Beginner and intermediate-level players as well as many advanced guitarists don't effectively utilize modes and fall into playing ruts by sticking with the "go to" scale patterns they learned when they were first taught. No worries, there is a simple solution to get you out of your mode rut by breaking modes into pentatonic box configurations.

As a guitarist, you know how important it is to have a varied chord vocabulary to help keep your sound interesting. One way to add flavor to your playing is to incorporate suspended chords into your chord progressions.

Many aspiring guitar players feel bad about not feeling motivated enough to play and practice. They feel like they're not worth becoming great musicians if they don’t feel pumped about guitar all the time.

Practicing 6 hours a day means nothing if you don’t know what you're doing. Overdoing it can even hinder your progress. Here's exactly how much you need to practice, and what you need to practice to get good.

As guitarists we spend 90% of our time working on our chops and improvisation skills and 10% of our time working on our rhythm playing. Yet a regular gig or a session guitarist will spend 10% of the time soloing and about 90% of the time playing rhythm. Aside from this eye-opening fact, here are 10 more reasons you might be a little lacking in the rhythm department.

To give you some new ideas about how to practice scales, I suggest patterns. And here's what I mean by that: A pattern is a particular melodic or rhythmic figure played repeatedly.

It happens to every guitarist at some point or another. Some call it guitar fatigue; others say practice boredom. The bottom line is that you’ve lost your motivation, your passion for playing guitar. What can you do to motivate yourself to keep practicing?

Fact is everyone encounters challenges with their fingers in the early days of playing guitar. It's all part of the process. The trick is that we have to adapt the hands we were born with to the demands of the fretboard.

Muscle memory is built through repetition over time. It is an acquired skill that has been practiced so long it seems innate, like riding a bicycle or tying your shoelaces. If you struggle to hit the right notes whenever you take your eyes off your hands, give the following eight tips a try to help beef up your muscle memory.

Musicians of all sorts, including singers, use vibrato to help add expression to their music. Vibrato makes your notes come alive. It adds warmth and gives notes more character and longer sustain.

Normally when you fret a note, you push it straight down on the fingerboard. But when you bend a note, you pluck a fretted note (the bend's "origin" note) and push or pull the string with the fingers of your fretting hand, stretching it across the fingerboard toward the upper or lower string so that it rises in pitch and becomes another note (the "destination" note).