Unleashing the Blues: Mastering Dominant 7th Chords on Your Cigar Box Guitar If you play blues on your cigar box guitar, you must learn several ways of playing a dominant 7th chord. Dominant 7th chords are used in all styles of music, from classical to rock, country...
Open D Guitar Tuning Minor Chords Lesson In today’s lesson, we will continue to work on our Open D guitar tuning chords, but this time we will zone in on the secondary minor chords in the key of D. In this case: Em, F#m and Bm. We will also learn five popular...
“Sleepwalk” by Johnny and Santo is a classic instrumental track covered by countless musicians. It was initially released in 1959 and became an instant hit, largely thanks to its beautiful melody and unique instrumentation. Sleepwalk featured Santo Farina...
Go Next Level with Arpeggios! Playing arpeggios is one of the first things to focus on when you learn to improvise. No matter what type of music you play or how complicated the chord progression is, understanding how to use arpeggios is crucial, but especially if you...
Learn Four Classic Blues Mandolin Songs Finding blues music for the mandolin is a challenge at the best of times, so in this lesson, we will learn four popular blues classics. Very few blues songs are written specifically for mandolin, so we borrow a few from the...
Open D Guitar Chords – Major Chords In today’s lesson, we will work on our Open D major chords. In particular, the primary chords from the key of D major: are D, G and A. Open D (DADF#AD) is an altered tuning that is exceedingly popular with creative...
In today’s cigar box guitar lesson, we will learn one of the most famous, if not the most famous, blues songs of all time – The Thrill is Gone. The song was written by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell in 1951, but it was B.B. King’s recording in 1969 that...
Here is a wonderful photo essay on how to build a mandola instrument from scratch. Yair Stern is a talented Canadian luthier who builds mandolas, among other instruments, including mandolins, octave mandolins and guitars. Mr. Stern has agreed to share photos taken...
Fingerpicking on the Ukulele In today’s lesson, we will work on ukulele fingerpicking. After you have learned to strum some chords, you may ask, is that all there is? What else can I do with this gem of an instrument? You could learn more chords up and down the...
A Brief History of the Looper Pedal From the beginning, the concept of looping has remained the same: to record a segment of music and have it repeat automatically while other parts can be overdubbed or played live. It began with composers splicing and joining audio...
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