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Intermediate Guitar
Bar Chords Forming bar chord shapes is
a very important principle in playing rhythm guitar for pop, rock
and jazz. The beauty of this technique is that we can cover many
different chords across the fretboard with only a handful of
different left hand shapes.
Identifying notes further up the neck To be able to know where
to play the bar chord shape we have learnt, we need to be familiar
with the notes further up the fretboard now. It's particularly
important for us to learn the notes on the thicker, lower strings...
they will be the bass notes on which we will form our bar chords.
Rhythms of different styles When we change the rhythm of our
right hand, we often change style in the process. The guitar is a
versatile instrument, we can get reggae, blues, country,
Latin and
African rhythms just by changing our strumming or arpeggio pattern.
Basic Improvisation We look at the most common scale guitarists
improvise on, the blues scale (a pentatonic scale - 5 notes). We can
also look at a country scale and a basic Spanish scale.
Blues in any key We develop the blues we learnt at beginner
level, and now, with the help of bar chords, we can play a 12 bar
blues in all 12 keys (C,C#,D,D#,E,F,F#,G,G#,A,A#,B)
We learn the concept of the intervals I, IV and V.
Modes These are a sequence of scales that fit nicely together.
Practising this sequence is good for improving left and right hand
technique, and later (at advanced level) we will use these modes to
start improvising in a jazz context...
Complete Guitar
Pieces Although most of my teaching emphasis is on
learning the skills to play with other people, it's also nice to
learn pieces that are self-contained on the guitar, needing no
accompaniment. We learn these pieces with either written notation or
guitar tablature. Here are two examples (in two fornats):
odetojoy.pdf
odetojoy.gif
greensleeves.pdf
greensleeves.gif
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