THE ‘SPEED UPPER’ MODE IS SUPER EFFECTIVE AT SPEED DEVELOPMENT FOR LICKS, SCALES AND SHORT PHRASES” Regular readers of my column will know how much I waffle on about the importance of rhythm. Some of you might also know that I sell an app called the Time Trainer Metronome and I hope you’ll forgive this article if some of it reads a bit like an advertorial. The app came about from wanting these tools myself for my own practice and assuming that others would find them helpful too – and it would seem by its popularity that people do. The first training mode I’d like to discuss I call Bar Breaks. The general ideas is that you play something (most often a rhythm part) along with a metronome…

THIS COUNTRY STYLED lick is short but sweet, making it great for use either as a song ending or as part of a solo. It’s based on a mixture of ideas drawn from A Blues scale (A-C-D-E b -E-G-A) and A Major Pentatonic (A-B-C#- E-F#-A). This sort of scale combination is often referred to as a‘hybrid’or ‘mixed’scale idea. Fingerstyle imparts a‘snappy-ness’to proceedings, but it will also work fine using pick or pick and fingers. The held bent triple-stop at the end of the lick is a county cliché where the 2nd (B) is bent up to the 3rd (C#) against a sustained root and 5th (A and E). Apply a smidgeon of vibrato to it – if any at all. For further inspiration listen to players such as Albert Lee,…

“GREEN’S SOLOS OFTEN USED NOTES FROM THE BLUES SCALE, THE NATURAL MINOR, THE BB KING ‘BLUES BOX’ AND THE MIXOLYDIAN MODE” ABILITY RATING Info Key Various Tempo Various CD TRACKS 4-31 Moderate Will improve your… Major key soloing Minor key soloing Solo control and phrasing Peter Green was the guitarist faced with the unenviable task of filling Eric Clapton’s shoes when he quit John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to form Cream in 1966 (just in case any readers have recently emerged from a rather long spell in a cave!). Green was a total unknown at the time but, like Clapton, he too would leave after recording just one album, A Hard Road, in 1967. Bluesbreakers drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie also soon followed, providing the rhythm section for his exciting…

ABILITY RATING Info Key D minor Tempo 34bpm CD TRACKS 40-41 Moderate Will improve your… Melody and accompaniment separation Ornamentation with legato Fretting-hand stamina Alessandro Marcello (1669-1747) was an Italian nobleman and composer whose privileged lifestyle allowed him to excel at several pursuits including mathematics, poetry, philosophy and of course music. Although he produced a relatively small compositional output (including several cantatas, violin sonatas and concertos and arias), he was well respected and received endorsement by no lesser a musician than his contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach. The Baroque master (and one of the greatest Western Art composer of all time) arranged Marcello’s most famous work Concerto for Oboe and Strings in D minor, op. 1 for harpsichord and is catalogued as Concerto for solo keyboard No. 3 in D minor…

BRIAN RASIC / GETTY IMAGES Brought to you by… ABILITY RATING Moderate Info Key: Various Tempo: Various CD: TRACKS 48-51 Will improve your Pentatonic and blues vocabularyString bends and fluidityDouble-stops At the age of 13 Frank Marino wound up in a mental hospital after getting involved with psychedelic drugs. Here he found a cheap Stella acoustic to keep his mind off the terrifying thoughts in his head. After a year or so he was incredibly proficient on the instrument, developing a deep relationship with it and often expressing how he felt that the guitar had became his lifeboat. Once discharged from hospital Frank began playing around Montreal with a trio called Mahogany Rush, which he named after one of his LSD experiences. Toting a 1961 Les Paul SG, bought by…

MARKUS CUFF / CORBIS / GETTY IMAGES ABILITY RATING Moderate Info Key: C Tempo: 111 bpm CD: TRACK 71 Will improve your… Use of altered tuningsFretting unusual chord shapesFretting barre chord shapes A gifted but troubled singer-songwriter, Elliott Smith stunned the music world with his violent suicide on October 21, 2003. Born in Nebraska in 1969, Smith spent most of his childhood years in Texas and later re-located to Portland in his early teens. A difficult relationship with his stepfather saw him escape into music as a child and he began to play guitar when he was 10, a year after taking up the piano. He started his first bands while as a student at college in the early 1990s and was gigging and releasing music by 1992. Although he…

