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Expand Your Harmonic and Fretboard Knowledge by Utilizing Spread Voicing Triads

10 April 2012

Triads are pretty much a guitarist’s best friend. We start out learning to play open chords on the guitar, built from triads, and if we expand our playing into the classical, jazz or improvised music realm, these three-note chords expand to take on a whole new meaning and level of significance in our playing. While [...]

Demystifying Fingerstyle Guitar

16 September 2011

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If you’re intrigued by fingerstyle guitar playing but haven’t yet found a way into feeling comfortable with the technique involved, then you’re not alone. It took me ten years of dabbling on and off with fingerstyle guitar before I finally felt like I had a handle on how to fingerpick. Then, I found a teacher [...]

Better Comping With Dyads

14 January 2011

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It seems to me that one of the biggest hurdles beginner jazz guitarists face when it comes to comping is getting away from the bulky barre chords we all memorize when we first start playing. You know, the “all you have to do is lift up your pinky to get a minor 7th” kind of [...]

Chord Hacks: Root Substitutions

17 September 2010

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It’s fun chord Friday here on Fretterverse! I can’t believe how long it’s been since we’ve broken out the staff paper and done some actual guitar work. I hope you had a chance to digest and start working on yesterday’s phrasing exercise. Though you should continue with the phrasing work from yesterday, today we’re going [...]

Fingerpicking for Beginners

8 July 2010

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Today’s article is a guest post from guitarist Brett McQueen. I think fingerpicking was one of the hardest things I had to learn for guitar. I always had problems getting my fingers to be steady and independent enough to cleanly pluck a string. However, like anything else, you have to start somewhere and it just [...]

Exotic Scales

7 July 2010

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Scales, scales, scales. They are what makes the world go around. Without them we would have to rely on boring creativity and originality. (Just kidding.) Having a healthy dose of scales at your disposal is essential to becoming a good guitarist and composer. Scales open up compositional doorways that might otherwise be closed to us [...]

Jam Track Friday

2 July 2010

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In lieu of a traditional blog post where I wax philosophical on the musings of being a guitarist, I decided to spend my time today adding a bunch of jam tracks to the site that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. They are all on the Downloads page, and include ii-V-I progressions in [...]

Rhythm Changes Jam Tracks Added

1 July 2010

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As promised in my Rhythm Changes article, I have added jam tracks with the chord changes for a typical Rhythm Changes tune. There are four tracks: two basic tracks and two advanced tracks. The basic tracks are the normal, standard chord progression. No surprises, with one at 110 beats-per-minute and the other at 200. The [...]

4th Chords and Quartal Harmony

30 June 2010

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As I have discussed in previous posts, traditional harmony/theory constructs chords in intervals of a third. There is another type of chord construction that is quite common in jazz, called “quartal harmony” or sometimes better known as “4th chords.” Quartal harmony is most commonly associated with the modal jazz of the late 1950′s and 60′s. [...]

Upper Structure Triad Soloing

21 June 2010

5 Comments

Triads are cool. Without them, Bach probably would have been a hay baler or something to that effect. Without triads, I would probably be writing about air guitar or something mundane like the proper way to stuff your spandex before playing that 80′s high school reunion you got tapped to do. A triad, as you [...]