Guitar
Slide Guitar Lesson: Choosing a Slide
For many of us, especially those who’ve been playing guitar for a while using more traditional flatpick or fingerstyle techniques, learning to play slide guitar can feel a bit daunting, even intimidating. We’ve all heard claims like, “you need a special guitar setup specifically to play slide,” or, “you can only play slide guitar in specific tunings.” It makes learning to play slide sound about as complicated as learning a brand new instrument. However, that is truly not the case…
Rock Guitar Lesson: Bending & Vibrato
One of the innate characteristics of the human voice that we as listeners find to be so musical and pleasing is a singer’s ability to glide seamlessly from one note to the next, bending the pitch and sliding across micro-tonalities as they transition between a whole or half step. Just about every melodic musical instrument that humans have designed incorporates a feature of some kind intended to mimic this quality of the human voice.
Bluegrass Guitar Lesson: Playing in Open D
An essential element of the bluegrass guitar aesthetic is the strategic use of open strings to craft fluid, tasteful melodic runs. Without the use of a capo or altered tuning, well-versed bluegrass acoustic guitar players frequently utilize open strings within their melodic phrases when playing in both the major and minor key centers of E, A, G, C, and D. Due to the nature of the guitar’s construction and where the notes happen to fall on the fretboard in standard tuning, integrating open string lines within these five key centers is exceptionally natural. That being said, it’s important for aspiring bluegrass guitarists to be intimately familiar with playing in the open position of these five keys, and, as such, it’s critical to invest time into learning them.
Blues Rock Guitar Lesson: Learn to Play Jared James Nichols’ New Single, “Down the Drain”
On October 26, 2022, blues rock powerhouse and ArtistWorks instructor, Jared James Nichols released his latest single, “Down the Drain,” on Black Hill Records.
Bluegrass Guitar Lesson: An Introduction to Crosspicking
As is the case with most genres, there are a handful of guitar techniques that must be utilized to accurately capture the aesthetic of the bluegrass style. Picking techniques, such as alternate picking and crosspicking, in particular, are tremendously important when playing bluegrass guitar. Therefore, it’s critical to take your time and focus on executing these techniques correctly and precisely as you begin to implement them into your playing. Eventually, the physical mechanics of these methods will become ingrained into your muscle memory, and they must be properly established from the get-go.
Blues Guitar Lesson: Soloing Over the 12 Bar Blues Changes
One of the most fundamental chord progressions that has shaped a near-endless number of songs in genres ranging from blues to jazz, rock, bluegrass, and beyond is the 12 bar blues. It’s a song form that is deeply rooted in American, and now world, music culture, and is an essential chord structure that every musician should know and explore.
Bryan Sutton’s Blue Ridge Guitar Camp 2023
We are excited to announce that, after facilitating a fantastic five-day musical event this past June, Grammy Award-winning guitarist and ArtistWorks bluegrass guitar instructor, Bryan Sutton, will once again be hosting his Blue Ridge Guitar Camp in 2023 from May 31 through June 4.
The Top 4 Techniques for Country Guitar Soloing
When learning how to play electric guitar in the classic country style, it’s important to focus on and incorporate several critical techniques into your playing to truly capture the aesthetic and authentic sound of the genre. There are four approaches, in particular, that should be utilized. They are hybrid picking, alternate picking, pedal-steel-inspired bends, and double-stops.
New Guitar Course by Martin Taylor!
I'm delighted to announce the launch of my new online course 'Dimensions of Solo Jazz Guitar'. In this course I share how to internalize the core framework of any piece of music and then build upon it utilizing melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic variations to add dimension and color to an improvisational performance.
Jazz Guitar Lesson: Soloing Ideas for Miles Davis’ “So What”
Miles Davis’ 1959 record release, Kind of Blue, is still revered to this day as one of the most prolific jazz albums of all time. Featuring John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto saxophone, Paul Chambers on upright bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and either Bill Evans or Wynton Kelly on piano (depending on the track), Miles’ sextet on Kind of Blue was composed of some of the most admired musicians in jazz history. It’s not a wonder that after more than 60 years, Kind of Blue is still one of the most popular and critically acclaimed jazz albums of all time.