Take a second and listen to Panama (here’s a Youtube link). Pay attention to everything that happens from the intro to the first chorus. Listen to Eddie’s guitar playing, and try to find patterns. You’ll see that there aren’t many. The only riff that gets repeated more than twice is the chorus riff, and no section is strummed like the one before.

The reason why there aren’t many patterns is because Eddie isn’t interested in writing patterns. What would be the point? He is trying to take you on an adventure, and the best way to do that isn’t just to repeat cool guitar patterns over and over. Instead, he has set points he’s trying to hit, and he’s crafting his writing to hit each of those points.

That needs to be how you approach YOUR writing.

From now on, you’re going to stop writing songs by putting together a verse and a chorus, and leaving it at that. No, you’re going to go further.

You’re going to craft songs within your riffs. You’re going to take your verse, and realize that where the listener is at the beginning of the verse needs to be different from where he is at the end. And the only way for him to get there is for you to take him by the hand and guide him.

Because, when you boil it down to the fundamentals, that’s what’s happening – you’re taking the listener on a journey. They are giving you the keys to their car and telling you to take them somewhere, anywhere. And by just writing verse + chorus, you’re doing the equivalent of driving around the block and calling it an adventure, when they want you to take them on the highway and go 20 mph over the limit.

If they are being kind enough to give you 3 minutes of their time, you’re going to make sure to give them their money’s worth.

So I have a challenge for you – you’re going to stop writing songs with a verse + chorus mentality. Starting today, you are going to take your listeners on journeys.

Trust me, they’ll appreciate it.

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Note: tomorrow, everyone on my email list is going to get an email with homework, specifically designed to work on using this concept to make their songs better. If you’re curious on how you can take this idea and incorporate it into your writing, then sign up for my email list below.

It sounds like a simple question, but it’s one that you need to ask yourself.

What kind of guitarist do you want to be? What do you want to be able to do?

Why do you need to ask yourself? Because, like everything with life, there are so many options out there. Too many. You can spend hours and hours practicing all of the different things you can do with a guitar.

But there’s a problem – it’s not all going to be fun, and it’s not going to bring you closer to your goals.

So you need to ask yourself – what are your goals?

Do you want to be a virtuoso?
Do you want to impress women?
Do you want to play your favorite songs?
Do you want to be a session guitarist?
Do you want to be able to hold your own in a band?
Do you want a way to unwind on the weekends?

The reason you need to find out is that the different answers to these questions will lead you down different paths.

Do you just want to be able to play songs on the radio? Then you probably don’t need to be able to sightread.

Do you just want to have a way to unwind on the weekends? Then you probably don’t need to learn how to sweep.

Once you have a truthful answer to that question, then you can start taking action. So with that in mind, you have some homework:

1) Grab a pen and paper (or open a blank document on your computer).

2) Write down as much as you can about the type of guitarist you want to be.

A note about this – don’t write down everything you wish you were better at. Instead, be honest with yourself – what do you actually enjoy about the guitar? If you could do only one thing, what would it be?

For instance, don’t write “it’d be great to be good at classical music” if you spend only 2% of your time listening to the music, have never bought a single piece of classical sheet music or done a Google search for it, or can’t name a single piece by Shostakovich.

The point of this exercise isn’t to think of all of the things, in a perfect world, you’d like to be able to do. Instead, you’re just looking for what you’d like to do MOST. When you imagine yourself 5 years in the future playing, what are you doing? Are you a session guitarist, playing the backing track on the new Beyonce song? Did you meet the woman of your dreams because of a song you wrote for her? Are you playing in a band with 3 foot long hair obstructing your view of the blistering solo you’re playing in front of a crowd of 100,000 fans at a stadium with pyrotechnics shooting all around?

It’s the answer to THAT question – the “what am I doing with the guitar 5 years from now” – that you’re looking for.

3) Figure out what you can’t do today that you can do 5 years from now. What do you need to get better at? What is the difference between the person you are today and the guitarist 5 years from now?

4) Create a practice schedule to work on those things only.

