Level Up Your Guitar Playing! » Press Start
With high gain, power chords sound great, basic triads can sound pretty good too depending on your tone.
7th Chords and beyond however, start to sound ‘muddy’ and unclear like this:
Continue Reading
In this lesson we’ll be looking at incorporating arpeggios into riffs. We’ll be looking at an example on an 8 string guitar and another on a 6 string. One of the reasons I like 7 and 8 string guitars is that you can get plenty of low end without losing any of the higher notes. Mixing lower riffs with arpeggios that go up into the higher notes can give your playing some really interesting dynamics. Let’s check out these ideas with some examples.
Continue Reading
Let’s take a simple chord progression and put it under the microscope. Analysing an example like this will help you to write your own music and ideas using this concept. If you’ve started to learn about music theory the following progression might seem ‘wrong’:
E Major – D Major – G Major – D Major
This is because there is no Major key which contains all three of these chords. If you want to learn about which chords occur in each key check out this post.
If I play that progression E – D – G – D, it sounds like this:
I’ll assume that you have a “metal tone” for writing metal rhythm guitar, but in a future post we’ll cover some tips for getting a good tone. For now just remember that you want plenty of mids, and a decent amount of gain, but not too much. We want a nice tight rhythm not tons of crackly white noise and feedback.
I’ll start by playing around with a combination of 8th notes and “gallops”. Below is a quick example of an E5 power chord played as 8th notes:
In rock and metal Tremolo Picking is more common to use the technique to maintain volume by giving each note less time to decay. It also provides more attack giving a harsher, more aggressive sound.
Continue Reading
In this lesson we’re going to take full advantage of the beautiful lydian mode to write a mysterious chord progression that employs a key change. The really clever thing about how this works is that it uses the idea of pitch axis.
Continue Reading
This track was a previously unreleased song recorded for the Dangerous album. It’s a shame this song didn’t make the cut because it’s such an aggressive solid rock tune from MJ. It would have easily complemented the likes of “give in to me” and “black or white” on the Dangerous album.
Continue Reading
