Guitar Noise

While the focus of this lesson is on switching chords smoothly, you’ll also learn some cool flourishes and riffs and strumming patterns and even find a good practical use for that pesky C major scale!

Neil Young’s Heart of Gold is a classic guitar-harmonica song. Take a four chord song, add a few simple touches, and you’ll be amazed how cool you sound!

There’s a lot of fun to be had with this song as we work through straight strumming, a little bass-and-chord work and even toss in some arpeggio playing.

Let’s take advantage of the MP3 files and do a lesson focusing on strumming. Here’s the opening song from Dylan’s classic album, Blood on the Tracks.

Silent Night is a classic three-chord song. Here is a simple yet elegant, single guitar arrangement of this beautiful Christmas song.

Sometimes the simplest of songs present the biggest of challenges – how do we take a basic song of four or five chords and make it memorable?

Check out our arrangement of this Rolling Stones classic for the single acoustic guitar, made possible by the use of open G tuning and a cool driving rhythm.

Neil Young’s songs are relatively easy to learn yet still complicated enough to help you hone your skills. They also appeal to both the electric and acoustic.

We’re going to use this old seventies song to apply some of the things we’ve learned about chord shapes. We’ll also experiment with dropped D tuning.

This John Lennon song can show us a few interesting things about using guitar chords. We’ll work on the strumming and put together a bassline for solo guitar.

From the L.A. Woman album, this is actually a 12 bar blues based song. We’re going to develop a sweet sounding version for solo guitar.

Bob Dylan’s If Not For You is a very easy song. Our simple arrangement of this classic will help you with figuring out the basics of playing slide guitar.

Bob Marley’s I Shot The Sheriff is a delightful introduction to reggae rhythms. This lesson also includes some more advice for transposing songs to another key.

Today we’re going to take an old Paul Simon song called Bookends. This is a helpful song for developing fingerstyle coordination.

In this lesson we’re going to learn two different fingerpicking patterns for House of the Rising Sun by the Animals.

Today we’re going to learn Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet. In and of itself, this will not take very long. We will only need three chords (okay, four).

We’re going to take this old blues standard and use it to learn three important things: the turnaround, the blues lead scale and the grand finale.

We’ll take this Chuck Berry classic to further our understanding of the 12 bar blues pattern. This is the second part of our three part look at the blues.

We’re going to take this three chord blues song and use it to learn the twelve bar blues. We’ll add a little theory so you can play any blues song in any key.

Our next song lesson is Three Marlenas by The Wallflowers. We’ll use this song to tackle the problem of playing a song at the correct speed.