ZUMA PRESS / ALAMY “PLAYING THE EXAMPLES IN 5THS AND 6THS MIGHT LOOK A BIT CHALLENGING SO BREAK EACH ONE DOWN TWO BEATS AT A TIME” ABILITY RATING Info Key: A Dorian Tempo: 120 bpm CD: TRACKS 77-82 Will improve your: Alternate picking and legato Strength, stamina and timing Muting, barring and rolling Welcome to this month’s column, already the fourth part in our series looking at developing fretboard fluency. Following on from our last lesson, where we worked through a multiple-element ‘master exercise’ in A Dorian, and with the associated chord, scale, arpeggio and intervallic pattern in 3rds and 4ths arranged in positions 1 and 4, this month we’ll revisit the same idea this time using 5ths and 6ths. In order to develop legato and alternate picking approaches to…

JOE BIELAWA “I PRACTISE SCALES TO LOOSEN UP. PENTATONIC PATTERNS OF DESCENDING FIVES AND SIXES AND ASCENDING SIXES AND EIGHTS”Lance Lopez GT: Do you have a type of pick that you can’t live without? LL: I love Jim Dunlop Tortex picks. The .73mm yellow ones. I’ve used them since 1989. When I was a kid I used Fender picks when I first began playing guitar, but couldn’t make them last very long. I met Frank Hannon and Tommy Skeoch from the band Tesla after a concert they played in Shreveport when they were at the height of their career in the late 80s, and they each gave me a handful of guitar picks, which were Tortex picks. I’ve used them since. I’ve tried other picks over the years but always…

MY OLDER SISTER used to go out with a very clued-up and musical drummer when we lived up in north Northumberland in the mid-60s. David was into every kind of music and would bring all these great albums into the house; not just the usual 60s suspects but things like Graham Bond, Zoot Money, Albert King with Booker T, Paul Butterfield Blues Band and, of course, John Mayall. Mayall’s Beano album had come out the previous year and one day David came over with a new Mayall album. I was mega excited since I’d been blown away by Clapton’s input into the 1966 release (which David had also introduced us to), and expected to hear more of his incredible wailing. My initial disappointment at there being no Eric quickly turned…

“LEARN TO ENJOY THE MUSIC FOR WHAT IT IS AND DO NOT DISRESPECT IT FOR WHAT IT IS NOT” Jason, an occasionally well meaning man, was moved recently to append a list of ‘suggested’ topics for future articles in a message to your correspondent. I inferred that perhaps he had grown indifferent to my tales from the fretting front line and considered that something helpful, hopeful or hint-ful might be just the ticket to sweep-pick our readers early this year. Perhaps it was his way of gently reminding me that the clue to this publication resides in its title. Or perhaps he had merely developed post Yuletide dyspepsia following the office party. All of which represents my ingenious ploy to deflect criticism from the wintery word play that follows, yet…

AFTER JUST THREE YEARS IN  existence Burns UK calls it a day. Formed in 1974 to continue Jim Burns’legacy of guitar building, sadly only one model has made any impact on the market. Originally to be called the Chonchorde, the renamed Flyte was warmly received. The Burns Mirage followed and this year the LJ24 was introduced and features a pair of Mach Two pickups but it’s unable to save the company. TWO PIVOTAL ALBUMS ARE RELEASED The Eagles - Hotel California and Fleetwood Mac - Rumours and they will go on to become two of the greatest selling albums of all time. Lynyrd Skynyrd lose three members of the band in a plane crash and without Cassie Gaines, Steve Gaines and Ronnie Van Zant they disband. Marc Bolan also dies…

ABILITY RATING Info Key Various Tempo Various CD TRACKS 32-39 Easy to Moderate Will improve your… Minor soloing in many styles Modal knowledge and uses Superimposing diatonic arpeggios Welcome to this exhaustive feature on one of the most melodic but also one of the most accessible modes: the Dorian. The aim of the lesson is to apply Dorian to various stylistic settings. Both rhythm and lead guitar ideas are notated and, once you’ve gone through these, your Dorian mode trick-bag should be fully topped up. The Dorian is one of the minor modes of the Major scale and is expressed like this: R-2- b 3-4-5-6- b 7. You’ll notice that five of its seven notes comprise a Minor Pentatonic scale, with the other two being the 2nd (9th) and major…