5) Write in the comments below A) what you want to get better at, and B) what you’re going to add to your practice routine to reach that goal.

Here are 3 mistakes you’re making in your riffs.

1) You aren’t using creative chords

Are you using only power chords in your melodies, with maybe a few inflections or added notes?

Guess what: there are a whole lot more chords you can play on the guitar, and you’re short-changing yourself if you aren’t making the rest available. Try using the below ideas to make substitutions:

• Add notes on top of your power chords. Try adding the 9th or 10th scale degree to the top (these can be easily played with your 4th finger).
• Instead of playing a fifth, play a sixth, third, or fourth instead.
• Add open strings to your playing.
• Use Sus2 and Sus4 chords (these sound great with distortion).
• Use octaves. Octaves are great because they both fill extra space in the sonic spectrum, while still freeing you up to play cool melodies easily by just shifting the shape around the neck.
• etc.

2) You aren’t interacting with the other instruments

You know what’s a sure sign of a beginner guitarist? If they only try to improve a riff by adding to the guitar part.

There are probably at least 3 other people playing at the same time (vocals/melody, bass, drums), and if you just improve the guitar riff, you’re not working off of what they’re doing. Instead, you want to think of how you can improve the whole rather than just the single part you’re in charge of.

• Try listening to the vocal melody, and see how you can use the tools at your disposal to accent the melody.
• Look at what the bassist is doing. Is he freeing you up to play more than just the roots of chords? Is he doing any patterns that you want to mirror or contrast against up top?
• Is the drummer playing any hits? What’s he doing with the bass drum? Is he hitting the snare just on 2 and 4, or is he adding in any syncopation? What choices can you make to play with him?
• What is the keyboardist playing? Is he doing full chords? Maybe that frees you up to play less notes. Is he doing a more busy pattern? Maybe you should play something simpler. Is he doing a single note line? Maybe you should play it too or harmonize against it.
• Finally, how does this riff fit into the whole song? Do you even want to play more complex now, or should you wait until the bridge/chorus/outro?

Finally, you don’t have to cater your playing to your bandmates completely – what can they all do to play with what YOU want to do?

3) You’re limiting yourself to arbitrary boxes

There are certain rules taught to guitarists that many don’t learn how to break. It’s time to break them.

• Just because you’re playing with distortion does not mean that you have to only do power chords.
• Just because one guitar is playing a melody line does not mean you need to harmonize against it.
• Just because you’re playing in E minor does not mean a G# won’t sound cool.
• Just because your chorus is in 4/4 doesn’t mean your verse can’t be in 6/8.
• Just because a minor second sounds abrasive doesn’t mean it won’t be effective.
• Just because the song is fast doesn’t mean you need to play a fast solo.
• Distortion pedals have off switches. Use them.
• Etc.

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There you have it – 3 mistakes you’re making. Now go to the woodshed and graduate to the next level.

Like this lesson? Readers of my email list today got a complimentary homework assignment to improve in this area. If you want to not only learn what you’re doing wrong, but want a set path to improve, then sign up to my email list below:

It happens to everyone sooner or later—one day you realize you’re playing the same old stuff, aren’t making progress, and feel uninspired and bored.

The good news is that it’s easy to get re-inspired by throwing something new into the mix. Mixing up your approach will also increase your general knowledge of music and give you countless more ways of expressing yourself.

So let’s get out of that rut and start having some fun again! Try these quick and easy methods to revitalize your technical, improvisational, and songwriting creativity.

1. Change equipment

It’s easy to get so used to playing your one, favorite guitar that you take it for granted. If you mostly play electric, try spending more time on acoustic. Try a nylon-string guitar. Try a 12-string guitar. Try different models and setups if you have access to them. Try playing the ukulele, the 5 string banjo, the mandolin, the banjolele—all of these “lute” family instruments will be easy to pick up if you already play guitar, and each will teach you new licks and transferrable techniques.

