GUITARHABITS

Combining Minor and Major Pentatonic Scales

May 14, 2019 by Klaus Crow

Combining minor and major pentatonic scales The minor pentatonic is the most important scale in blues and rock music. It’s an awesome scale and sounds great, no doubt about it. There are a million ways to express your emotions through the minor pentatonic and use it for your soloing.

However it always has that same dark classic minor pentatonic sound. It doesn’t take you anywhere else. Combining the minor pentatonic and the major pentatonic will take you to different places.

Suddenly you have the ability to produce the same kind of sounds and licks you hear in the solos of Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Combining the notes will give you a wide selection of flavors to choose from and to play around with. You will keep attracting the listeners attention with all these extra lovely notes that will make your soloing a lot more interesting.

So how do you approach this? Let’s take a closer look. Continue Reading

6 Cool Guitar Player Apps for iPhone and iPad

By Klaus Crow 11 Comments

March 29, 2021 by Klaus Crow

Portrait of burning young attractive blond woman playing on electric fire guitar
Once in a while I check if there are any new good and useful guitar apps available. While there’s a lot of baloney out there, sometimes you’ll find some really nice tools that can help you out with your guitar playing. It makes the life of the guitar player easier, more comfortable and increases the progress.

These guitar apps are really cool. They all have an easy interface design that will make you start practicing within a minute.

Here you go:

Riffr
800,000+ Guitar tabs & Chords. Riffr is daily updated with the latest tabs and chords from various guitar websites. Built in Chord Dictionary. Video lessons and audio playback. Just awesome and it’s free!

GuitarTuna
A ridiculously accurate guitar tuner and easy to use. Works for Guitar, Bass, 12-string guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo and other string instruments, and contains most of the alternative tunings too! It also includes ear training practice. Yes it’s free.

iReal Pro
iReal Pro simulates a real-sounding band that can accompany you as you practice, and also lets you collect chord charts from your favorite songs for reference. You can import 1000’s of songs from the forums. Especially if you want to learn to play jazz, this is the bomb. It’s rather expensive for an app, but a must for the jazz student.

Spreadsheets
This isn’t necesarily a guitar app, but I use this app to write down my guitar practice goals. I create my guitar goal lists on the computer in google spreadsheet and when I practice I use my Ipad to check what I need to be practicing, add stuff I need to work on later and keep track of my progress. It’s free.

MTSR
While Garageband can do many things, sometimes I just want to record and export a musical idea. Nothing more nothing less. Multi-Track-Song-Recorder is my savior. It’s an easy to use 4 track recording app. Export your songs via Dropbox, Email, SMS and iTunes File Sharing. Great for musicians. It’s free.

Ear Trainer
Every musician should work on Ear Training (or Aural Training) and Interval Ear Training is a very important element of ear training. You will learn to recognise the relationship between two notes (by distance), when they are played together or apart!

Do you know any cool guitar apps? Please share in the comments.

6 Reasons You Want to Learn the Notes on The Fretboard and How

By Klaus Crow 11 Comments

January 12, 2025 by Klaus Crow

In this lesson you’re going to discover Why you need to Learn The Notes on the Fretboard and How. It may seem obvious that when you learn to play guitar you also need to learn the notes on the fretboard. How can you play music without knowing the note names? Well believe it or not, there are a lot of guitar players out there who don’t have the slightest clue what they are playing and they do just fine.

I didn’t know all the notes on the fretboard for a long time either. And yes I could still play all my favorite tunes and improvise over chord progressions. But there were limitations that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Huge limitations!

Once I started learning the notes on the strings and figuring out what the notes of chords, scales and licks were, things started to change. One discovery let to another and a lot of things suddenly made sense and became clearer. My knowledge expanded and my playing improved. I learned all this in small steps.

Extended Chords 9th 11th 13th for Guitar

By Klaus Crow 7 Comments

September 4, 2023 by Klaus Crow

extended chords 9th, 11th, 13th for guitar Extended chords are usually used in jazz music, but also in other styles like pop, blues and latin music to spice up chord progressions and add some nice flavor to the chords.

When I first learned the theory behind extended chords, it opened up a whole new world for me. All these mysterious chord names made finally sense.

I would use the chords for my own material, incorporate them into some of my favorite guitar songs and started learning some wicked jazz tunes.

Once you play around, experiment and incorporate these chords into your playing it will make guitar playing really fun and colorful.

If you’re new to chord construction then first check out How to Use Chord Formulas and Their Benefits and How to Play The Most Common Types of 7th Chords. These posts will give you the basic chord theory you need.

Let’s dive in…

Triads and 7th Chords

Extended chords are the 9th, 11th and 13th chords.

To understand the chord structure of extended chords we must first know the major and minor triad and three types of seventh chords. We use the “C” chord as an example to show the chord names.

« Previous Page