Nashville Guitar Guru | Guitar Lessons in Nashville, TN

Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

Assorted Guitar Lessons

New moveable shapes from barre chords

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Barre chords are the first moveable shapes most people learn. The concept is easy: take an F chord and start sliding it up the neck. Every fret is a half-step, and because it doesn’t involve open strings the formation works in every position. Now you can play all twelve major chords using the same finger pattern.

We might refer to the F chord as an “E shape” barre, since the fingers form the same shape we use for an open E chord.

Apply the same concept to an A chord and we can play all twelve major chords off the A string as well.

 

Add the parallel minor forms of E minor and A minor and we have two ways to play every major and minor chord, using only four shapes. This is obviously very useful, since once you’re comfortable it removes the need to use a capo.

 

If you struggle with barre chords, click here for some helpful advice. If you can play them comfortably, you might be looking for the next step. And it might be simpler than you think.

 

It’s very possible that the first version of the F chord you learned was a four-note version, like this:

This form is moveable just like the larger F chord! So sliding it up two frets gives you another form of G. Continue up the neck to reach all the different chords just as you would the full barre. Essentially, this form is a partial version of the 6-note chord.

The simple idea here might actually be a revelation.

You can choose any combination of notes from the larger shape to form other, alternate versions of the chords. If you’re plucking the strings with your fingers, or muting some of the strings with the fret hand, you don’t even need to use adjacent strings. This gives you multiple new options out of every barre form, and increases your chord vocabulary exponentially!

Applying this idea to other barre chords gives you an entire new set of 2, 3, and 4-note chords that can be easily moved around the neck. It’s not hard to see how many new possibilities this opens up! Explore and see where it takes you.

Learn concepts from the songs you play

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If you really want to keep growing as a player, look for bigger musical concepts in the songs you learn.

We all start out memorizing songs as finger patterns, but that way of looking at things will only take you so far. That’s far enough for some people, but if you find yourself feeling limited you might be surprised by how much more there might be to what you think you already know.

Practicing ultimately breaks down to just two basic areas, technique/theory and application/performance. We can practice exercises to build technique or to illustrate musical concepts, but what we all really want is to play music. So an ideal way to put these two things together is to look more closely at the songs you learn.

From a mechanical perspective, anything you might do to play a specific song can be broken down to the techniques it requires.

For example, a difficult chord change can be deconstructed into a finger exercise. Part of the difficulty in anything new is that it’s unfamiliar, not simply that it’s hard to do. We often tend to assume that when we can’t accomplish something that it’s just beyond us. But even the most advanced techniques are a combination of simpler ones. Getting clear on what those simple things are sets you up to be able to accomplish the more complex ones.

From a musical perspective, it’s really valuable to understand how the songs you play are put together. Not everyone sees the value in this right away, but chalk that perspective up to impatience. It’s also shortsighted. Every song you learn should be a step towards making the next one easier, for both technical and musical reasons. First of all, there are particular patterns that show up again and again in every style of music. That repetition is part of what defines the sound of a style in the first place. Think of it as a specialized vocabulary or dialect within the greater language of music. When you learn to organize sounds into categories they become easier to recognize and understand. So if you learn a song that follows a particular chord pattern, you’ll be more likely to recognize that same pattern when you hear it in a different song.

This musical understanding works on many levels.

On one level, there’s the simple sequence of events: one note or chord followed by another. When we first learn to play, this is often all we’ve got to work with. So we memorize the patterns until we can repeat them from memory. But beneath that mechanical level is the musical relationship that creates the pattern in the first place. Some people can hear those relationships intuitively, but even the naturally gifted can benefit from knowing how to name what they hear. For those of us that have to learn to recognize these things, the naming and categorizing helps the learning process. In fact, the speed of your learning might be directly tied to the depth of your understanding!

Listen for form

Form is the deeper level beyond the specifics of licks, melodies, and chord sequences. All music has structure of some kind: even the absence of form is an organizing concept. Good musicians are able to hear these larger patterns, and understand the specific details in context.

