I’m a SoundSlice fanboy. It’s impossibly good: inexpensive, easy to use, beautiful to behold, backed by fast & thorough customer service, owned & operated by folks committed to the open internet. That said, the breadth of what it does isn’t immediately obvious. Hence this lesson. Workflows > Feature Tours Feature tours can be exhausting, and […]
Making Theory Practical: The What, Why, & How of Bends
It’s tempting to jump straight to the how of bending. The proper thumb position, which finger to use, and so on. But I think it makes more sense to start with the what and the why. The What When we bend a note, we’re raising its pitch *by a specific amount.* Bends aren’t random. We bend from one note to […]
Making Theory Practical – The Steady 8th Note Rhythm
This is an excerpt from the course Making Theory Practical. If you want to hear about it when enrollment is open, get on the list. In the last lesson, we learned: Our vision is ~7x stronger than our hearing. We can use our eyes to improve our ears… …but first we have to get past the […]
Songs With Odd Time Signatures—30 Examples & Excerpts (With Counting)
This is an excerpt from the course Making Theory Practical. If you want to hear about it when enrollment is open, get on the list. Let’s try something different. Instead of meticulously transcribed guitar parts, this lesson’s SoundSlices will focus strictly on counting the beat. That’s because in this lesson, we’re looking at odd time & mixed meter. […]
Making Theory Practical: The Four Minor (iv) Chord
This is an excerpt from the course Making Theory Practical. If you want to hear about it when enrollment is open, get on the list. Humans like stories. If you’ve ever watched a TV series, you know about cliffhangers. They tell you part of a story, but make you wait to find out what happens […]
Making Theory Practical – Rhythm 1-5: Rests
[this is a preview from the upcoming course Making Theory Practical] In the last lesson, we began mixing quarters & eighths. We didn’t get far, though, because we’re missing an ingredient: silence. Every note value has a matching rest. (Don’t worry about memorizing these—we’re going to learn them in context.) “Rest” is a crappy name […]
The sublime genius of Carole King’s It’s Too Late
get the newsletter RIFFS Ani DiFranco has a lyric: “every pop song on the radio / is suddenly speaking to me” I think of that line whenever I get deep into a subject. Because it always feels like the universe is reconfiguring itself around me, setting up happy accidents, and leading me along to things […]
Riffs, Recs, Charts, & Smarts #35
RIFFS: Anderson .Paak’s name has a dot. But why? The dot stands for detail. It’s a reminder to himself to pay attention to detail, because “people take you as seriously as you take yourself.” Oftentimes we’re in such a hurry to develop our badassery that we forget it’s the sum of paying attention to thousands […]
Just What I Needed
Tab, Sheet Music, Backing Track, Lesson, & Analysis If you’re new here, this should help you make sense of this new/different/unusual lesson format: how these lessons work what are stem packs? why would I want that? the five-minute daily practice routine how to actually get better at guitar And if you wanna jump ahead to […]
Practice makes… plastic?
Practice makes perfect.Practice makes permanent. By definition, we practice the things we can’t yet do. Which means we spend the majority of our time doing it wrong. If practice really made permanent, then no one would ever get any better. It’s a paradox. So what’s going on in there? Errors cue neuroplasticity. They tell your […]