Guitar Tricks - Guitar Insider

This week on Insider I share another one of the things I really wish someone would have told me early on in my own guitar journey, which is what on earth to do with dimished chords?!?! What even are they, how do you play them, how do you avoid them and much more. We'll start with the most basic approach and then we'll gradually build on both the voicings as well as a deeper understanding of how they tend to function within a progression. 

Published: 06/25/2026 Published: 06/25/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider we explore some very advanced soloing sounds, BUT we do this using the most simple and basic pattern of the minor pentatonic. It's an often overlooked fact that you can get easy access to sounds like minor, major, Mixolydian, Lydian and more by simply moving the old familiar pattern around on the neck. First I'll build an ambient C5 loop and then I'll demonstrate how to move the basic minor pentatonic shape around to create some new, exciting and wildly different sounds.

Published: 06/25/2026 Published: 06/25/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share one of the biggest lightbulb moments I had early on, on my guitar journey. This happened when I started to see the visual overlap between scale patterns and chord shapes, and once I started using this musically it opened up a whole world of beautiful sounds that effortlessly blend melody and chord without straining to do both at once. You can easily explore this concept on an advanced level, but even at it's most basic levels it's a great sound and makes for an extremely beneficial exercise. 

Published: 06/11/2026 Published: 06/11/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider we dive into the world of MIND GAMES. Just like it's the case with most other difficult things we try to do in life, the mental component of learning and performing music is powerful. Some mind games can send you into a tailspin if you don't manage to snap out of it, and others can be extremely helpful. 

This all came about after I received a question about that familiar moment when you realize you're doing something new and difficult and then seemingly because of that thought you end up messing it up. That particular issue is simply a matter of powering through to the other side, but there are many other both helpful and destructive mind games that it's important to be aware of. 

Published: 06/04/2026 Published: 06/04/2026 Upgrade

This week on insider we continue our journey into songwriting. In the last episode, we explored adding melody and chords to the lyrics we had written in the first episode, and today I show you everything that has happened with this song since the end of that last episode. 

I basically followed the formula until I got inspired. This inspiration was triggered by an upcoming studio session with friends and something really tragic that happened. It all lead the song to a very interesting and unexpected place, and in this episode I'll walk you through all the decisions I made in the process and offer lots of helpful songwriting tips along the way.

Published: 05/28/2026 Published: 05/28/2026 Upgrade

This week on insider we continue our deep dive into the songwriting process. We have now reached step 2 of my tried-and-true method for writing a song - a method that works whether you're feeling inspired or not. Some writers wait for the songs to come, but I like to chase them!

In step 2 we pick some reference songs that we would like our song to feel like and with those in mind, we start singing our lyrics over different chords. After that, it's simply a matter of staying with it long enough and keep searching until you find something that feels right. I demonstrate this process and offer all my best advice along the way. 

The world of songwriting is for everyone, and I hope you'll join me there. 

Published: 05/15/2026 Published: 05/15/2026 Upgrade

This week on insider I come to you from an entirely empty studio. A studio that has been my one-man music spaceship for the past 15 years of my life. This room was a Swiss Army knife of guitar sounds and I could do anything I ever needed to in there. Now it's empty and I'm playing a small ZT amp I could dig out of storage and a really cool Jerry Jones baritone guitar that just showed up in the mail! We'll talk about baritone guitar and how to approach any old or new, cheap or expensive instrument with curiosity and try to find out what IT wants to do. That's a hack that'll give you access to so much inspiration, help you beat the gear hype and ultimately find your own unique voice on the guitar.

Published: 04/30/2026 Published: 04/30/2026 Upgrade

This week on insider, I offer a stark warning about cheese graters. I also offer my best tips on one of the skills that I always dreamt of acquiring, but for some reason thought was entirely unattainable: lyric writing. I don't know why, but so many of us think lyric writing is a skill you have to be born with, but it is a craft - just like anything else we do in music. 

Today I offer some hands-on tips that will help you get started writing your very own lyrics - and if you're already writing lyrics, these are really great tools that I use myself every time I sit down to write. 

