by Brad Carlton
If you dig these video
In this 4-part video
1. Johnny Winter
In this issue Southern rock/blues legend Johnny Winter recalled that when he was an up-and-coming guitarist, you weren’t cool unless you could play “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie” at the same time. “Luther Naley showed me how to do it,” said Winter, “but I never really got it down.” To help you get it down, GP contributor Eric Park provided a complete arrangement for readers who would dare the fretboard feat. Comprising the distinctive opening phrases of each melody (“Yankee” on the low strings, “Dixie” on the high ones), this example details how to go double-duty on these ditties.
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
2. Steve Morse
If Steve Morse isn’t the scariest chops-meister on the planet, he’s in the top two. This beautiful series of arpeggios is actually a couple of lessons in one. It’s an alternate-picking workout and a fingerstyle boot camp (depending on how you choose to practice it). You can play through the whole exercise or you can grab two beats at a time for cool little motifs to work into a solo.
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
3. Howard Roberts
Guitar cliches, as Musicians Institute co-founder and GP columnist extraordinaire Howard Roberts put it, come from “habitual muscular responses triggered by familiar playing situations.” One of Roberts’ signature cliche-killing teaching techniques was to get players of all skill levels to break out of the typical chord and scale patterns ingrained in their fingers-and the corresponding sounds imprinted in their ears-by experimenting with sonic shapes. Strum each shape (and its mirror image, as shown) as a chord, or arpeggiate it note-by-note. Mix, match, and make up your own. No matter how you play ’em, sonic shapes yield fresh, atonal, and unpredictable sounds.
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
4. Craig Hlady
The easiest way to create wild sounds using an ordinary riff or scale is to shift one or more of its notes up (or down) an octave-an approach that is simple in concept but tricky to execute on the fly. “Eric Johnson, John Scofield, Pat Martino, and Jim Hall all use octave displacement to create wide intervals in their solos,” wrote Craig Hlady in this lesson.” The first bar shows an ordinary eight-note C-to-C major scale. See how it is transformed by octave displacement in the two phrases that follow.
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
5. Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell has always sung like an angel, but she’s a perpetual rogue when it comes to
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
6. Jim Campilongo
“As I’m drawn to ringing dissonances, blues notes, and passing tones, I try to incorporate open strings in a melody whenever possible,” wrote cowboy jazz iconoclast Jim Campilongo this fine year. “Against a moving line, sustaining open strings can create an eerie, beautiful effect. The behind-the-nut bends [bars 4 and 5] sound like pedal steel. They’re most comfortable on Fender-style headstocks. For better leverage, press about an inch behind the nut with your fretting hand’s 1st finger.”
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
7. Nuno Bettencourt
Anyone can hit harmonics on the 12th fret but there are a ton of cool chimes to be found on other frets. Here funk-rocker Nuno Bettencourt details a two-bar harmonic riff that’s pretty and spooky at the same time. Drop your low-E string down to D and pick closer to the bridge to make the harmonics really jump out. Bonus! If you don’t detune your low string and just follow the tab you’ll have some harmonics that are truly disturbing!
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
8. Paul Gilbert
Shred
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
9. The Hellcasters
You can’t have too many cool bending or sliding techniques, so why not combine them into one slinky run? In an effort to simulate pedal-steel licks on
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
10. Jerry Hahn
Penning over 50 lessons, Jerry Hahn was one of GP’s most prolific columnists. His pieces were great because they rarely if ever featured exercises that merely improved a guitarist’s physical technique. Hahns’s examples always improved a player’s overall musicality as well. For instance, ask yourself: Are these three knuckle-busting stretching exercises merely fretboard calisthenics, or do they also demonstrate sly ways of affecting smooth key modulations via stepwise voice-leading? (Tip: If the stretches are too brutal, move the exercise higher up the neck.)
Click here to get the chart and tab for this
If you dig these video