2. Try a different tuning

This is a guaranteed rut remover. Once you retune your guitar you’re guaranteed to do something new—even if your fingers are playing the same old licks. Different tunings make certain things easier and other things more difficult. There’s a good chance you’ll stumble across licks you’d never be able to play in your previous tuning. Who knows? You might love your new tuning so much you decide not to go back!

3. Switch styles or genres

This is a great one if you’ve been playing the same couple of songs over and over. Tired of playing the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” for the millionth time? Try injecting it with a ska rhythm, or mixing up the picking pattern to sound like driving bluegrass. Take a low-key song and amp it up. Take a loud, powerful song and tone it down. Make an upbeat song sound sad, or a sad song sound like a party anthem. Have fun with it! By the way, this is also a great option for covering songs.

4. Jam with new people

The people you jam with can influence and inspire you personally, and help you create something truly unique. Many great bands developed a sound and delivery from just the right combination of people working off each other. Try jamming with all kinds of other musicians, with all different influences. You might be surprised who inspires your best playing, improvising, and/or songwriting.

5. Music binge

When I’m feeling uninspired, this is one of my go-to methods for songwriting inspiration. Give it a try: Spend a day or two listening to hours of new music (having it play in the background is fine, as long as you can hear it). It can be from the radio, Pandora, your local library, anywhere. It’s more important that the music is new to you, rather than your favorite songs.

Then sleep on it. During the night your subconscious will sift through everything you were exposed to, and you’ll pick up inspirational bits that worked well in those songs, while also getting a better sense of what makes a song boring, disappointing, or trite. You may wake up the next morning with a great tune already in your head, or find that writing a new song is faster and easier than normal.

6. Take a lesson

Shameless plug from a guitar teacher? Maybe. But taking even just one or two lessons during those plateaus in your playing can be just what the doctor ordered. A good teacher can often hone in on your sticking points, and help you move past them and keep making progress. They can also expose you to new techniques and influences that can inspire your playing.

7. Change your approach

If your songwriting or soloing is feeling staid, sometimes all it takes to get re-inspired is to change the order in which you do things.

All songwriters have strengths and weaknesses, and most tend to write songs around their strengths. For example, I feel my strength is melody, and therefore tend to write songs melody-first. One of my weaker areas is lyrics, so I don’t often add them until the end. One way I’ve gotten my creative juices flowing is by going a bit outside my comfort zone and writing lyrics first, and melody after. Try writing a song starting with whichever following area you feel is your weakest: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Lyrics.

In soloing and improvising, we likewise have strengths that we gravitate towards, and weaker areas we avoid. Take a moment to really think about what you’re doing in your improvisation, and see if you can’t find any patterns, and any techniques or areas you aren’t including.

For example, do you tend to solo in one scale in only the first position because it’s the one you’re most comfortable with? Even just learning ONE additional scale position will open up a world of new options. You could also see what other scales would fit besides your first choice.

BONUS TIP: The 2nd Right Answer

In his classic guide to unlocking creativity, A Whack on the Side of the Head, Roger von Oech mentions an incredibly easy way to be more creative: Find the second right answer.

Most problems we face have more than one solution, but we usually stop looking after we’ve found the first thing that works. In music, this could mean choosing to develop a song idea or solo in one specific way, or learning how to technically play something (a chord progression, scales, rhythm, etc.).
But the next time you’re writing a song, developing a solo, or figuring out new playing techniques, see if you can figure out TWO different ways to make it work. Not only is this a great way to discover more material, but it will also help you realize how many options you have with a musical idea, and help you choose the best one.
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So the next time you’re feeling bored or uninspired with your playing, give one or more of the above tips a try, and see if they don’t unleash a gusher of creativity. Sometimes it just takes a tiny nudge of effort in the right place to move up past your plateau.

For reference, here are the two rhythms written out. In both cases, I start the rhythm every two beats.

Using sixteenth notes for emphasis:

Using sixteenth triplets for emphasis:

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For reference, here are a few songs that use this idea (note: these songs are HEAVY, and contain explicit lyrics):

Dethklok “I Tamper With The Evidence At The Murder Site of Odin” – Brendon Small uses this rhythm during the verses.

