Creative guitar lessons

From an earlier arrangement of My Foolish Heart I first changed the chords like this . Then I added a new melody like this. So as another method for coming up with something new you can Re-harmonise Add a new melody This also gives it some harmonic structure with the grounding from the original song.

This could be a good way to rhythmically interact with other players thinking of 8 bar phrases rather than reacting by copying what other players do. Think in 8 bar sections. Start your idea on any beat except beat one, make sure to aim for a particular beat, e.g first phrase start beat 2, second […]

Here is a simple arrangement I made for guitar trio around Grade 1 level of the song Green Onions.

This is all of the amazing piece, ‘Safta” written by Yotam Silberstein I mentioned in the last post. I really like the way between the melody and bass notes he adds some middle notes echoing the melody and giving it more momentum. I wrote a lead sheet here for it if you want to try […]

I have recently been learning this amazing piece by Yotam Silberstein called Safta. There is one beautiful chord movement which is very simple, he plays a Bb major 7 with a raised 5th and third, (B,F#,A,Eb, so Bbmaj7#5sus) and resolves to Bb major7 chord (Bb,F,A,D). I have made a simple arrangement of My Foolish Heart and tried […]

It’s not the most musical way to improve your playing but it can give you a good warm up and can help to steadily develop your technique/ dexterity over longer periods of time so that you don’t have to try so hard physically when trying to play different ideas. The idea is that you learn […]

This exercise is mainly to search for better ways to use scales to outline chord tones more clearly. Here are some 6 note scales I thought of and the chords they could be used on. I found the repeated triplet pattern works well as the pattern resolves back to the start each bar on beat […]

I have been listening to some great string quartet compositions and have tried to use some of the ideas in my new tune which I have started on. The 3/4 section is harmonic ideas taken from a string quartet with a melody on top and then the 4/4 section is more of a groove with […]

I thought it was a good idea to start trying to practise phrases that cross the bar line and specifically not landing on beat 1, here is an exercise on Coltrane’s 26/2 to try and practise not landing on beat 1. I think we are taught at school to learn things bar by bar which […]

How do you arrange music? This time I wrote the bass line first then added the notes between that and the original melody to harmonise. I just experimented with one or two notes until I found something that I liked the sound of. Here is my arrangement of Here’s that rainy day. then I adapted it a […]