If you’ve ever learned to play or sing a song from beginning to end you understand that songs have sections. This might be articulated mostly by the words: verses that tell a story as it unfolds, choruses that repeat a refrain. But these sections are usually musically distinct as well, and the chorus is recognizable because of its melody as well as the repeated lyric. That’s simple enough, and not news to anyone.

But think about how we often learn songs, especially from the internet. The most common online format is to have the song lyrics accompanied by the chords that match them. This should make it easy to recognize the patterns, but the focus is on the words. It can really be challenging to follow a chord chart without the lyrics, try it and see! We’re used to the form of the song being organized by the words. But the music articulates form as well, and your ability to hear and follow musical form really enhances your ability to learn new songs.

Perhaps most importantly, every new song you learn gives you an opportunity to practice your flow.

“Flow” is something every performer and player needs to master. It’s simply the ability to play a song confidently from beginning to end. This goes beyond your ability to execute each specific change or musical gesture. It extends to things like concentration, focus, and the ability to recover from mistakes. In the larger sense, it’s the ability to communicate a piece of music as an unfolding story without ever breaking the spell. This is something many people miss, even long after they’ve built the skills to actually play the music.

This has very little to do with the relative difficulty of the song. Ideally, you should be choosing music that’s a good mix between technical challenges and musical expression. So the music you use to practice flow should be within your reach enough that you don’t struggle with too many details.

Ultimately, you do want to divide your practice between focused technical work and the more musical expression of flow. So there will be things you practice that aren’t close to being ready for performance. But you should make an effort to use both mechanical and musical practice to work towards building a repertoire. You may find that you become more motivated, progress more easily, and learn more quickly.

Should you anchor your picking hand?

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There’s some debate among guitarists whether it’s ok to anchor the picking hand.

As with so many other aspects of technique, there’s no absolute right answer. Watch ten different players and you might see ten different things. But there’s a basic principle of technique at work, and then several variables to take into account. Some of these are mechanical factors, some musical, but the more skilled a player you become the more you’ll begin to realize that you can’t separate one from the other. Every technical choice you make has a musical impact.

The basic principles we want to follow are economy of movement and relaxed control. Resting one or more fingers on the face of the guitar just below the strings can help with both these things, minimizing motion and making your picking more precise. Many people do use the term “anchor” to describe this technique, but I think that’s misleading. An anchor keeps you fixed in one place, but we need to be able to move around in order to strike any of the strings with equal ease and a consistent sound.

Try resting one or more picking hand fingers on the soundboard below the strings, and strike each one in sequence. If you keep the fingers in the same spot, you’ll probably need to start twisting the wrist to reach the bass strings. Aside from being awkward to begin with, you might also notice that this changes the angle of attack. The way the pick or finger strikes the string is important for both mechanical and sonic reasons. Minimal, relaxed movement is most efficient, while a focused, direct attack produces a strong, resonant note.

Instead of anchoring, think of balancing on the face of the guitar.

Maintaining some kind of contact does provide a helpful spatial reference, just like the way a railing helps you walk down stairs. We don’t hang on to the railing to keep from falling, but touching it helps tell your brain where your body is in space. Touching the guitar has the same effect on your control of the picking hand. But your touch has to remain light, resting without applying pressure. When you move from string to string, let your arm come into play. The wrist will move slightly as well, but shouldn’t have to twist dramatically.

The proportion of your hands is a major variable here. Some people have long fingers that allow them to comfortably reach the face of the guitar without restricting the movement of the pick. You might find it feel best to rest with the pinky alone, or with all three free fingers. Either way, you want to maintain relaxed control of the pick without restricting your ability to reach all the strings. If your fingers aren’t as long, you might find that you need to let them rest on the treble strings when you strike the basses. Other players might rest the heel of the picking hand against the bridge, stabilizing from the bass side. This works well for bass runs, but can make it awkward to reach the treble strings.