Meshuggah “Bleed” – Meshuggah uses this rhythm to set up a polyrhythm.

Arpeggios are great to practice when learning how to play jazz guitar. Not only do they have fewer notes to remember than scales, you can also define the chord quicker because they contain the important chord tones.

As useful as arpeggios are, they can sometimes sound a little bare and incomplete by themselves in an improvisational setting. There are many ways that you can adjust these arpeggios to create new and interesting sounds. In today’s lesson I am going to be teaching you how to add passing notes to an arpeggio. For this example we are going to be looking at how to add passing notes to a C dominant 7th arpeggio.

I will be teaching two ways to add to this arpeggio. The first way is to add a note below each note of the arpeggio.

The second way to add extra notes to your arpeggios is adding the note above each note of the arpeggio.

Remember when using this approach the notes above and below the arpeggio notes are not necessarily diatonically within the key so be careful how you use them.

Check out this great Charlie Parker line that uses the ‘Note below approach’. Notice that after he reinforces the harmony by playing each diatonic chord tone three times after the outside note is introduced.

Did you find the above lesson helpful? How do you practice adding chromatics to arpeggios? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

The lessons I usually make for my own site are typically based on ‘the masters’ of jazz and country. When given the opportunity to contribute to Joel’s site, I had the idea of some odd meter country licks to go along with some of his recent explanations of rhythm. Thing is, there are not many (read: zero) odd meter country tunes. So here are some ways to change existing licks to be in a different meter. Note: this stuff is NOT exclusive to country!

Original Lick

Here is the original. It’s in the key of A, and is a relatively typical lick in the country/chicken pickin’ style. This one is easy to move around as well, so have at it!

5/4

One way to change a lick’s meter is to repeat a piece of it. When going from 4/4 to 5/4 you can just repeat a beat of the lick. That’s what is going on with the second example here.

6/4

In this lick we add extend the rhythm by adding a higher part that compliments the lick. This one is definitely an embellishment of the original, but they are still related. Another tip in making a lick sound like it’s in a different meter is to use notes moving in a similar direction. Check out beats 4, 5, and 6 to see each featuring 2 eighth notes moving up. This really gives it a 6/4 sound.

7/4

The final lick here is in 7/4. Here we are using the same techniques, just taking it further. We’re extending the beginning by adding just two more notes to the lick, then ending it similarly to the 6/4 lick.

Try doing this with some of your own licks-you’ll find some really cool embellishments as you work on this stuff. Plus you’ll get some great ideas for writing solos or improvising. What are some of your favorite odd meter tunes to play on?

I’m very excited to have this thing out for you all to read and digest. I don’t think their are enough good tools out there for guitarists who are trying to get comfortable with soloing, so I wanted to create something that could set you out on the right path. This is a great resource for any beginner or intermediate player who wants to improve.

Here’s a short list of what it contains:
- 35 different lines to use in your solos, broken into four different groups (pentatonic, diatonic, advanced, arpeggios/string skipping)
- How to practice soloing in order to improve
- A list of great solos to learn
- Information on the best way to learn solos, if your goal is to get better at soloing yourself (it’s NOT by ear!)

(also, as an added bonus, I’ve included some other resources you can use to improve your playing, which you’ll get if you sign up for the newsletter)

So sign up and give it a spin. If you have any questions or comments, you can use the comments field below. Thanks everyone!

To get better at the guitar, you need to practice, and practice a lot. Everyone knows this, but very few guitarists do it.

Usually, people have good reasons to not practice. Maybe it’s Friday night, and it’s your one chance to see that close friend you haven’t seen in months. Maybe your sister needs a favor. Maybe you just had a long day and you’re exhausted, and practicing is the last thing you want to do.

But whatever it is, it’s keeping you from being the player you want to be.

I’m not saying that you need to blow off your close friend, your sister, or sleep – it’s important to have a well-rounded life and to have more going on than just guitar. But you also need to understand that you can plan around things, and that practicing is not about sacrifice. It only seems that way before you do it.

