Aural skills are a crucial part of any musician's skill set.  Aural means related to to sense of hearing or the anatomy and physiology of the ear.  So, aural training is sometimes called ear training, an important foundation when learning music theory.  Aural skills training is the process by which musicians identify and mentally organize the sounds that happen in music.

Chord melody style is a way of playing a song as a completely self-contained solo arrangement.  It's essentially a classical guitar approach.

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.

Have you ever tried to figure out the chords to a song and become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of chords available to you? And have you noticed that some chords sound better together than others, while some sound downright discordant together?

I don’t want to say that the rhythm side of modern rock guitar is “easy,” but it’s probably not as difficult as you might think. Rock music is, generally, uncomplicated. Classical music, certain sub genres of bluegrass and advanced jazz (among others) are complex, but modern rock is actually quite simple...

Knowing what a tetrachord is gives you structure for building lead patterns, solos, and other single-note sequences that sit over top of a bass line or underlying chord progression.

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.

If you have been playing guitar for a little while, you've probably heard of natural harmonics, those shimmery, ethereal chiming notes that add contrast to a rhythm part, accent notes to a heavy riff, and create screaming divebombs.

Whether you're cruising down a stretch of coastal highway to Joni Mitchell, or humming an Irish lullaby to a fussy baby, or squeezing out an extra mile or two while running to Green Day, or perusing the Sunday paper over scones and Schubert, music has a unique ability to affect how we feel. So how is it exactly that music has such a potent effect on our psyches?