The Voice Of Your Guitar Lesson

The Voice Of Your Guitar

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  • Howdy GMC’ers!

    This lesson is meant to offer a vantage point over the idea of building ‘humanized’ guitar lines – thinking like a vocalist, in order to become more catchy and melodic!

    How does a vocalist think and build up the lines?

    First, a vocalist almost ALWAYS sings what’s going on in his head – of course, there are clichés, but they appear a lot less frequent than in the case of guitarists. So, with the aid of the bad habit of playing ‘licks’ out of the way, let’s see what we can improve on in this lesson:

    - articulation skills: bending, slides and vibrato
    - learning how to use registers – start low and end high
    - implementing dynamics in your playing – straying from the beat to become more expressive.
    - using intensity to dramatize the lines.

    The chord progressions are:

    - Aadd9 Badd11 G#m Aadd9
    - Emaj Badd11 C#madd11 Aadd9 Badd11

    Learn the lines and then try to interpret them the best way you can – we are all different and thus we perceive things differently. Each one of us can come up with a very personal version of these lines, so go ahead and try them. A good source of inspiration for this approach would be none other than the great Slash.

    Tuning: Standard (E A D G B E)

    Chords (from thick to thin):

    Aadd9 – 577600
    Badd11 – 799800
    G#m – 466444
    E maj – 022100
    C#madd11 – x46650

    Meter: 4/4

    Tempo: 130 BPM

    Tonality: E major

    Scales: A Lydian/ E major

    Tone settings: Bass – 11 o’clock, Mids – 10 o’clock, Highs – 12 o’clock, Gain – 12 o’clock, using the crunch channel of my AMT ss20 Pre-amp.

    For further exploration and development, I would recommend the following lessons, especially, my comrade Ben Higgins' Vibrato Odyssey series.
    Check out these lessons: Jonathan's melodic soloing, Phrasing and Dynamics 2, Ben's Vibrato Odyssey



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