The only way to understand what I’m saying – that practice is not about sacrifice – is to do it, but not just once or twice. You need to do it for a prolonged period of time – usually at least two weeks – to really see that it has very little effect on your daily life. And then pretty quickly, you’ll see that you really are improving, all because you’re putting in the work.

So this is my dare for you: for the next 4 weeks, I want you to practice 30 minutes a day. No excuses.

If you’re traveling, your guitar is coming with you. If you’re tired, you’re still staying up later. If your sister wants to hang out, she has to wait 30 minutes. If you’re going out drinking with friends, you need to either a) not show up, or b) make sure to plan ahead so that you pay your dues.

If you do this – practice 30 minutes a day for the next 4 weeks, or 28 days – you will see significant improvement.

A few notes:

1) To get the most out of your 30 minutes, I would recommend isolating a single area and working on that. If you split 30 minutes 6 ways, you’re only spending 5 minutes a day on any one topic, which isn’t enough time to see significant improvement. But 30 minutes on one topic, for 28 days? That will pay huge dividends. Use this as a month to get better at improvising, or songwriting, or ear training, or sight reading, etc.
2) If you’re spending time practicing, it’s important to be committed 100%. 30 minutes with a guitar in your hands isn’t necessarily practicing. You want 30 minutes of focused, attentive work.
3) 4 weeks is not a whole lot of time. Don’t expect to be a wizard at the end, but that being said, you can expect very noticeable gains (you’ll probably start noticing 10-14 days in).

This is my challenge to you. Take 30 minutes a day and start becoming the guitarist you want to be!

There are several “standard” polyrhythms (if any polyrhythm could be called standard) out there, such as 3 against 4, 4 against 5, 3 against 5, 4 against 7, 4 against 9, etc. If you listen to bands that use polyrhythms, you’ll often see these same sets being used. Part of the reasoning is because polyrhythms can be very disorienting for the listener, especially the further out from normalcy you venture, so it is best to only use sets that only go against each other minimally.

That being said, I wanted to do a short post on some more advanced polyrhythms that I’ve been playing with lately, if for no other reason than to give you some new ideas for when you’re practicing. So if you’re looking for new polyrhythms to spice up your playing, try out this new trick: expand one of the beats very thin. For example, look at the below example, for 4 against 15:

What I like about this trick is it allows you to keep most of the different parts feeling relatively square – you can keep a 4/4 feel going throughout the measure, with certain elements accenting the longer rhythm (a snare hit, held chords, a repeated pattern, etc.). You can still have a hi-hat or ride playing on each quarter, or a guitar hitting notes each beat, while still having a complex layer going on underneath.

What makes this trick work is that you have one of the numbers way larger than the other, so that the larger number is being subdivided many times by the smaller one. In essence, you basically are creating measures of the larger number, while subdividing them through the smaller one (just one note off).

To see this more easily, look at these examples:

- 13 against 3 = 4 beats of 3 triplets, + 1 extra triplet
- 17 against 4 = 4 beats of 4 sixteenths, + 1 extra sixteenth
- 11 against 3 = 3 beats of 3 sixteenths, + 2 extra sixteenths

These work because you have, say in the first example, the 4 beats of 3 triplets to keep you grounded, with the one extra triplet at the end giving it the polyrhythm feel. You’re keeping normalcy for 4 beats, then doing a little switch on beat 5.

For a final note, if you want to take this even further – I’m subdividing the beats into sixteenth notes and triplets to make this more easily. You can subdivide them deeper into quintuplets, sixteenth-triplets, septuplets, etc. if you so choose, like this pattern of 5 against 14:

If you go down this path, it will become more and more important to add emphasis on each “beat” (every 5, 6, 7 notes), to give the listener guidance. Most listeners will not be able to tell if you’re playing only on the 3rd of 5 quintuplets, or the 6th of 7 septuplets – there’s just too little time that passes between each note is hit. Make sure to not lose the listener when you’re doing this sort of thing.

Now run wild and see what you can come up with. Enjoy!