September 3, 2013

8 Octopus Licks: Fresh Guitar Scale Ideas With Wide Scales

Hi again! After my last lesson on the methods of writing an instrumental guitar song, now I’ll show you some interesting wide scale ideas. This lesson is called “8 Octopus Licks”, because the left hand’s movements will resemble an octopus. I’ve created 8 licks in the following video, and today we’ll discuss the first 4 licks.


The video with all the 8 licks:

 


These licks are based upon the idea that if we create wider scale boxes, then we’ll get more interesting intervals and sounds.

The backing track in the video is in the key of F sharp major. The first few licks are played between frets 9 and 14, so the width of the scales is 5 frets, or a perfect fourth. Make sure to warm up properly before practicing these scales, because it can be quite a stretch!

The scale pattern is really simple: on all 6 strings, the notes of fret 9 and fret 14 are within the key, so if you play these notes string by string (so playing 2 notes per string), you’ll get a pretty interesting sound, as opposed to the all-too-familiar minor pentatonic sound.


You can read the full lesson at Guitar-Muse.com. Click here: 

http://www.guitar-muse.com/8-octopus-licks-fresh-guitar-scale-ideas-with-wide-scales-7603 

July 20, 2013

Tips for Writing an Instrumental Guitar Song

In this lesson I’ll show you some of my methods for creating riffs and then combining them to make a full instrumental guitar song. The example for this purpose will be one of my songs, “Tight Squeeze”, from my first album Sharp Guitars From a Flat Planet. You can see me playing the full song below.

 




The opening riff starts at 0:10. The root note is obviously the note B, and you can also see the minor 3rd in bar 2. There are a few chromatic passages too, and the riff ends with a C power chord at the end of bar 4. So you may see it as a B phrygian riff, but if you look at it closely you’ll see that the C note, which would represent the minor 2nd of the phrygian mode, does not play a significant role. So this riff is not about the phrygian mode. The “pseudo-phrygian” vibe at the end of a riff is a common trick in prog metal. So I’d rather call this riff a B minor pentatonic rock/blues with chromatic notes.


You can read the full lesson at Guitar-Muse.com. Click here: 

http://www.guitar-muse.com/tips-for-writing-an-instrumental-guitar-song-7448