Published: 04/24/2026 Published: 04/24/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider we continue our exploration of the concept of "micro licks" - this time within the context of "Chicken Picking". Chicken picking refers to the percussive sound we get when we use a combination of regular picked notes and notes we "pluck" with our fingers. This is a really fun sound to explore and you often hear it within a country context - but it can be used in many other styles as well. We'll break down 4 micro licks that can be expanded and combined to play a large number of different chicken picking licks. If you're already a seasoned chicken picker, this will give you some new ideas - and if you've never tried this sound before, it's a really great place to start.

Published: 04/16/2026 Published: 04/16/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider we talk about gear! Acquiring instruments and equipment in order to find your sound can be an exciting part of learning to play. It also has the potential to be a giant rabbit hole and a total waste of money and energy. Because at the end of the day the most powerful way to sound better is to get better - but as we all know it is all too easy to get caught up in the notorious "Gear Acquisition Syndrome" and think you can fix your musical challenges by buying stuff. So in this episode I share all the moments, where I bought equipment that did in fact make a difference for me. I hope this will help you on your own journey through the exciting and confusing world of GEAR.

Published: 04/09/2026 Published: 04/09/2026 Upgrade

One of the trickiest parts of navigating your guitar journey is figuring out what advice to take to heart and what to ignore. In this episode I share some of the advice I got that sent me down the wrong path for a while. I also share what I think the advice should have been and what I eventually learned from it all. These bits of bad advice were offered to me by people who gave me an astronomically larger amount of great advice, so this is in no way me criticizing or putting down my old teachers and mentors. I'm simply offering some hard lessons I learned, hoping it will be helpful to all of you.

Published: 04/07/2026 Published: 04/07/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider we continue to explore the concept of "micro-licks", this time in a jazz blues context. Jazz blues is an intriguing sound that mixes up the basic blues pattern with notes from the major chord/scale along with other cool sounding tension notes. We will break down and practice four short licks that can be used and combined in a bunch of different ways. This new, jazzy sounding vocabulary will blend in seamlessly with your regular blues vocabulary, and I think you'll have a ton of fun exploring this potent blend of sounds and vibes.

Published: 03/26/2026 Published: 03/26/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share another powerful group of "microlicks" - this time to work in a blues shuffle context. The medium tempo blues shuffle can be hard to solo over, because everything becomes triplet based and it can feel very disorienting to navigate for both your phrasing and your technique. These 5 microlicks can be used in a million different ways and can serve as a kickstarter for your triplet-based vocabulary. Im confident you'll get a lot of use out of it - also outside of the shuffle context!

Published: 03/19/2026 Published: 03/19/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share the behind-the-scenes story of how I ended up playing on a song with the great Willie Nelson that just came out. I spent some time in Nashville last year, and while I was there I played on a song for a great artist named Lily Meola. I played my heart out and the producer was extremely happy. Unfortunately the artist didn't think it was the right vibe stylistically, so they axed my lead parts and called in the amazing Willie Nelson to replay it. Thankfully my Tic Toc parts survived, so now I can cross "playing on a song with Willie" off my bucket list. Throughout this story I'll show you some of the tricks and techniques I used in the process as well as some general tips for playing with this kind of south-of-the-border country sound. Sounds that are so convincing enough that even a Danish guy can pull it off!

Published: 03/12/2026 Published: 03/12/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share a true lightbulb moment I had in the earlier part of my guitar journey. This all comes down to a simple, but powerful exercise that really made the relationship between chords and scales click on a whole new level. We'll be soloing in the key of A minor, using a small pattern of the full minor scale. Then the harmony will go to a major V-chord, which uses a note that isn't in the regular minor scale. Changing this one note within our scale pattern, really opened up the door for me to a whole new level of playing - a level where you're not just blindly soloing over and through the chords, but playing with them. This scale is called "harmonic minor", but I hope you'll see it as a simple variation of the basic scale rather than a whole new scale.

Published: 03/05/2026 Published: 03/05/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I invite you all to join me in a bit of an experiment. I have always encouraged everyone to break down a longer lick or phrase into smaller chunks - in order to get creative with each of the chunks individually. Today we'll reverse engineer this process by learning four micro-licks and then exploring all the different ways you can string those together to make long and elaborate phrases. We'll explore this in a Bluegrass context (because it's fun!), but it works in any style of music. My hope is that you will not only get a lot of mileage out of these micro-licks, but also that this will help you get more use out of licks you already know.