Strumming is another variable. Depending on the sound you’re trying to produce, you may need a much wider range of motion.

Some players keep the base of the hand resting on the bridge of the guitar. This requires a lot of side-to-side movement of the wrist to be able to strum. To really make the strings ring, though, you need to be able to swing past the strings and follow through on the downstroke. This will take your wrist off the bridge, but the full strum shouldn’t need to be stabilized the way picking individual notes does. If you’re combining single notes and strums, you might find it best to move the hand on and off the face of the guitar as needed.

If you maintain a light touch it’s not difficult to just allow the fingers to trail behind the movement of the pick. As long as you’re not unintentionally muting any strings, this will allow you to maintain better control over the single-note picking while still allowing for a full range of motion when you strum.

The bottom line is that we need to balance between two primary goals:

  1. Accuracy

    We want to minimize effort and maximize control in every aspect of guitar technique. Stabilizing the hand helps your accuracy by minimizing motion, but you need to make sure that the stability is really coming from balance rather than from muscular effort in the forearm. It can be easy to mistake control for tension if you’ve gotten accustomed to using the muscles of the forearm to direct the pick.

    Explore the difference between leading the arm from the fingertips versus actually engaging the muscles of the forearm. See if you can create a consistent feeling of lightness that you can maintain as you move from slow, relaxed notes on a single string into larger and larger strums. If you feel like your control and accuracy suffer, find a point of contact that allows you to maintain that open feeling in your forearm and still direct the movement of the pick.

    2. Tone

    The sound of your guitar is a product of how you play it. A clean pick attack produces a strong ringing note with minimal “scrape” or percussiveness. The angle of the pick as it strikes the string makes a big difference here. Try approaching the string from directly above and lightly moving the thumb towards the floor. Some electric players use a more angled attack so that the edge of the pick glides across the string; this does allow for some additional speed at fast tempos but usually sacrifices some definition and fullness of sound. Find a relaxed hand position that allows you to let the mass of the hand and arm do the work. Explore how this impacts the sound of the guitar.

How do scales become melodies?

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How do scales become melodies?

Most guitar students practice scales at some point. It’s a good way to build chops and learn to navigate the fretboard at the same time. With a little extra thought you can also use your scale practice for ear training, and to learn to apply music theory to the guitar neck. But one of the major challenges many students face is learning how to make music out of scales.

A scale can be a musical statement, but simply listening to scales alone is not very interesting. This is because there’s no variety, nothing distinctive for the ear to catch on to. Scales are a good way of organizing notes, but from a musical perspective it’s useful to think of them as raw materials: collections of notes to choose from. In order to create a memorable melody, we need to add more musical elements.

 

Rhythm

A good melody has some kind of distinctive rhythm. One of the traps students often fall into when learning to improvise is to play steady repeated notes with no sense of phrasing. Thinking rhythmically, “phrasing” means that notes are grouped into discrete sets, often separated by some sort of pause. It’s an organizing force in music, just as punctuation is for language.

I often start lessons on improvisation and soloing by asking the student to just play rhythms on a single note. This removes the question of which notes to play, and leaves only the choice of whether to make a sound or not. If the choice is not to play, the question is how long to wait. If the choice is to play, the question is how long to let the note sound. You can play notes on each beat, notes that extend over multiple beats, or notes that fill in the space between them. Playing more notes creates more activity, while using fewer notes creates a sense of space. This is a fundamental aspect of improvisation that’s hard to master when you’re busy trying to follow a finger pattern.

 

Shape

A scale goes one direction, up or down. A melody has contour, rising and falling in pitch. Standard music notation is essentially a graph of the melody, in which the horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is pitch. You can think of the notation as a drawing of what you hear, making it understandable even if you don’t read music. If you’re a visual person, imagining this can be really helpful.