LIVEPIX Brought to you by… ABILITY RATING Moderate Info Key: A Tempo: 125 bpm CD: TRACKS 52-54 Will improve your… Rhythm and riff playingClassic rock soloingTone and delivery This month we pay musical respect to AC/DC’s co-founder, riffmeister and principal songwriter, Malcolm Young. Together with brother Angus, Malcolm formed the band in 1973 in Sydney, Australia and they went on to become one of the most legendary acts of the past five decades. Accolades include: over 200 million albums sold, including 70 million in the US (more than Madonna), selling over a million CDs in America in 2007 despite not having released an album there since 2000, and having a street named after them in Madrid. They have been branded ‘hard rock’, ‘heavy metal’ and ‘blues rock’ but they have…

DAVID LYTTELTON “WE HAVE ENDED UP WITH FIVE DIFFERENT PENTATONIC SCALES THAT CAN BE USED OVER OUR DOMINANT VAMP” ABILITY RATING Info Key: A (A7) Tempo: 60bpm CD: TRACKS 72-73 Will improve your… Pentatonic scale knowledge Knowledge of unusual Pentatonics Unorthodox Pentatonic repertoire Recently, we have been exploring various ways of using Mixolydian mode (1-2-3-4-5-6- b 7) over a dominant chord (1-3-5- b 7). So far, we have extracted a range of different ‘devices’ and flavours: • Triads (three-note entities) • Arpeggios (four-note entities) • Pentatonic scales (five-note entities) Each concept provides a different mental and aural perspective, leading you to play different musical ideas each time. In terms of Pentatonic (five-note) scales, we have looked at the following: Major Pentatonic: 1-2-3-4-6 Dominant Pentatonic: 1-2-3-5- b 7 Indian pentatonic: 1-3-4-5-…

WENN LTD / ALAMY “SONGS LIKE 15 STEP BY RADIOHEAD, ANIMALS BY MUSE AND STING’S SEVEN DAYS ARE ALL PROG STYLE ROCK IN 5/4 TIME” ABILITY RATING Info Key: Various Tempo: Various CD: TRACKS 83-87 Will improve your… 5/4 playing Odd-time understanding Prog and jazz feel It’s quite easy to grasp 5/4 time and easy to utilise due to its close similarity to 4/4. Being an odd-time signature it has an inherent ‘off-kilter’ feel, but it’s also quite accessible. Songs like Radioheads’s 15 Step, Animals by Muse or Sting’s wonderful Seven Days are all prog-style rock and in 5/4 time. 4/4 means four quarter-notes per bar, which we usually count as simply ‘1-2-3-4’ over and over again. 5/4 literally means ‘five quarter-notes per bar’, which is essentially a 4/4 bar…

Tap the links Finding your way around the magazine is easy. Tapping the feature titles on the cover or the contents page, takes you straight to the relevant articles. Any web and email links in the text are tappable too! Animated tab & audio All the mag’s main lessons have the audio built in with a moving cursor that shows you exactly where you are in the music. Simply tap the ‘play’ button and you’re off - you can fast-forward or scroll back at will. Play the videos Certain articles have accompanying videos full of useful insight and additional information. Once again, tap the play buttons to enjoy video masterclasses on your iPad (recommended) or smartphone. PLUS! Get a FREE iPad/iPhone sample of GT. For full details and how to…

A F ARCHIVE / ALAMY ➊ Straight-ahead rock blues (Am) We start with an easy and fun rock-style blues in A minor. Use A Minor Pentatonic (A-C-D-E-G) and A Minor Blues scale (A-C-D-D#- E-G) to your heart’s content, then and add extra colour with some A Natural Minor (A-B-C-D-E-F-G). Basic arpeggios are Am (A-C-E), Dm (D-F-A) and Em (E-G-B). ➋ Mixing the modes rockout (G) This one is an uptempo jam, made for working on mixing various modes into your playing. That said, G Minor Pentatonic (G-B b -C-D-F) works throughout. The chord progression is G-B b maj7-Cadd9-A b maj7. Try G Mixolydian (G-A-B-C-D-E F) on the G chords, G Dorian (G-A-B b -C-D-E-F) on B b maj7/Cadd9 and G Phrygian (G-A b -B b -C-D-E b -F) on the…

