Guitar lessons for beginners and more

Blues Backing Tracks for Guitar: Five Free Tracks

One of the best ways to practice soloing is to use backing tracks for guitar. It’s hard to craft solos when you don’t have a band or another guitar player behind you. For those that don’t have this luxury, backing tracks are another really great substitute.

Professional guitarist and instructor Zack Roberts has complied over 50 professional backing tracks for guitar. He’s offering five of these for free to try out. I’ve taken a listen and they are of good quality and variety.

Here are some samples from his collection of blues backing tracks for guitar. Make sure you have Flash Player installed in order to hear them.

Backing Tracks for Guitar #1

12 Bar Blues Groove (E minor Pentatonic)

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Backing Tracks for Guitar #2

Jazzy Blues (G Pentatonic & G Mixolydian)

[view full article to hear the tracks]

In order to get the other three free backing tracks for guitar, go to his website here.

To get all 50 backing tracks it is $37, which means you get each for less than a buck. Zack is selling the tracks with a 100% money-back guarantee with some extras thrown in. It’s worth checking out. You can check it out here. [...]

Major Triad Positions: One Way to Learn the Guitar Fretboard

Are you up for a challenge?

In a recent previous post, “Guitar Lessons: Scales & Learning the Guitar Fretboard,” I mentioned a few things you can put into practice to master the guitar fretboard. One of these suggestions was to learn your triads over the fretboard. Triads can help “connect the dots” for how individual notes across the fretboard interact and relate to one other.

Just a forewarning, this discussion needs some understanding of how guitar scales work. This might make more sense to more intermediate players. If you are just beginning, you will want to check out guitar scales explained.

What are triads?

A triad is a group of three notes played simultaneously. Triads are made up of one note with a major third and a perfect fifth above it. In plain speak, a triad is just a three note chord. There are different types of triads: major, minor, augmented, and diminished.

For now, we just want to talk about and focus on major triads. If we understand major triads, we can understand the other ones better. [...]

Guitar Lessons: Scales & Learning the Guitar Fretboard

It’s true that knowing guitar scales and learning the guitar fretboard is invaluable for taking your playing to the next level. A knowledge and understanding of your instrument opens up a wide variety of creative possibilities (e.g. soloing, improvising, etc.) for how you actually play your instrument.

In the past, we’ve explained the theory behind guitar scales and we’ve also took a more in depth look at how to build a major scale. This information is essential to your growth, but we’ve never really had any guitar lessons that look at the ways you can actually learn guitar scales and learn the guitar fretboard.

In this guitar lesson on scales, let’s look at a three ways you can learn guitar scales and learn the guitar fretboard [...]

Guitar Scale Anatomy: Theory Explained Behind Guitar Scales

I remember that when I was first beginning guitar I was hungry to learn the chords and lead lines of popular songs. While I learned a lot from this, after awhile, it left me feeling disappointed because I didn’t really know how to create and form my own cool lead lines, solos, licks, or whatever you want to call them.

I remember it being suggested to me that I learn guitar scales up and down the guitar neck so I could learn the guitar fretboard. I was told, if you know your guitar scales you can master the guitar fretboard. Maybe you too have been suggested or heard such a suggestion. So as a hungry beginner I started practicing different scale patterns.

The Main Problem

I practiced away, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to apply these scales I was learning into a song. I was learning a ton of patterns, but didn’t know what to do with them! In hindsight, I realize that in my attempt to learn the guitar fretboard, I was only learning guitar scale patterns, and I wasn’t learning how the notes, in those patterns, function together as a cohesive whole.

Perhaps you too have tried approaching learning the guitar fretboard by learning scale patterns, but quickly found that you didn’t have a clue as to how to piece those different patterns together. Guitar scale patterns are good, but not if [...]

Fretboard Note Chart

I took the liberty of making up this guitar fretboard note chart as an aid for learning the guitar fretboard. I couldn’t find many good ones out there that laid it all out so I made my own!  I made this fretboard note chart up to the 20th fret.  Use this for reference or [...]

Learn Guitar Fretboard: Tips & Thoughts

Learning the guitar fretboard can prove itself to be quite the challenge. However, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to navigate across the guitar fretboard with ease and clarity. If you know your fretboard, you can solo and improvise very naturally. But, how do you even begin to learn the guitar fretboard? Let me share some of my own thoughts with you on learning the guitar fretboard and some resources that can help you.