Scales always move in steps (whole or half), moving through the musical alphabet from letter to letter. Different scales will have different sequences of whole and half steps; you can imagine this clearly enough by picturing a piano keyboard. The combination of black and white keys may be different from one scale to another, but the sequence will always follow the musical alphabet without skipping letters. A melody will generally have more variety, moving up and down using smaller and larger intervals.

 

Improvising melodies

The way guitarists learn scales actually makes it a little harder to learn to improvise with them. It’s convenient to organize the patterns by position, staying within the same four or five frets across all six strings. This is a great way to organize the neck, but it breaks up the linear aspect of the scale. You can probably imagine the movement of notes on a single string pretty easily, rising in pitch in half-step increments as you move from fret to fret up the neck. Move in one direction, notes go up, move in the opposite direction they go down. Move more frets at once, larger change in pitch. Simple, right? But add the aspect of crossing strings and the mental map becomes a whole lot less clear. Combine the position model with the linear, single string model and things get exponentially more complicated!

To get past this, we need to see the scale as a simple sequence that rises and falls rather than a fingering matrix.

One good exercise is to start to identify the tones of the scale as scale degrees, numbering them according to their position in the sequence. This is great for ear training as well as a reinforcing the theory, in that you begin to learn the sound of each scale tone. A fifth sounds like a fifth, once you know what to listen for. Play the scale as a series of gradually increasing intervals, singing along if you can: 1 – 2, 1 – 3, 1 – 4, and so on. Then fill in the steps between each interval: 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 1. Treat each octave separately, and if the fingering pattern doesn’t cover a complete octave just go as fall as the pattern will allow. Don’t forget to practice descending intervals as well!

For another useful practice sequence, check out this related post.

It will take some time before you really begin to absorb the information. You’ll start to hear similar sounds in different places right away, though. Remember the goal is to get to the point where you can think in terms of musical gestures rather than fingerings. To practice that aspect, we can take another approach.

Limiting your note choices is a great way to put the focus on other musical aspects.

Choose a small segment of a scale instead of the entire thing. Working with or without a backing track, experiment with very small musical ideas. Don’t play more than a few notes at a time, but focus on the ideas of line and phrasing. Remember, we really just have a handful of variables:

– up or down
– how much
– how long to wait for the next note

You might be surprised to find how easy it is for musical intuition to kick in when you start to apply these ideas. As you become more comfortable with directing your ideas rather than leading with your fingers, you can add more complexity. But the exercise in the beginning is to focus on making musical decisions as you play. That’s why we want to keep it simple at first, because even the most complex music can be broken down into series of simpler ideas.

If you’d like to explore this idea some more, take a look at this video applying the concept to rudimentary blues soloing:

 

Learn new ways to play familiar chords.

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When was the last time you learned a new way to play a familiar chord?

It’s relatively easy to learn the primary “cowboy” chords. If we include the F chord, there are nine: A, Am, C, D, Dm, E, Em, F, and G. This plus a capo is enough to serve the most basic strummer, and there are songwriters that get by on less.

I meet people all the time that say they never get above the third fret. Legendary country songwriter Harlan Howard supposedly had a guitar with just three frets on it. This might just be legend, but classic country is a lot like the blues in that there are simple patterns that are used again and again. The old adage “three chords and the truth” really does apply when story and melody are king. If you add a fourth chord we could say the same about modern pop music, where simplicity and economy in songwriting are (usually) key.

But there are many styles of music, each with its own vocabulary and norms. And every genre has songs that are simple and others that are more complex. So to really be able to play what you want to play, it’s good to know more chords. Not just more types of chords, although that’s good too. But there are multiple ways to play even the most basic chords, and learning some of them will add a lot of variety to your playing. And you don’t even need to get out of the first three frets to find some of them.

The way we learn chords actually creates its own problem when it comes to learning new ones.

Since it’s relatively easy for a beginner to just memorize shapes, you can learn the basic vocabulary quickly. It doesn’t take long to get to the point where you can play a simple song well enough for someone to sing along. But because we don’t need to understand anything about how those chords are formed, many people never bother to learn it. When you do, the logic can still be tricky to apply. It’s much easier to follow on a keyboard, which is why all music students are required to at least get familiar with the piano. The simple, linear nature of the keyboard makes relationships easier to see. Not so much on guitar.

