50 More Guitar Hacks

Due to the fantastic response to the first book in this series, ’50 Guitar Hacks for the Thinking Man’s Guitarist’, it gives me immense pleasure to bring you this second installment; 50 More Guitar Hacks for the Thinking Man’s Guitarist. My hope is to again provide you with timely insight into all aspects of learning and playing guitar. These hacks are things I’ve learned from years of playing that should and will be passed on to those seeking insight, out-of-the-box thinking, and the deepening of their knowledge of the guitar whatever their current level may be. The information herein takes the form of mini-lessons, anecdotes, wisdom and knowledge, divine inspiration and friendly advice. It is my desire to help you on your journey to being the best guitarist you can possibly be.

The Advancing Guitarist faces many challenges on the instrument, yet it is one of the most exciting periods in a player's development. This eBook features hacks, mini-lessons, insights, tricks and tips to push you past your new-found comfort zone and make real progress on the instrument. You will reach many plateaus as you progress on guitar, and these are fantastic opportunities to do something different, and to learn something new while deepening the knowledge you've already acquired. This eBook provides solutions to many of the issues faced by guitarists on the intermediate plateau, those stuck in a rut, or those simply wishing to break into advanced territory on the instrument. I hope to be a facilitator on this journey, and help you get to where you want to be with your guitar playing. Here's what we'll be getting into in this 50 Guitar Hacks eBook:1. The Secret to Fast Playing that Everyone Overlooks2. How to Move Beyond Pentatonic Scales3. Do You Need a Mentor Rather than a Teacher?4. How to Get into Melodic Soloing5. How to Use the Other Four Minor Pentatonic Boxes6. Why Your Solos Still Sound like Scales and How to Turn It Around7. What's Your Specialty?8. When to Learn the Notes on the Neck9. How to Get the Gig10. How to Learn New Scales without Learning New Patterns11. How to Balance Your Pickups for a Sharper Sound12. Write This Down Before Every Practice Session13. How to Get Free Gear14. Buy Tons of Picks15. The 'Hendrix' Chord and When to Use It16. How to 'Johnny B. Goode' Any Scale17. Scale Fragments: Practice This to Increase Your Speed18. Repetition Is Only Half the Story19. Split the Fretboard20. Zone in to Improve Your Phrasing21. Take Advantage of Your Own Hindsight22. How to Spice Up Your Chord/Rhythm Playing23. How to Memorize New Material Faster24. The Hearing Lag25. Beyond the 'Hendrix' Chord26. The Reason You Find Chord Tone Soloing Hard27. The Real Meaning of 'Less is More'28. Stop Learning Guitar Solos29. Sweep Picking Made Easy 30. How to Play the Minor Pentatonic Scale Over Almost Anything 31. 4 Neglected Pentatonic Scales32. Are You Using Your Best Picking Technique?33. What Do I Use This for?34. How to Know What to Learn Next35. How to Make the Most of Backing Tracks36. How to Tap into an Infinite Supply of Riffs, Licks and Ideas37. Instant Jazz/Fusion Soloing with 9-Note Scales38. How to Take the Tedium Out of Learning Arpeggios39. Improve Your Phrasing with the Pivot Technique40. The Law of Overcompensation and Fretting Hand Strength41. The Best Books for Learning to Sight Read42. How to Find the Right Gear for You43. If You Use Tablature, You Must Do This44. The Dreaded, 'Now Practice This in All 12 Keys...'45. Is It Time to Forget Scales?46. More Than Repertoire47. Make Time for Noodling48. A Healthy Obsession You Should Have49. How to Play Over Changes without Getting Frustrated50. Are There Any Skeletons in Your Musical Closet?

50 Guitar Hacks for the Thinking Man's Guitarist has just received an extensive update and now features more detailed explanations, plus new hacks, diagrams and insight. Guitar Hacks can be clever ways to do things on guitar, priceless nuggets of information, or new perspectives on vital concepts for learning and understanding guitar, out-of-the-box thinking and much more besides. These hacks are based on 20+ years of hindsight so that you can get to where you want to be with your playing quicker and more efficiently. whatever your current level, or provide an excellent reference for guitar teachers looking for lesson ideas that can be easily expanded upon.

The very first scale most guitarists learn when they begin to explore the world of improvisation is often the Minor Pentatonic Scale, usually it’s A Minor or E Minor form. While this scale has been the crux of much of rock and blues music for the best part of a century, in the modern era of guitar playing it deserves a more thorough exploration through new pentatonic concepts, ideas and insight. Over 10 in-depth lessons, this book will deepen your understanding of pentatonic scales while opening your eyes to a myriad of ways in which they can be used and exploited to build up an arsenal of improvisational tools based on these five-note scales. We’ll also cover the difficult transition from pentatonics to modes through a new method that allows you to retain your pentatonic prowess by intertwining it with the modes instead of abandoning pentatonic scales in favor of other more cumbersome scale systems. In truth, most guitarists have barely scratched the surface when it comes to pentatonic scales, believing the major and minor pentatonic scales to be the end of the story when in fact, it’s just the beginning. So, if you know those five minor/major pentatonic boxes, and want to see how much farther this can go, this book is for you.

