Graham Tippett's Blog

I see this a lot with beginners and experienced guitarists alike. Most of us start out by learning a selection of open chords, next we move on to barre chords once we have enough hand strength, and then we come across the missing link; triads, which at that point seem to confuse matters rather than doing what they should do, which is to expand our knowledge of chords and provide us with the basis to form any other chord. It’s one of those things that could be staring you in the face, but you...

As guitarists we tend to focus on guitar-specific things such as learning licks, riffs, technique and the accumulation of gear. While this is all well and good, at some point you’ll wish you’d taken at least one if not all of the courses below as they’re universal skills that will raise your level of musicianship, which is critical if you play with others on a regular basis or want to make a living from playing guitar. First up is a skill that’s highly undervalued by guitarists themselves...

If you’re serious about learning guitar, beyond having the technical ability to play your favorite songs, then at some stage you’ll need to learn scales. While this might seem like a daunting task, it doesn’t have to be. Sure, the pentatonic scale will have you covered in most situations, but there will be times when you want to branch out or bring other sounds into your solos. The problem here is that a lot of new players think that running scale patterns will provide them with these skills...

If you're committed to learning the guitar, it's inevitable that you're going to get into a rut from time to time. Ruts can last from a weeks to years and can be very frustrating but once you understand the psychology behind getting into a rut, you may even be able to avoid them altogether. This is a very useful skill to have since we have a finite amount of time on this planet and if you're serious about guitar, you'll probably want to be the best guitarist you can be for good chunk of that...

If you want to learn guitar online there are a plethora of options these days; and with technology playing an ever-increasing role in learning, new apps, tools, and interactive courses are cropping up every day. Where most of these are aimed at guitarists wanting to teach themselves, Veevar Guitar combines an online learning community with face-to-face tuition, which is great news for both students wanting to learn, and teachers wanting a steady paycheck. We were intrigued...
Learn Guita...

If you’ve been following this series, you can probably guess how we’re going to form eleventh arpeggios. If you haven’t, feel free to check out Part 1 and Part 2 as they’ll provide you with a solid foundation for incorporating arpeggios into your scalar playing or scales into your arpeggio playing, depending on how you’re seeing things. What I love about this approach is that I don’t have to think of a separate pattern for arpeggios and scales or make any drastic changes to my fingering when...

In Part 1, we looked at a way to pull arpeggios out of scales by looking at the bigger picture first, then focusing on a smaller part of it. This way, we were able to extract all the diatonic triad and seventh arpeggios and blend them with scales. In this second part, we’re going to use the same idea but expand it to ninth arpeggios, which have applications ranging from prog rock to jazz.
If you haven’t read Part 1, check it out now as it builds the foundation for what we’re about to see...

Truth be told, I always found arpeggios very challenging to learn and ended up trying to force them into my playing. At Music College we were given all these patterns to learn that you’d spend hours on end practicing, but which seemed to have little or no practical use or effect on your playing. Scales, on the other hand, were far more intriguing and offer fairly instant gratification when you go to improvise. This was all well and good and got me through in most playing situations, but I wa...

I’ve been a huge fan of 4NPS (four-note-per-string) scales ever since I first saw them on the Allan Holdsworth REH DVD back when it was a video cassette in the late 90s. If you’ve ever seen Holdsworth play, you’ll probably be aware of his huge hands and equally impressive reach on the fretboard. 4NPS scales were clearly a walk in the park for Holdsworth, but what about the rest of us mere mortals? The main attraction (at least for me) of 4NPS scales is that there are no box patterns to learn...

You can find tons of stuff on modes right here on the blog, but I’d like to share this quick exercise which tests whether you’re really hearing them or not. One of the major drawbacks of using patterns to navigate the fretboard is that your ear gets left out of the equation. If you can memorize a pattern, you don’t actually need to know what it sounds like to play it. For example, if I asked you to play the melodic minor scale, you’d most likely fire off a couple of patterns you know, which...