Published: 02/26/2026 Published: 02/26/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a request for more "lab work" - particularly the concept of chasing a particular emotion in the lab. The "lab" refers to the headspace in which we stretch and build upon our existing knowledge - see the episode called "5 Rooms" for more info. The emotion were trying to evoke is "hopeful" and in order to conjure up this feeling well use all the tricks, tools and techniques available to us. Conveying emotion just might be the ultimate goal of music making, so this exercise is important and hopefully inspiring. You can come at it from a million different angles, and I hope this demonstration will help you get started.

Published: 02/12/2026 Published: 02/12/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share my experience from this weekend attending the Grammys as a nominee. Grab your guitar, run some scales and let me tell offer you an insider perspective from the biggest night in music!

Published: 02/05/2026 Published: 02/05/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to two questions from Larry and John about finding your way through all the many Insider episodes we've done so far. After that we continue to the topic of the day which is as clear a demonstration as I can imagine of the power of rhythm and timing. I have recorded a simple rhythm guitar and a solo with the worst timing I could pull off, and then I'll show you how much more confident and pro it sounds, once I clean up the timing. This is not a lesson in editing a poor performance, but rather a demonstration that I hope will inspire you to pay attention to your rhythm and timing in both your lead playing and accompaniment.

Published: 01/29/2026 Published: 01/29/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share one of the important lessons that I wish someone would have shared with me early on. This is the fact that a scale is simply a collection of notes that makes sense to the player so anything can be a scale. You can even make up your own based on simple variations on scales you already know or random visual patterns on the neck. Try it out remember the good notes and ditch the bad ones. And don't be afraid of a little dissonance as long as you land on a comfortable note it can be a powerful sound.

Published: 01/22/2026 Published: 01/22/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to what might be my favorite Insider question ever. The question is from Bill who asks for some tips on how to play melodic and catchy solos rather than the usual pentatonic riffing. This is something I strive to do anytime I play a solo, so I'm excited to offer some tips on making your solos more catchy, recognizable and melodic. To me, the perfect solo is one that you have to play note-for-note when you play the song - or the listener gets disappointed. Obviously this is a huge topic, but today we're diving right in.

Published: 01/15/2026 Published: 01/15/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I show how easy and affordable it can be to explore the sunshiney sound of the Ukulele. With just a little bit of knowledge you can more or less directly transfer your guitar skills onto the Ukulele by pretending it's the top 4 strings of the regular guitar. You also don't have to spend a lot of money to get a decent Ukulele. They're extremely affordable, and it can be nice to have as a break from your learning on your regular guitar - for both your fingers and your mind. Finally I show how you can convert your regular acoustic to work like a Ukulele in case you like the sound, but don't want to buy the instrument.

Published: 01/08/2026 Published: 01/08/2026 Upgrade

As we're heading into the new year, I thought it would be helpful to offer some encouragement for all my Insiders - because we all need that from time to time. We'll talk about why the guitar is such an awesome instrument, why it's a uniquely great time to be learning it right now, how there is no wrong way to study and how it's good for much more than just your musical abilities to be learning music and guitar. I hope to leave you invigorated and excited to continue your guitar journey in 2026!

Published: 01/01/2026 Published: 01/01/2026 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to the many questions I've received about dialing a good tone on various different pieces of equipment, amps, pedals, modelers, etc. We'll explore this by dialing in some of my best virtual guitar amps - all within my recording software. This software is modeling real tube amps, so all the knowledge will transfer directly to real tube amps as well as other types of modeling equipment. We'll use a virtual amp that's modeled after a Fender Twin Reverb and another that's modeled after a VOX AC30 - two of the most iconic classic amps that exist. We'll apply those amp tones to guitar tracks I recorded with a cheap Strat going straight into the computer, and you'll see how much magic these classic tube tones can provide.

Published: 12/19/2025 Published: 12/19/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we talk about the only secret there ever was to getting really good at guitar, which is to fall in love with the process of getting a little bit better at playing guitar. Once you figure that out everything else falls into place! I could do a whole course on how to facilitate this, but today we're going to focus on some key elements of what I consider to be the ideal headspace for practicing. Print out this chart, add your own reminders and put it up in your practice space! Unless you're rehearsing for a specific performance, the only goal for your practice session should be to stay in the right headspace and to get a little bit better than you were when you started. What you work on is infinitely less important than that!

