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Beautiful Chord Embellishments & Tricks

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Beautiful Chord Embellishments & Tricks

Playing chords and strumming patterns makes up part of the guitar rhythm for a song. Adding colorful embellishments to your chords will make your rhythm playing more interesting to listen to. It can give the song just sparkle it needs.

Although it’s really cool to experiment with embellishments, try to use them when it’s appropriate. Use embellishments here and there to lift your music.

In the two videos below I explain how to use and apply embellishments using a basic strumming pattern, open chords C, D, E, F, G, A, Am, Em, Dm, adding sus2, sus4, add4, 6sus4, sus2sus4, dom7 and hammer-on tricks to chords and progressions.

Let’s spice up your rhythm playing.

Enjoy!

Beautiful Chord Embellishments & Tricks Part I

 
Beautiful Chord Embellishments & Tricks Part II

Top 30 Easy Guitar Chord Songs for Beginners

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easyguitarsongsIf you are a beginner guitar player or you just need some inspiration for easy guitar songs you’ve come to the right place.

I’ve put together a list of 30 easy guitar songs that are great to strum along with and a lot of fun to play.

Make sure you practice the chords and switching between chords for each song thoroughly. It will benefit your playing.

I’ve put a Youtube link on each song title and two chord links next to it. The “Chords” link will take you to the chords and lyrics for the song and the “More Chords” link will show you the official transcribed chords if you want to learn more songs of the artist concerned.

Some of the songs in the list below are played with a Capo.

The capo is commonly used to raise the pitch and change the key of a song while still using the same open chord fingerings, but a capo makes it also possible to play a different set of chords for a song which makes the song easier to play while still remaining in the original key of the song. This is a common thing in guitar playing and guitar players do it all the time, not just beginners.

Professional singer songwriters use the capo frequently so they can sing in a particular key but still use the beautiful sounds and possibilities of open chord fingerings.

Life is too short not to use a capo.Continue Reading

8 Reasons Why Learning The Blues is So Important

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My oldest brother introduced me to the music of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was hooked instantly. I soon took up the guitar and started taking lessons.

Although I was happy in the beginning playing and singing songs by Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, The Beatles and Springsteen, what I really wanted was to learn those beautiful bluesy solos that came from Stevie’s fingers and strings. It took another couple of years before I found the right teacher to teach me those skills. The blues has always been a major influence on my playing ever since.

Whatever you’re playing, whether it’s country, folk, alternative, rock, pop music or jazz it’s always great to combine these and other styles with blues elements or to lean on your blues vocabulary and skills whenever you need it.

There’s also something about the pentatonic / blues scale that no other scale has in store. It’s that raw, crying, heart aching, but also earthy, soulful, honest sound that really comes alive through playing the blues.

Now if that hasn’t convinced you to pick up your guitar and dive into the world of blues, you might want to know what reasons are so important that you do so.

Check it out:Continue Reading

Building Chords and Progressions of The Minor Scale

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Once I learned how to build chords of a major or minor scale, the logic of chord progressions made much more sense.

I became more efficient in analyzing and memorizing chord progressions and it was also a helpful tool for song writing and understanding how to improvise over these chords.

As a young kid I underestimated the knowledge of music theory.

It don’t matter how musically gifted you are as a person, music theory makes the life of a musician a lot easier. So benefit and enjoy!

In this post you’ll learn how to build chords of the minor scale, create your own chord progressions and analyze the chord progressions of famous songs in a minor key.

For building chords of the natural minor scale we can use the same approach as building chords of the major scale

Like the major scale we can also build 7 chords of the minor scale. In fact the minor scale is relative to the major scale. When you play the major scale starting on the 6th degree and play seven notes ascending (going up) in the scale you are actually playing a minor scale.Continue Reading