ABILITY RATING Advanced Info Key: Amaj, Dm Tempo: 102 bpm CD: TRACKS CD-ROM Will improve your Use of the guitar’s controls Intervallic rock & blues vocabulary Triads & string-skipped arpeggios This month we set sail with the first in a two-part feature with rock-blues soloing master Carl Verheyen. There are plenty of ear-grabbing interval leaps and instrumental rock vocabulary to learn so let’s get cracking. As Carl reflects, this month’s track is basically in the key of A. If you use the A Major scale (A-B-C#-D-E-F#-G#) over the chords A, Bm, D and E their modal flavours will automatically be produced. The song has a 12/8 time signature so the pulse is counted 1 and a, 2 and a, 3 and a, 4 and a. Carl uses some special effects…

Brought to you by… EASY LICKS EXAMPLE 1 JERRY CANTRELL CD TRACK 42 Here’s a typical Alice In Chains style verse riff. This is a straight-ahead down-stroked powerchord riff played in odd time (7/8). Watch for the push in the second bar and count a steady 7/8 to keep you and your guitar in time. EASY LICKS EXAMPLE 2 MUDDY WATERS CD TRACK 43 Play this classic intro, sliding into the first note and with a quick vibrato on the third and second strings for the authentic Chicago blues feel. Resolve to the open E position to ready you for the‘groovy’standard blues riff on the sixth string. INTERMEDIATE LICKS EXAMPLE 3 JOHN DENVER CD TRACK 44 This example is based around an A chord at the 5th fret with the…

KEITH TSUJI / / GETTY IMAGES ABILITY RATING Moderate/Advanced Info Key: Various Tempo: Various CD: TRACKS 55-70 Will improve your… Single-note fingerstyle techniqueUse of chromatic bridging notesSyncopation and rhythm variation Earl Klugh has one of the most unique and instantly recognisable sounds in jazz guitar. Synonymous with the nylon-string classical (as indeed was Charlie Byrd), Earl was invited to and spent several years in George Benson’s group, starting while still in his teens. Then, after a short stint with Chic Corea’s Return To Forever, Klugh signed a solo deal with Blue Note and released his debut album, simply titled Earl Klugh, in 1976. Klugh now celebrates over 40 successful years in the music business; he’s gone from strength to strength and is sounding better than ever. His tone is warm…

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES “SONGS LIKE THE SKY IS CRYING AND SHAKE YOUR MONEY MAKER HAVE BEEN COVERED BY PLAYERS INCLUDING PETER GREEN, ALBERT KING AND SRV” ABILITY RATING Info Key: Open D Tempo: Various CD: TRACKS 74-75 Will improve your Blues authenticity Vintage slide repertoire Feel and vibe It’s hard to overestimate Elmore James’s influence on slide guitar. Starting as sideman for Sonny Boy Williamson II and influenced by Robert Johnson and Tampa Red, The Mississippi born guitarist had his first hit in 1952 with Robert Johnson’s Dust My Broom. The slide intro would go on to become one of the most recognisable blues phrases of all time. James was among the first Delta bluesmen to ‘go electric’, using an acoustic with two De Armond pickups that…

Album of the Month WES MONTGOMERY IN PARIS Resonance Records This is something special; an official, high-resolution master of Wes’s lauded Paris concert from 1965. Ten pieces that span two CDs and a well documented booklet make for an involving release with Wes on fire throughout. Featuring Harold Mabern on piano, Arthur Harper on bass and Jimmy Lovelace on drums (special guest Johnny Griffin on sax), the band really cuts loose with Wes’s single-note, octave and chord soloing in full flight. Opener is Four On Six, one of Wes’s most famous pieces (based on Gershwin’s Summertime harmony) which has a memorable head and bristles with tasty chord changes. On John Coltrane’s Impressions (no studio version was ever recorded), Wes’s octaves and syncopations are exquisite. For sheer bravado the 12-minute rendition…