Published: 12/11/2025 Published: 12/11/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I continue my "Cheat Like A Pro" series, in which I show you ways to make music that don't even require playing an instrument. This is of course not meant to replace your guitar playing, but rather to supplement it and expand your abilities and perspective on music making as a whole. This week we're working with the most forgiving tool in music, which is called "MIDI" and I show how anyone can use this tool to easily build up a song with drums, bass and piano.

Published: 12/04/2025 Published: 12/04/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I continue my long neglected series called "Cheat Like A Pro" in which I try to let everyone in on some of the dirty tricks and techniques that are used in professional music making. We always have to remember that the vast majority of the people who made/make the music we all listen to don't care very much about the "proper" way to do this. They will use any tool at their disposal to make the best possible music, and in this series I aim to let you in on some of these tools. Even for a dedicated instrumentalist like myself it's fun and rewarding to learn some of these tricks and techniques. The workflow we'll explore today is called "sampling" and it enables you to make all the music in the world and doesn't even require you to play an instrument!

Published: 11/27/2025 Published: 11/27/2025 Upgrade

Here on Insider we have talked a lot about the importance and the power of working on your rhythm. Having a solid rhythmic feel will make everything you do sound better, and if you don't have good rhythm you'll never sound truly great - no matter how good you get at the notes. But it can be hard to work on your rhythm in a way that feels fun and musical. In a way where you can feel and track the progress. So in this episode I'll show you a really fun funk exercise that - once you learn it - feels more like a jam and less like a workout. It's fun and incredibly beneficial for your rhythmic chops. At the end of it I have also included a metronome track that blends the classic metronome sound with a simple drum beat, so that you can start to bridge those two things in your mind.

Published: 11/20/2025 Published: 11/20/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from Thilo, who has been invited to join a rehearsal for a blues band to see if it might be a fit. We'll talk about the best ways to prepare with the somewhat limited material that has been offered ahead of time, how to figure out the gear situation, how to deal with your nerves and many other helpful tips for going to play electric guitar with a band for the very first time. The advice we'll get into is also helpful if you're a beginner hoping to do this someday, and a useful reminder if you're more experienced.

Published: 11/13/2025 Published: 11/13/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a request from George for more examples of "lab" work - particularly in relation to the world of moving pentatonic shapes around the neck. So in this episode we take a simple pentatonic lick into the lab and use our ears and knowledge of the neck to come up with an epic climbing pentatonic lick.

Published: 11/06/2025 Published: 11/06/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we're doing a very special Halloween episode! Ever since Tony Bones - The Tonal Terrorizer first appeared on the GuitarTricks Youtube channel, the world has been anxiously waiting for the third song. However, shortly after his short stint of fame and fortune, Tony went back to the depths where he came from, and we never got a chance to record it. At the time I wrote this song for him, he only had one string left on his guitar - but that didn't stop us from writing an epic Halloween instrumental that we'll break down in this episode. Terrifying backing track included!

Published: 10/30/2025 Published: 10/30/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we talk about a topic that comes up a lot in messages, private lessons and forum posts, which is the topic of quitting. Some people find themselves so frustrated that they are considering quitting. Others have come back from having quit for many years and are now re-discovering the joy of learning and playing guitar. In this episode I share my best advice for how to handle the roadblocks that we all encounter in ways that don't result in selling your guitar and turning your practice into a gym.

Published: 10/23/2025 Published: 10/23/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I continue my quest to help everyone get the most out of their practice time. A while back we explored the very helpful analogy of the "5 rooms". Last week I showed how I spend most of my time in the "Gym" these days in order to maintain my technique during the periods where I don't have enough time to practice. Today I show an example of how I work in the "Lab", which is the practice room where guitar players have the potential of becoming really great - where one little nugget can become a million and where we really find our voice and develop our playing.

