Guitar Insider

Answers to all your guitar questions, plus tips and stories from the road with Anders Mouridsen.

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  • Anders Mouridsen
    Playing In A Music Store

    This week on Guitar Insider, I respond to multiple questions I've received over the years about what to play when you pick up a guitar in a music store. First we cover some practical tips like making sure you're in tune before starting to play and how to get comfortable with the instrument before making any loud sounds. Then we...

    Published: 03/18/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    How to Make a Backing Track

    This week on Guitar Insider, I show how I build a backing track in my studio, and this is a fun peek into the wonderful world of home recording and production. Within the context of a very simple backing track, we explore the incredible world of MIDI, simple drum programming, basic bass guitar and even some very guitarist-friend...

    Published: 03/12/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Productive Ways to Use Jam Tracks

    This week on Guitar Insider, I respond to a question from George, who asks for some more productive ways to use the jam tracks that we have in the Guitar Tricks Jam Station. We all know how fun it can be to just get lost soloing over a track that loops indefinitely, but you've probably also experienced how it can eventually get...

    Published: 03/06/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    When To Use Shortcut Chords

    This week on Guitar Insider, I respond to a question from Nagharaj, who asks if it's okay to use a Cadd9 shape instead of the regular C shape - because it feels easier. This is a variation on a very common and important question I get often, so in this episode we'll dive into the concept of "shortcuts". We'll explore this top...

    Published: 02/29/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Studio Session Walkthrough

    This week on Guitar Insider, I bring you along to a really cool studio session in a legendary studio here in Los Angeles. I show you how the full band is set up to record together, what guitars I bring and how my studio rig is built up. Finally I return to my own studio to show you a fantastic guitar I just got back and talk a b...

    Published: 02/13/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    When To Move On to the Next Lesson

    This week on Guitar Insider, I respond to one of the most common questions I get, which is: 'How do you know when you're ready to move on to the next lesson?' There are many answers to this question, and in this episode we explore some of the most helpful ones within the context of some simple open chord strumming. Of course all...

    Published: 02/07/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Rhythm and Counting Workout

    This week on Guitar Insider I respond to a request from Amir for some tips on counting and understanding the rhythm behind parts you learn. Most of us ignore this element for a while before we realize how important it is. This usually happens when we try to play by ourselves or with someone else and we realize that we’ve been re...

    Published: 01/31/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Practice Reminders And Other Useful Features

    This week on Guitar Insider, I introduce and demonstrate our brand new feature, where you can create your own customized practice reminders. This is super useful for our busy lives to avoid getting distracted and missing our window to practice! I'm also showing some other cool features that you find in the Toolbox section of the...

    Published: 01/25/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Demystifying Modes: MIXOLYDIAN

    This week on Guitar Insider we explore the simultaneously bluesy and sweet sound of the Mixolydian scale. This is simply a regular major scale, but where the 7th scale degree has been lowered by a half step. Even within the easy one octave pattern we use today you can instantly feel the power of the Mixolydian sound under your f...

    Published: 01/18/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Demystifying Modes: LYDIAN

    This week on Guitar Insider I continue on my quest to demystify the often misunderstood and overcomplicated concept of modes. Modes are just alternative scales that can be used to evoke certain emotions - just like the minor, major and blues scale all convey certain moods. Today we explore how a single half-step change within th...

    Published: 01/10/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Demystifying Modes: DORIAN

    This week on Guitar Insider I respond to a multitude of questions about one of the most misunderstood topics in music, which is MODES. Modes are taught and understood in such confusing ways, but if you come at this from a player's perspective they're just variations on the basic minor and major scales. Variations that most often...

    Published: 01/03/2024 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Gift Ideas For Yourself And Your Guitar

    This time of year we can all be tempted to wish for an expensive new guitar or a fancy amp, but there isn’t always a lot of headroom in the holiday budget. So this week on Guitar Insider, I offer a list of ideas for very inexpensive items that you can buy to boost your guitar playing and creativity. These range from 0-40 bucks a...

    Published: 12/20/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Instrumental Arrangement Trick

    I just released an album with ten of my favorite old Christmas hymns arranged for solo electric guitar, and this week on Guitar Insider, I share the harmonized scale that I use as a basis for most of these arrangements. This harmonized scale will work for countless classic songs, and it's also very easy to come up with your own...

    Published: 12/13/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Record Yourself!

    This week on Guitar Insider, I answer a question from Laura about recording yourself. As Laura points out, this can be incredibly intimidating, but the reason it's intimidating is also the reason it is so powerful. A recording of any quality will tell you how you really sound, and if you routinely record yourself and listen back...

    Published: 12/06/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    How To Get Back On the Horse

    This week I find myself in the rare situation where I haven't touched a guitar in ten days. This is something almost everyone experiences at some point on the guitar journey, and depending on how we handle it, this situation can either be entirely insignificant or cause a ton of frustration that only slows down our progress. So...

