Dan Loves Guitars and jazz and blues and ukuleles
Fingerpicks Why fingerpicks? I guess why any picks. The first answer is of course, picks allow you to play louder. Also, picking long and hard without a pick can be rough on the flesh of your thumb or fingers. But for finger picks, there is a third reason. If you [...]
The holidays are near. What should you get for the guitarist in your life? Here’s some ideas based on what I’ve asked for, received or wished for over the years. Some of these are items I’ve newly discovered. Everything falls under the category of small enough to fit in a [...]
I don’t always use a pick when I play guitar. But I do keep an eye out for interesting new types of picks. Picks are great item to buy when you need something new but don’t have much money. You can always afford a few new picks. There are many [...]
We have now covered 4 of the examples I plan to review on how to get music images into blogs and documents. The examples are: Put the guitar tab of a C major scale into HTML for a blog. Create a high quality image of the tab which can be [...]
In my previous post, How’d I get that tab, notation and chord diagram into my blog?, I listed 6 examples of things you might want to be able to do if you teach or write about music. Here’s the list again. The examples are: Put the guitar tab of a [...]
Do you ever want to share musical information with others? It doesn’t matter if you’re want to send an email, create printed material or post something to a blog, the essential problem is the same. Here are some of the things which you might want to do if you are [...]
The harmonized scale, like the circle of fifths, is a wonderful, amazing and somewhat mysterious musical construct. If you don’t know or remember the harmonized scale let me review before I move on to how to use it for arpeggios. What is the harmonized scale? The harmonized scale can be [...]
I reviewed how to play major scales on the guitar in my last post. You’ve learned those scales right? I’m still working on them – and I have been for years. I know them, but I can always improve. But as I said last time, scales may be useful, but [...]
There are many ways to play any scale on the guitar. You can learn the positions of each note of a scale on a single string. You can learn scales that play three notes per string then move to the next higher (or lower) string. However, many guitarists look for efficiency [...]
I took clarinet lessons when I was in elementary school. Scales were a prominent feature among the lesson subjects. Scales were boring. No one ever told me why they were important. I wanted to play tunes I recognized. But this is the way music was taught back then. “We’ve always [...]