Continuing our discussion about the Lydian mode, let’s stay in the key of E Lydian. A simple trick to making the Lydian sound come out is skip the 2nd note of the mode, and just play around with the root, 3rd, fourth, and fifth notes of the mode… With special focus on the 4th note.

If you’ve been playing guitar for more than a day, you’ve probably heard about scales and “modes”. Although they can sound mysterious, they’re really nothing more than inversions of a scale. If you have C major scale, you have the notes: C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Then you also have: C Ionian

I was just noodling around with this famous melody and noticed the use of the flat fifth as a way to spice up a major chord or major scale. It’s also used in another famous melody as the video reveals. Check it out!

Hey now… Sometimes rippin’ guitar licks sound great even though its not the most crazy patterns or crazy tempos. I’ve seen many a “guitar god” solo made up from basic pentatonic licks in very ordinary fretboard positions. You can certainly make some wailing sounds in the root position pentatonic pattern. The keys are smooth bends

Here is a pentatonic sequence using 3 notes per string. It’s a sort of variation on the descending “1-2-3” sequence except we repeat some of the groupings of 3 notes with our 3 notes per string fingering. Click here to download a MIDI file so you can hear the audio.

This is based off a japanese-sounding modality…kind of phyrigian sound in E. Try playing it – its fun and not super hard 🙂  

Hello…Claude Johnson here (who else, right? lol)   Just a fair warning – this is a fairly advanced lesson, so if it goes over your head, please check out some of the other lessons on my blog, or, of course, MY DVD COURSES.   I am going to be showing a lick using 3-note-per-string pentatonics,

  Hey guitar guys and gals…   Claudio “Guitar” Johnsonater here back again… Comin atcha with another installment of my blog mini lessons.   Today I want to talk about 3-note-per-string pentatonic patterns. One interesting thing about them is that if you play 3 notes on 1 string in the pentatonic scale, and then go

Arpeggios rule. They are everywhere in music. Here is a cool little chops building pattern based on an arpeggio. Basically you’re playing up an E major 6 arpeggio and back down, and back up but hitting the octave instead of the 6th for an Emaj6/emaj type pattern. When you practice this one, try to mix

Hey friends and guitar allies… It’s Claude J. back again with another arpeggio mini-lesson.   Before I get started with that though, I have some exciting news… I did get my video camera finally so hopefully I will have some video lessons for you soon.  Actually now the problem is with my computer. I just ordered