LogicalLeadGuitar.com
Newsletter #12
Hello LLG
friends,
I'm excited
to say I've completely re-vamped the Logical Lead Guitar website to start
including some of the great celebrity interviews I've done in the past, plus to
post some of the lesson columns I wrote as editor of Guitar.com and to more
clearly explain what the Logical Lead Guitar course is all about.
Check it
out at www.LogicalLeadGuitar.com, and
please do come back regularly as I've got hundreds more celebrity interviews in
my vaults, some never before published, which I plan to post for all to read!
Now Let's Play!
I've got
some great new Free Lesson content both in this newsletter and on the site!
Please read on:
Shut Up 'N' Play Yer Guitar: Awhile back, when I was Editor of
Guitar.com, I wrote a regular lesson column titled "Shut Up 'N' Play Yer
Guitar. I'm now re-posting many of those informative columns on Logical Lead
Guitar (they no longer exist online anywhere else, including Guitar.com). I'll
put up a new column each week over the coming weeks, so be sure to visit www.LogicalLeadGuitar.com weekly
to continue your growth on the guitar.
I'm also
working on a 72-page pdf book that will include 20 of these lesson columns in a
downloadable format. I'm offering this full book as a valuable and informative
additional bonus to those who buy the full Logical Lead Guitar course,
beginning immediately. But you can learn from the first batch of lesson columns
for free. Just click the "Free Lessons" menu button on the site.
There's a lot of awesome info I'll be posting in here over the coming weeks
which you'll want to know if you intend to become a truly competent guitarist!
The first
column I've posted teaches you the seven must-know patterns of the diatonic
scale (that's your major and minor scales as well as all of your modes). Here's
a teaser:
Scales Are Everywhere, Know 'Em or Not
by Adam
We've all heard some
local hotshot guitar player say something like, "Scales? I don't play
scales, man, they're just for jazz players." You know the kind: It's the
guy or girl who taught themselves by ear and thinks he knows every Stevie Ray,
Kirk Hammett, or Satch riff like the back of his or her favorite blond (hey, it
could be rosewood, we won't discriminate here). But usually, he's got half the
licks wrong, 'cause he failed to learn a few essential basics.
Listen up dudes and
dudettes: Whether you know you're using them or not, any time you string a
couple of single notes together, you're playing a piece of a scale. Accept it
or go home crying. When that amp goes live there are only three seriously
useful things you can play on a guitar anyway: chords (three or more notes),
intervals (two notes played simultaneously), and scale-based melodies (single
notes). So, since you can't avoid them no matter what you do, your playing can
only improve with a working knowledge of what scales are all about. Here's some
scaly wisdom to live and die for:
The Super-Harmonic
Diatonic
Let's dig into that basic diatonic, major scale real quick.
Below is a diagram of all the notes in the key of C major. In this column we'll
break this mess into smaller, hand-friendly chunks which you'll then memorize
your seven diatonic scale patterns. These same patterns simply slide up or down
the neck to allow you to play expertly in any key. You might not want to use
the whole guitar neck in your own playing, but why limit yourself? Just go with
me on this one.
To read this entire
column and see the seven diatonic patterns (especially if you can't see the
diagram above in your email), click on the "Free Lessons" menu button
on www.LogicalLeadGuitar.com, then
choose the column "Scales Are Everywhere, Know 'Em Or Not."
More To Learn
Once you
learn and memorize the seven patterns, either from my "Scales Are
Everywhere" column, from another scale book, from a friend, or from the
Logical Lead Guitar course, you'll need to begin locking them together. The
seven patterns fit together just like puzzle pieces, and if you change keys,
they stay locked together if you move one pattern two frets down the neck,
you have to move all the patterns two frets down the neck. I explain this in
great detail in the 132-page LLG course book titled "Mastering The Seven
Diatonic Scale Patterns."
Here is a
proven exercise, excerpted from that book, to help you learn to lock the puzzle
pieces together:
Two Exercises To Lock The Puzzle Together
For me
and for guys like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen, and all the greats
you and I listen to the seven diatonic scale patterns are permanently locked
together in our brains and muscle memories. (Please understand that I'm not
trying to compare myself to those guys as a player just our shared
methodology of using the seven different diatonics patterns to cover the whole
fretboard.)
You want to
get to this point too.
So let's
run through a couple exercises to learn how to lock patterns together. After
you've done this for awhile, the patterns will become inextricably locked
together in your muscle memory
In other
words, after enough repetitions, your fretting hand will know exactly how far
to slide up the neck to go from one pattern to the next pattern and your
brain won't even have to be involved!
This is
truly an awesome and downright amazing thing, and it will happen if you put in the time and enough
repetitions of these simple exercises.
At this
point in my life, I can easily slide from one pattern to the next while soloing
whether completely improvising or playing a solo I've learned note for note
without having to think at all about how many frets I'm sliding my hands, and
usually without even looking!
You can
develop this skill as well.
Puzzle
Locking Exercise One
For
Exercise One we'll use patterns 7 and 1 of the C major scale (the same two
patterns we looked at a minute ago).
We're going
to play a few notes in one pattern, slide up into the next pattern, then
descend back to the lowest note of that pattern, then end by sliding back into
the original pattern.
Here is the
sheet music and Tab for the exercise:
Step 1)
Play just the notes on the two lowest strings of pattern 7, ascending,
beginning with B at the 7th fret on the sixth string.
Step 2)
Immediately after playing G at the 10th fret on the fifth string
with your fourth finger, slide your fourth finger up two frets and play A at
the 12th fret.
Step 3)
Then descend through the notes in Pattern 1 until you play D at the 10th
fret on the sixth string with your second finger.
Step 4) To
complete the exercise, slide your second finger down two frets to play C at the
8th fret. You now should find yourself in the exact finger/fret
position in which you should be to play your original pattern in this
exercise, pattern 7 again.
Wanna Know More About LLG?
There's so
much more I'm ready to show you. Are you ready to learn?
If so, CLICK HERE.
My Latest Guitar
Industry Projects
It was cool
to meet a couple of Logical Lead Guitar newsletter recipients last month at my
gig at Rock-Fest in
There were
40,000 people at this annual four-day festival in Northern Wisconsin, a short
drive from
My band
plays plenty of Allman Brothers and Gov't Mule tunes, so you know my slide
player and I were watchin'
Oh
. I was
surfin' the net this morning and found this cool vintage video of,
appropriately enough, Dick Dale, the "King of the Surf Guitar." This
guy plays left handed AND upside down. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIU0RMV_II8
I
interviewed Dick a few years back in his room at the House of Blues hotel in
Chicago and have about 90-minutes of sadly still unedited video footage
which I'll put together some day in the future
. (hey, it wasn't my fault it
never got edited: Circumstances change, and the then-CEO of Guitar.com made me
lay off the video editor I produced all those awesome videos with).
Anyway,
Dick Dale is really a trip!
In the
meantime
Practice,
Practice, PRACTICE!
Adam St.
James
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