Tips for Playing the Guitar Without Looking at the Fretboard
Looking to build confidence and muscle memory when playing the guitar? Look no further! These practice tips will help you gain dexterity and fluidity fast.
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Allegro! Exploring the Legacy and Technique of the Great Django Reinhardt
+ Welcome to Soundfly! We help curious musicians meet their goals with creative online courses. Whatever you want to learn, whenever you need to learn it. Subscribe now to start learning on the ’Fly. A fire roars with life on a cool summer night somewhere in the north of France, possibly even just over the Belgian border. Music drifts into the night…
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The 9 Most Common Mistakes Musicians Make When Learning to Play Electric Guitar
By Natalie Wilson As a guitar teacher, I see a lot of common mistakes in my beginner students. While it’s okay to have lofty goals and aspirations, all too often, beginner students get discouraged early on by not being able to achieve the tone, smoothness, and power of famous guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric…
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Aesthetics: The Forgotten Frontier in the Tone Debate
If you’ve spent enough time around guitarists or bassists, you’re certainly familiar with what gear obsession looks like. You may even be a gear obsessive yourself, or have at least been through a phase of quarreling over minutiae in online fora. And if you know a gear obsessive, you’ve almost certainly witnessed them debate their main adversary: the “tone-is-in-your-fingers”…
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5 Mind-Bending Early Guitar Innovators
Compared to most instruments, the modern guitar is a relatively new instrument. While classical instruments like piano, brass, and woodwinds all have hundreds of years of pedagogy behind them, the language of guitar music and how we learn to play is new and constantly changing. Today, we can find chords to any song on the internet…
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An Introduction to the Wide World of Alternate 12-String Guitar Tunings
That 12-string guitar is a difficult thing to tune! All those high-tension thin strings can be really difficult to deal with, especially the high G string, so this instrument doesn’t necessarily readily encourage alternate tunings. It is a lot of work, but if you take the time to explore the options for alternate tunings on a 12-string, it can…
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A Primer on Tool’s Use of the Drop B Tuning
The Drop B tuning has primarily two different variations, both of which have been used almost entirely in the post-grunge rock of the early ‘90s. Pentagram guitarist Victor Griffin is credited with inventing the tuning, and he makes a point to tell players that the tuning sounds great when played “gingerly” as opposed to “heavily.” Yet today, we’re…
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How to Play Sweeping Arpeggios on Guitar
By Claude Johnson “Sweep picking” is a technique where the guitarist plays single notes on consecutive strings with a “sweeping motion” of the pick. While simultaneously using the fret hand to produce a specific series of notes, usually an “arpeggio.” Both hands are essentially performing these motions in unison, to achieve the particular desired effect of…
