As a new guitar player, do you feel overwhelmed trying to learn and memorize a bunch of chords that don't seem to have any relationship to each other? Well, the fact is that chords do have relationships to each other and learning what those are can greatly accelerate your ability to play and improvise on the guitar (or any instrument, for that matter). I like to call these relationships "chord fa... [More]

As I've said in previous lessons, learning how to play chords is the basis of playing the guitar. Simple chords are comprised of three notes that are played together. Once you've mastered playing simple three-note chords, adding extensions to chords is the next logical step for you to take. You've probably flipped through some music books or looked up a few songs online by now, and you've also pr... [More]

Professional musicians often use lead sheets to learn new songs, but many music students aren't quite sure what they are. For that reason, today I'm going to discuss lead sheets with you. By the way, lead sheets are sometimes called "fake sheets" and for that reason, a book of lead sheets is usually called a fake book. Lead sheets and fake books are readily available for purchase in music stores a... [More]

Today, I'm going to finish the series about on how to build your own chords.  I'm going to continue to show you that you don't need technical mastery of an instrument to begin to create music (besides, if you love playing music and have a little bit of discipline you will develop technical mastery over time).  As this is a series, if you haven't yet read the first two posts, I would reco... [More]

Last lesson we learned some simple but important terminology about chords and familiarized ourselves with the difference between the two most important building blocks in music. If you haven't read that post yet, I would highly recommend you read it first so that we are on the same page before proceeding. You can find it here In that lesson I promised to tell you about the four most common chord ... [More]