    Published: 11/29/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Pinky Wrangling

    This week on Guitar Insider, I answer a question from Brian about how to get your pinky to join the team and cooperate with your other fingers. We all know how difficult this can be, and seeing many great guitar players play world class music without using their pinky at all doesn't exactly make us want to drop everything and wo...

    Published: 11/21/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Capo Blues Soloing

    This week on Guitar Insider, we explore how to use a capo to move our position blues vocabulary up the neck in order to be able to use it in different keys. This gives us an entirely different sound that we get when we play our regular fretted blues scale, and some guitar players have made a whole career out of this awesome and...

    Published: 11/15/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    My Desert Island Effect

    This week on Guitar Insider we dive into the one effect I could never live without, which is reverb. Back in the day there was only one reverb knob on an amp, where you could either get more or less. Now with the rise of modeling amps, pedals and plugins there are a million parameters to tweak and many different types of reverb,...

    Published: 11/07/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Harmony Cheat Sheet

    This week on GTI I write out and explain a harmony cheat sheet that can be used to write and/or understand chord progressions in the key of C. This is centered around our I, IV and V-chords and then we add in relative minors and secondary dominants offering a harmonic smorgasbord that's worthy of countless songs that have alread...

    Published: 11/06/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    The Story Of My Acoustic Guitar And My Mobile Recording Setup

    This week I finally respond to years of questions about my VKV guitar that I use in almost all the acoustic lessons on Guitar Tricks. This is a really interesting story that includes a beautiful old Martin D-28, a talented guitar builder in a small Eastern European town and a 20-year-old Anders on a road trip to get his dream gu...

    Published: 10/26/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Open Position Blues Licks

    This week on Guitar Insider, I respond to a request for 'some blues licks' by exploring some really cool open position blues vocabulary -- which is particularly fun when you play all by yourself. First, I'll show you the basic concept and then we'll explore a couple of licks. Finally I hope you'll continue to explore this great...

    Published: 10/17/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Dealing With String Noise

    This week on Guitar Insider, I’m responding to countless requests for advice on dealing with unwanted string noise. Some of these issues are easy to fix, some require focused practice and others we’re forced to live with.

    Published: 10/10/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    The Secrets Of The Knobs On Your Guitar

    This week on Guitar Insider I share some tips I wish someone would've shown me many years ago. I was originally told to leave the knobs on my guitar all the way up and forget about them. That is in fact what I do most of the time, but there are so many practical and inspiring, creative ways to use the tone and volume knobs on yo...

    Published: 10/03/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Advice On Barre Chords - Pt. 2

    This week on Guitar Insider, I respond to a request for more barre chord tips -- particularly for the A major and A minor shaped barre chords. My tips include stripping down the voicings so you don't actually have to barre, adding open strings, different fingerings, practice tips, and much more. Barre chords are tough, but they'...

    Published: 09/27/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Cheat Like a Pro: Comping

    This week on Guitar Insider, I start a new series called 'Cheat Like a Pro', where I show some of all the tricks that are used in and out of the studio to sound a little (or sometimes a lot) better than what we can perform in real time. These techniques are fair game for anyone and can be fun and useful to explore on any level o...

    Published: 09/21/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Advice On Barre Chords

    Here's this week's episode of GTI, where I offer some helpful ways to work on your barre-chords. Barre-chords can feel like a barrier for most of us, when we're first starting out, and it's important to remember that you can keep working on your barre-chords while you're exploring a million other things. Barre-chords are importa...

    Published: 09/13/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Lightning Answer Round

    This week I try to answer as many direct questions as I can in one episode. We'll talk about how I approach buying guitars, how to dial in new gear and how to best build speed and accuracy. We'll also explore an example of a 'mode', talk about how to get feedback on your playing, how to request songs and much more. Remember that...

    Published: 09/06/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Triad Chord Licks For Days

    This week I'm showing how to get a million cool chord licks out of the triads we explored on the top 3 strings. Rest assured that you can still pick up some of these tricks even if you haven't gotten to all the triads yet. It's rarely all or nothing when it comes to guitar, and triads are no exception. Triads are the number 1 wa...

    Published: 08/31/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Dialing A Good Tone On Any Amp

    This week I'm responding to a multitude of questions about dialing a good tone on a variety of different amps, which ultimately comes down to understanding three factors: EQ, gain and reverb. First I'll use my recording software to show a visual representation of the concept of EQ, and we explore how that relates to the feeling...

    Published: 08/23/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Minor Triad Lead Fun

    This week we start exploring some of all the fun things you can do with the triads we've been drilling. Don't worry if you haven't gotten to all of them, cause we'll only use the ones from the very first triad lesson - and you may even be able to hang on without having watched that one. After using our basic theory knowledge to...

