I’m not very good at getting things done. If you’ve ever followed my endeavours to finish the various things I start, you’ll have an idea…

Just did a gig with a bass player and a singer last night, and I haven’t done that for a while. It reminded me that…

  Drummer Leon Parker would sometimes play whole gigs with just a cymbal. Pretty daring, but what an amazing way to learn! If you want…

I said in a previous post that creativity is where imagination meets reality. It’s very easy to start the creative process. You just imagine something,…

Here’s a simple method to understand how John Coltrane’s composition ‘Giant Steps’ is constructed. It’s basically a Yo-Yo of a chord progression; it goes down…

What was the thing that made you want to play? What was the best experience you’ve had playing music? What was the best gig you’ve…

I like to play from feeling. I’m not so excited by the idea of ‘thinking’ when coming up with some music, be it improvised or…

Just resist what you normally do. Do you play solos that start low and end high? Start high then. Start with a barrage of 32nd…

I used to live with a sax player who always played a descending Eb major scale whenever he got the instrument out. A thing like…

If I want to work on a certain aspect of my playing, I try to learn an actual piece of music that’ll help. E.g., if…

All played with strict alternate picking. Start on a downstroke. (the last one will start on an up though) Then reverse the picking; i.e., start…

Forgot to add words to yesterday’s post, but that’s what happens when you diet on biscuits and fake whelks. Anyhow, we all know that it’s…

Some things just aren’t meant to be understood. I have this theory that there’s a void between ‘understanding’ and experience. But it’s a nice place…

I do many types of gigs, different music and so on, it’s all good. But, there’s something magical about creating something. Something where I can…

  How do you define a thing? For example, if you ask, ‘what is a bus?’, you could start to define that by setting out…

I used to do T’ai chi, and there are many wonderful looking and feeling movements within the short form; it’s a beautifully flowing and balletic…

Ever listen to music through some kind of filter? You could set filters to only let certain frequencies through, or to remove certain frequencies., So,…

Know what you’re doing. Have it under control. If you want to do it this way, you can. If you want to do it that…

This is a nice way to work on fretting-hand muting. You crank the amp to Tufnellian proportions and play an Ab major scale. Only difference…

Here’s an idea that came from a student at The Arden Centre a good few years ago; I think his name was Ben Shaw. Could’ve…

An interesting possibility that the Internet offers up is that you can very easily post snippets of your playing, things you’re working on, things you…

There are four locations for a diminished 7th chord within the Harmonic Minor and Harmonic Major Scales. If you treat the diminished 7th as a…

Play into changes before they happen. Easy example: say you’ve got a progression that goes F- to Cmaj, you just start playing Cmaj sounds whilst…

Tell me the best place you’ve heard a diminished chord * Anyway, one of my favourite tunes is ‘Beatriz’ by Chico Buarque, there are some…

  So the idea is to give yourself different ways to learn something. You may find if you try to, for example, demonstrate something you…

How does one become more aware? Have you ever listened to boiling water for more than, say, 9 hours straight? If not, surround yourself with…

This is a little exercise I developed that breaks away from regular picking patterns. It presents a good problem to practise.

Nina Simone, Jeff Buckley, Bjork, Frank Sinatra. All these singers have beautiful nuances in their voices. I want to do that! Little request now: A…

Try This… Play ‘Happy Birthday’ or any other tune you know from childhood. If you can’t play it straight away without any mistakes, then what…

Three part chords is what we have here. Part 1. The Bass Note It’s a C. Leave it to the bass player – they’ve trained…

I think transcribing is a really useful thing to do. I see it as a replacement for not having a body of work to study,…

Here are all the 7th chord inversions using these here voicings on strings 6432 for a II V I progression in G major. Learn it…

Phrasing on the guitar is somewhat complicated by the fact that how something gets phrased is a combination of where you play it on the…

The idea here is to work on co-ordination between left and right hands, and combining picking and slurring. The exercise uses all the left-hand fingers,…

Learning is an experiment. When I’m learning something I try to think about how I’m going about the learning. So I try many different approaches….

Here are the possibilities for different intervals in D Dorian on the D and G strings. Of course, if you have exceptionally long fingers, or…

Here’s a way of comping on a static modal vamp. The kind of thing that might be appropriate on a tune like ‘So What’ or…

3 Minute warning, maybe :) Anyhow, at 140 BPM the whole thing takes 2 minutes, so let’s aim for that. A two minute warm-up sounds…

George Van Eps wrote three books on manipulating chords called Harmonic Mechanisms for Guitar. It’s full of things to do with chords. Very full :)…