Published: 10/16/2025 Published: 10/16/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share some insights on how I spend my own practice time these days. We'll base this on the principle of the "5 rooms" that we explored in a recent Insider episode. In spite of my professional life being centered around the guitar, my actual practice time is surprisingly limited. Most of my time I spend rehearsing material, recording, writing or simply managing all the things that come with a life in music. So when I do have some real practice time I'm very aware of which of the rooms I spend it in and why. The concept of the 5 rooms is a very powerful concept, and I hope that spending some more time with it will help you focus and supercharge your own practice time.

Published: 10/09/2025 Published: 10/09/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a request from John, who would like to take the knowledge from the video called "Chord Theory in Five Minutes" and adapt it onto the guitar. These two episodes contain some of the most useful theory I have ever learned, which will enable you to understand how chords are created, and subsequently how to modify the chords you already know as well as create your own voicings. The layout of the notes on the guitar is very confusing and it's not a great place to learn theory. It's better to start on the piano like we did in the older video, but once you have that visual in your mind it's really beneficial to transfer it to the guitar.

Published: 10/02/2025 Published: 10/02/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to Dan who is requesting some tips on how to build up your calluses, when you're first starting out on the guitar. There isn't much we can do to speed up that process, but there are important ways we can avoid losing our calluses. I'll share these along with my best tip to avoid kitchen-related injuries that can potentially set back our guitar playing by months. I'll also offer a really useful way to harmonize a major scale in 6th intervals that can be used for chord licks, rhythm parts and riffs, solos and instrumental arrangements.

Published: 09/25/2025 Published: 09/25/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to an old request from Marco, who asked me to share some of the struggles and breakthroughs from the early part of my own guitar journey. My first goal on the guitar was to learn as many chords as possible so that I could play the songs in my songbook. This of course lead me straight into the universal "battle of the barre-chords", and I share the approach I used to get to the other side. Later on I learned how music theory could help me play any chord ever and how to solo in a major key. I am sure you'll recognize some of these struggles, and I hope you'll be inspired by some of the solutions I found.

Published: 09/18/2025 Published: 09/18/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I demonstrate the raw and simplistic power of what I personally refer to as "BOSS Guitar". This is the type of guitar playing that perfectly exemplifies the fact that when it comes to getting good at guitar it's not how much you know, but rather what you do with the stuff you know that counts. The players of this style could make a whole venue full of people go wild using only a few basic chords or some twangy open notes. First I showcase my BASS VI, which is a guitar that's down a whole octave from our regular guitar and is frequently used in this style. Then I break down a practice tune in the style and we play it over the backing track.

Published: 09/10/2025 Published: 09/10/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from George, who has seen someone play a mandolin and wants to know about the instrument. So we'll take a good look at my old mandolin - how it's played, tuned and modified - but my bigger aim is to convince you to come at all these alternative fretted instruments like banjos, ukuleles, bouzoukis, etc. with the mindset that they're all just guitars. You can tune them and play them any way you like, and once you realize that it can be a lot of fun to explore all the strange fretted instruments we find out there.

Published: 09/04/2025 Published: 09/04/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to quite a few requests for clarification on the whole "relative minor major" concept. This is one of the most useful bits of music theory you will learn on the guitar, because it will enable you to use the same scale pattern - and even most of the same licks - to create both a minor and a major sound. In order to clear up any confusion I will start at the very beginning and build up to some simple rules for navigating minor vs. major pentatonic soloing. These rules can be used even if you don't understand any of the theory behind it.

Published: 08/28/2025 Published: 08/28/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share an extremely helpful concept that I've used in private lessons over the years. The metaphor is a "guitar compound" with 5 distinct rooms, and each room serves an important function in our music learning process. We have the library, the gym, the study, the lab and finally, the stage. For many of us, these 5 "rooms" get jumbled together randomly within our practice time, and that can lead to some very frustrating issues. And I'm quite confident you'll recognize a few mistakes of your own as we go through these. At the very least, understanding this concept will help you practice more effectively.

Published: 08/21/2025 Published: 08/21/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we explore the powerful concept of "borrowed chords". This topic is often overcomplicated and misunderstood, but if you watched last weeks episode on making chords in a minor key it should all make perfect sense after today's episode. The basic idea is that within a major key we can "borrow" chords from the "parallel" minor key. Parallel means that it's the same letter name - for example A major and A minor. This is a subtle way to bring in some of the minor tension without moving away from our major key. It's helpful for writing chord progressions, understanding and learning songs and ultimately also for soloing.