When it comes to scales and improvising, the guitar fretboard is a maze, and this is both good and bad… Well, instead of bad, let’s say it’s ‘challenging’ because like any maze it’s easy to get lost, familiar routes can often lead to dead-ends, and it can be overwhelming to find your way out. On the other hand, we have countless routes (possibilities) to choose from, all of which provide different creative opportunities; what I’m basically saying is that by learning one or two scale systems to ‘get through the maze’, we stop seeing (or even avoid) the many other ways there are to navigate the fretboard. This is where 25 Guitar Scale Hacks comes in. This book is about exploring the fretboard using those other routes to create motion, fluidity and bring the music out of any static pattern. Here, we dispense with the standard patterns such as 3NPS scales or the CAGED system in order to explore the many other patterns, nuances and hacks the guitar fretboard has to offer. Who is this book for? This book is for the intermediate to advancing students who really want to make their playing stand out from the crowd, feel stuck in a rut, or want to move away from rote pattern playing and predictable-sounding solos. 25 Guitar Scale Hacks looks at improvisation based on the guitar fretboard; in other words, we’re putting the guitar and all its nuances first, rather than working from generic patterns that are traditionally taught in scale and arpeggio books. The concept of 25 Guitar Scale Hacks then is a collection of mini-lessons or hacks for a deeper exploration of scales and how to make music with them. Feel free to work through the book in the order it’s written or choose the hacks that interest you the most.

3NPS (three-note-per-string) scales, as used by legions of guitarists but popularized mainly by Joe Satriani, are one of the most efficient ways to navigate the fretboard and get your scales down IF you follow the guidelines in this book. As the name suggests, a 3NPS scale is any scale that contains three notes on each string, and as you'll see in this eBook, this makes for a very consistent way to map out scales on the guitar fretboard. What we’ve done here is revamped the 3NPS scale system and turned it into an incredibly effective means to learn a wide variety of scales all over the fretboard by streamlining the number of patterns, as well as the picking system. This is not a scale theory book, and contains no pentatonic scales. This is a quick and dirty (and very effective) method for learning 3NPS scales all over the fretboard; something to work on in the woodshed. It will improve your picking technique and speed. It does not require a great amount of thinking as you only need to learn two picking patterns, which is really one in two directions, and only three scale patterns instead of the usual seven per scale.

Chord tone soloing and soloing over changes on guitar is a complex area which can be approached in many ways, and where even a cursory search for online resources is likely to leave you with more questions than answers. It’s particularly difficult on guitar because guitarists tend to arrive at this point with varying amounts of knowledge and gaps in their playing, whereas other instrumentalists approach soloing over changes in a more uniform way. While it’s true that everyone learns differently, I believe that a solid approach to soloing over changes requires a system that is a) not based on patterns, b) develops the ability to locate notes on the neck either by interval or by the name of the note, and c) develops the player’s ear to the point where he/she is able to fully express themselves and truly improvise on their instrument as oppose to a formulaic, calculated and somewhat cold approach to something that should be, insofar as is possible, spontaneously created in the moment; and this is what I hope to achieve with this eBook.

If you ask anyone who's been playing guitar for a while how to turn scales into solos, you'll likely get a variety of answers. They'll tell you to learn licks, work on your arpeggios, even learn your favorite players' solos note for note. While this is all good advice, I've had some particularly stubborn students that wanted to go beyond that; they wanted to be able to improvise using any scale up and down the fretboard, but at the same time break free from those deeply-ingrained scalar lines and patterns. It was then that I suggested the zonal approach to improvisation; by working in reduced areas of the neck with specifically designed patterns, they were soon able to create melodic, flowing lines that didn't sound at all like scales--they sounded like real music! This is the approach you'll find in this book. We dissect 15 of the most common scales, beyond the pentatonics, and break them down into zones which can be practiced either by scale, or for any particular scale across the fretboard. The objective of this book then is to provide a structured reference to make the transition from playing scales to playing, improvising and creating musical lines when soloing. It’s aimed at the intermediate to advanced guitarist looking to be able to improvise confidently and freely on the instrument in a wide variety of styles. It is also aimed at guitarists that want to move beyond rote pentatonic/blues soloing and incorporate other scales and modes into their playing, as well as building up a vocabulary to solo fluently over chord changes.