    Published: 08/17/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    High-Strung Acoustic and More on Writing Chord Progressions

    Here's this week's episode of Guitar Insider, where I show a way to get a whole new and inspiring sound of your acoustic guitar - all for the price of a half set of strings. This is similar to what's called 'high strung' or 'Nashville tuning', but note that it's only the sound that changes - Your chord shapes will all look the s...

    Published: 08/08/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Navigating the Fretboard with Triads: Pt. 4

    Here's this week's episode of Guitar Insider, where I'm filming in the music room of my childhood home in Denmark. This is the space in which I spent a huge chunk of my young years stubbornly trying to master the guitar, and it's inspiring to be teaching from here. First we'll do a brief follow-up on the writing challenge and th...

    Published: 08/02/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    The Drill Sergeant And The Cheerleader

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, I'm outside in my backyard sharing what I think is one of the most crucial balancing acts when it comes to learning guitar, sticking with it and eventually getting really good. This has to do with the two perspectives we all have -- and today we'll personify them as the cheerleader (enco...

    Published: 07/26/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Navigating the Fretboard with Triads: Pt. 3

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, we continue our triad navigation bootcamp by adding three more A major triad shapes - this time on the A- D- and G-string. These triads are not only musically useful right away, they also help you connect your scale patterns to chord tones and basic music theory. I generally recommend a...

    Published: 07/18/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Writing Challenge

    Here's this week's episode of Guitar Insider, where we take a break from the triads to explore one of the most gratifying and powerful topics I know of, which is writing. Even if you don't plan to be a songwriter, writing can be a useful and inspiring tool to use in your learning process. So today I'm announcing the first of man...

    Published: 07/13/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Navigating the Fretboard with Triads: Pt. 2

    This week we continue to explore what I consider to be the best way to learn the fretboard which is by learning triad shapes. Last week we covered the top 3 strings and this week we're continuing on the D-, G- and B-string. On top of helping you find your way around the fretboard, these triads are also immediately musically usef...

    Published: 07/07/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Navigating the Fretboard with Triads: Pt. 1

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, I respond to numerous questions about the CAGED system and how best to navigate the fretboard. While there's nothing wrong with learning the CAGED system or any other system that helps you, I think the best way to learn the fretboard is by learning triad shapes all over the neck and usin...

    Published: 06/29/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Tremolo Systems

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, I respond to a question from Fuzzbox about how to use a particular tremolo system called Floyd Rose. This leads me to the broader topic of tremolo systems, vibrato arms, whammy bars -- whatever you choose to call them. I mainly use the type called a Bigsby, and this week I show my favori...

    Published: 06/22/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Using A Looper Pedal

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, I'm responding to a question from John who wants to know how to create harmonized lead lines in the style of The Allman Brothers and others. This made me realize I should do a video on using a looper pedal, which is a really powerful and quite affordable tool to add to your practice rig....

    Published: 06/14/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Learning By Ear

    Published: 06/08/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Practicing Without Your Guitar

    Published: 05/31/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Full Minor/Major Scale

    Published: 05/24/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Which Notes To Bend

    Published: 05/17/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Dealing With Nerves

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, I share my best tips for handling and minimizing the inevitable performance anxiety that arises anytime we play music in front of another human being. This is something we all have to deal with, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with you for getting nervous. Even if you get really ner...

    Published: 05/11/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Fingers Vs Pick

    Published: 05/03/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    E Major Shaped Chord Lick

    Here's this week's episode of Guitar Insider where we continue to explore the very popular topic of chord licks. This time we break down one of my most frequently used chord licks, which is based off of the E-major shaped barre-chord. The good news is that you don't have to be able to use the barre-chords to play the chord lick...

    Published: 04/26/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Minor Chord Licks

    This week on Guitar Insider, I'm responding to a request for more chord licks and particularly for use with minor chords. Conveniently, our relative major/minor relationship makes it possible to take the same chord licks we used in C major and apply them to an A minor chord. This is some of the most universally useful rhythm gui...

    Published: 04/19/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Rubber Bridge Creativity

    Here's this week's episode of Guitar Insider, where I show my new rubber bridge acoustic/electric made by a famous little store called Old Style Guitars in L.A. I also show how you can imitate this sound with something you most likely already have in your home and this leads to a general encouragement to fearlessly explore all t...

    Published: 04/12/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Tips For Better Finger Picking

    Here's this week's episode of Guitar Insider where I share my best tips for better finger picking. Finger picking is one of the greatest sounds we can produce on a guitar and while it can definitely be difficult to master, there are some immediate things you can do to make it easier - and these are the tips we'll be exploring in...

    Published: 04/05/2023 Upgrade
  • Anders Mouridsen
    Practice Tip - Bite-Sized Learning

    In this week's episode of Guitar Insider, I share a really powerful and often overlooked practice tip. It's both useful and gratifying to learn full songs, but it's often much more powerful to zoom in on a tiny part of a song (like a lick or a chord voicing), learn that and then methodically work that into your own playing. That...

    Published: 03/29/2023 Upgrade