Published: 08/14/2025 Published: 08/14/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we explore the simple, but powerful building blocks of minor key harmony. This is extremely helpful for writing chord progressions, but also for understanding the harmony in songs you learn. Music - and storytelling in general - is a matter of nailing the balance between tension and release, darkness and light, sadness and hope. Understanding minor harmony with this approach is a powerful tool for that purpose. First we'll explore the I- IV- and V- relationship to see how the relationships function the same as in the major key - but with a much sadder overall feeling. Then we look at the relative majors for each of these and explore how you can use the major chords as substitutions to throw some "light" in between all the sad sad minor chords.

Published: 08/07/2025 Published: 08/07/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we continue to explore my favorite topic: arranging songs for solo guitar. This time we'll use a different approach to the timeless "Amazing Grace", now playing the melody on the bass strings with gentle strums of the treble strings in between. This is a great way to play this particular melody as well as many others. It is also a great way to get comfortable with the more melodic use of the bass strings, which can be a great tool for your rhythm playing.

Published: 07/31/2025 Published: 07/31/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we dive into one of my favorite things to do on the guitar, which is to arrange beautiful melodies for solo-guitar. I've been fascinated by this craft since I was 6 years old, and still to this day it's my favorite thing to do on the guitar. In this episode we'll break down the chords and the melody for the timeless melody Amazing Grace and then at the end we'll combine the two elements into a simple solo-guitar arrangement. There is an almost infinite number of ways to arrange this melody, and we can keep going with this topic and building on the arrangement as long as you want to.

Published: 07/24/2025 Published: 07/24/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we continue our birds-eye view of everything I consider to be “functional” music theory. I use that term for all the tools and concepts that will actually help you make and understand music. This is opposed to the more academically oriented approaches you find out there. We have already covered a lot of these topics here on Insider, and if you’d like to dig into some of the ones we haven’t already explored, just let me know. You can absolutely make music without understanding these concepts theoretically, but I've always find it super fun and helpful to look into the engine of music.

Published: 07/16/2025 Published: 07/16/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we take a birds eye view of everything I consider useful music theory. You can absolutely learn to make music without understanding theory, but I have always found it extremely interesting and helpful to know why something I learn sounds the way it does. As a musician I rely on this knowledge every day, and as a teacher I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways people make it seem much more complicated than it really is. So in this episode I embark on an overview of what I consider to be the best way to understand it all. Some of these topics have already been covered in earlier Insider episodes and I will be referencing those as well. Next week we'll keep going with the birds eye view, and if you want to dive deeper into any of the specific topics after that, just let me know. I'm always ready.

Published: 07/08/2025 Published: 07/08/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I demonstrate what I think is one of the coolest (and amazingly accessible) sounds you can make on an electric guitar. We've talked a lot about the importance of getting weird and looking for rules to break, and the 5 string Telecaster is a shining example of this. You can leave the low E-string on there, but for the full experience we remove the low E-string and tune the remaining 5 strings to open G. After that it's extremely easy to play a million arena-worty riffs, and after you're done exploring this I'll show you how to imitate this in standard tuning.

Published: 07/03/2025 Published: 07/03/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a request from YL asking how to play the riff from the promo video with my pink Telecaster. This is a rockin' pentatonic riff, and while the notes are fairly simple, the tempo and the syncopated 16th note rhythms makes it a fun challenge. And it works well at slower tempos too. It includes some thumb work in your left hand, but there are ways around it if you're not comfortable with that. And as always, it's important to remember that you can make up your own simplified version of the riff if you want. Remember: if it sounds good, it is good!

Published: 06/26/2025 Published: 06/26/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to several requests to build on the electric strumming pattern we broke down a few weeks ago. So in this episode we'll review the basic strumming pattern, which is simple on paper and tougher to execute. After that we'll add a cool fill to it, and as we build up the fill it's important to note that each of the building blocks is perfectly useful as their own fills. It is also perfectly okay to use the notes I'm showing to come up with your own variation on it. As always, if it sounds good, it is good!

Published: 06/19/2025 Published: 06/19/2025 Upgrade