Knowing a chord’s root note helps you play it cleaner. This knowledge also helps you recognize and play slash chords without thinking twice about it.
Music Guide
These mini-lessons for guitar are short guides to help you understand basic music concepts, guitar techniques and other topics that occur frequently in your day to day guitar playing. The idea is to give you a quick refresher should you happen to need it on any given topic.
Oct02
Root Notes and Slash Chords
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Apr01
Quarter Note Triplets
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Playing quarter note triplets – dividing two beats into three equal parts – is tricky. David demonstrates how you can do it easily.
Feb07
Playing Percussively
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Learn to add percussive strumming to your rhythm playing. David walks you through the basic technique, step by step, with audio examples.
Oct12
Holding Your Guitar
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How you hold your guitar can make a big difference on how quickly you make progress learning to play. David Hodge gives you a few tips to help you out.
Jul13
Barre Chords (Part 2 – Shapes)
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Knowing four simple basic chords allows you to play forty-eight barre chords. This article teaches you to play two versions of any basic chord you know.
Jun28
Barre Chords (Part 1 – Forming and Playing)
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Learn how to play barre chords by taking them one step at a time. David Hodge walks you through playing your first barre chord making them as easy as possible.
Apr15
Hammer-Ons
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Hammer-ons are one of the four basic slurring techniques of playing guitar. While many guitarists think of them as just a technique of the lead guitarist, they are essential to rhythm playing as well.
Dec15
Chord Melody
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Chord melody is a way of arranging songs so that a single guitar does all the work of providing melody and harmony, and usually includes a bass part as well.
Dec10
Song Structures
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Knowing how songs are structured can help you with learning songs and with communicating with other musicians. Here’s a brief run down of the basic parts of songs.
Nov13
Alternate Tuning
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Alternate tuning involves changing any or all of a guitar’s strings to a different note than in standard tuning. “Drop D” and DADGAD tunings are frequent choices of alternate tuning but there are many to choose from.
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