You might already know the basic theory. It takes three notes to make a major or minor chord. When we put those notes in sequence as close together as we can, we get a root position triad. This means the lowest of the three notes is the root, the note the chord is built on. If we start from the root and just climb the scale, we add the third and fifth notes we find to complete the chord. Easily enough, we refer to the other two notes as the 3rd and 5th of the chord.

You almost always learn chords on piano as root position triads first.

This is the simplest way because there’s a consistent pattern from chord to chord, even if the combination of white and black keys changes: root note, skip a letter, skip another letter. But on the guitar, we just memorize box shapes. There’s rarely an explanation for why a D chord has four notes but an E minor has six – it’s just the way it is. We don’t even pay attention to the different in sound and are used to hearing it this way. But it’s helpful to understand what’s happening if you want to expand your vocabulary. It only takes three notes to form a chord, but guitar chords duplicate notes to create a fuller sound.

For example, a C major chord on piano looks like this:

The notes are C, E, and G.

On guitar, the familiar C looks like this:

C chord

Leaving off the low E string, there are five strings being played. This produces a 5-note chord, C – E – G – C – E. It’s the same three letters are the piano chord, but the the C and E notes doubled.

At this point the light bulb might come on.

It only takes three notes to make a chord and we often double notes when we play basic chords. So we can find variations of a familiar chord by doubling different notes!

For example, play the familiar C chord again and add your little finger to the third fret of the 1st string. The fingering now looks like this:

alternate C chord fingering

The C can be played either way, with or without the pinky. It’s still the same chord, but now the notes are C – E – G – C – G. We’ve just doubled the G instead of the E. It still sound like a C chord, but with a different note on top.

Now play each version of the C chord going to a D. Notice that the difference in the sound is melodic! Using the traditional C makes the “melody”, the high note, move up when going from C to D. Using our variation, the high note moves down. It’s a subtle difference but clearly a different sound.

Not every variation is this easy to find, but there are a lot of them.

Some are simple rearrangements of the notes of the triad. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re playing an inversion, which means moving the lowest note of a triad to the top or vice versa. Inversions will still contain the three notes of the chord in ascending order. In other words, C – E – G inverts to E – G – C or G – C – E. The C chord we created by adding the pinky is what we would call a new voicing of the chord: C – E – G – C – G.

Sometimes adding a finger adds a different note and creates a new type of chord. This is a big topic and best left for its own lesson. For now, it’s enough to simply recognize that a chord is not a single thing but a collection of notes that can be rearranged in a variety of ways. Some of these fall more naturally on the guitar than others, and a little exploration is worthwhile. It’s helpful to get to know the note locations in the open position so you have an idea of where to look. Notice the note sequence on each string: this diagram omits the sharps and flats, just move one fret up from a letter to find the sharp and one fret down to find the flat.

open notes on the guitar

Rather than getting overwhelmed by the options, look at this lesson simply as an introduction to the concept. We’ll explore more specifics in subsequent posts.

5 essential rules for accompanists

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There’s an art to being a good accompanist.

To do your job well as an accompanist you have to be essential but invisible, because your role is to make someone else sound better. Whether you’re backing up a singer in a band or supporting your own singing as a solo player, there are essential things you need to know. These are not only professional qualities that will keep you working, but musicianship and performance skills that will raise your game all around.

1. Keep time.

An acoustic guitar is a rhythm instrument! Like a drum, it’s a resonant box that you strike in time. And just like for a drummer in a band, when you’re accompanying a singer it’s your job to provide the pocket.

The basic strumming movement of almost any groove is a steady swing of the arm, with the downstrokes matching the pulse of the song. You should really be feeling the beat with your entire body, but the strum motion itself can help you keep steady time. In fact, moving to the music in any way will make your groove more solid. Some people find it helps to nod their heads or rock their upper body instead of tapping their foot. And if you don’t move when you’re play, you’re almost certainly not feeling the beat. It’s rhythm, not math, so feel, don’t count!

2. Your guitar is a drum kit.

Also like a drum, striking a guitar in different ways produces different sounds. You should find that there’s a natural difference in sound between a downstroke and an upstroke. A downward strum has momentum and gravity behind it, producing a natural accent. If you swing the arm further, the accent becomes stronger.

You’ll notice the same effect in the difference between strumming with the wrist or the arm. A wrist movement produces a smaller arc, while an arm movement produces a wider one. Experiment with small movements that grow increasingly larger, and listen to how it expands your dynamic range. This is basic mechanics: the larger the movement, the greater the force and the bigger the sound.

Try swinging the arm further on alternating downbeats to bring out a “backbeat” on counts 2 and 4. Think of where you would expect to hear the snare drum, and give those beats a little more energy. You can alternate between the bass or treble strings to imitate the “thump” and “snap” of a kick and snare drum.

3. Follow the vocal.

Along with keeping the beat, your other role is to provide the musical backing for the singer. That means that the vocal is always primary, but your role is not just to be in the background. In a group setting or a pop track, there are musical parts that form the “bed” or basic background, and others that weave around the vocal to add interest. This can be a part of the bed that’s accentuated for a moment, or another instrument or sound.

You should be able to mirror the singer’s dynamics, bringing the energy up and down in response to the vocal. This often means doing less in the verses, more in the chorus, but it’s your job to pay attention and let the singer lead. However, it adds a lot to fill in the spaces between vocal parts with accents or even fills. Again, think of the example of a drummer playing a fill at the end of a cycle to bring the next section in. Playing melodic fills can add a lot to the music as well, but never at the expense of the groove. Above all, pay close attention to the vocal and choose your spots for maximum impact. Never overplay!

4. Know the music.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but you might be surprised. It’s especially relevant in a place like Nashville, where there are so many singers that need accompanists. It’s pretty common to see a singer onstage performing, backup up by a guitarist half-obscured by a music stand or iPad.

There’s nothing wrong with using charts, but they should be there for reference. First of all, everyone listens better when they aren’t reading. You need to be able to take both auditory and visual cues from the singer, which is impossible if you’re overly focused on the chart. (See number 3 above). You do want to develop your reading skills to the point that you can keep track of what you see AND hear, but even so it serves the music better when you’re fully focused on the vocalist. After all, a singer-and-accompanist dynamic is essentially a duet, in which one role supports and adds flavor to the other. To do this well, you need to pay attention to the interaction, not just your part alone.

5. Look alive!

Unless you’re hidden in darkness at the back of the stage or in an orchestra pit, you are often as much in view as the singer. There are few things more distracting to an audience than disinterested-looking musicians. Your presence on the stage is often just as important visually, even if you’re not the center of attention. A good accompanist is a foil for the singer, and adds just as much to the show.

If you do need to use charts or music onstage, be aware of whether you’re obscured by whatever is in front of you. Keep it as unobtrusive as possible, and don’t bury your face in the chart! I’ve seen entire bands onstage squinting at music stands while the person the band is supposed to make shine looks out of place trying to perform. (This is not just a question of inexperience, either, I’ve seen many seasoned pros do the same thing).

Any visual discrepancy onstage distracts from the impact of the performance. It’s like an actor in a play suddenly breaking character and speaking to the audience as themselves. It breaks the spell and takes the audience out of the song! Everything about you, from the way you dress to the way you carry yourself, is a part of the performance and needs to match the tone set by the artist you’re backing up.

If you’re a working musician, you already know that good accompanists get hired: there’s always more need for solid backup players than for flashy lead pickers. Both have their place, but most popular music is vocal-driven and so every good player should know how to make a vocal shine – whether it’s someone else’s or your own.