Guitar Tricks - Guitar Insider

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

This week on Insider I respond to a request from Alex for some info on how 12 string guitars work. Alex had noticed my electric 12-string guitar hanging behind me in one of the Insider videos, and while that particular guitar is in the shop at the moment, I did just buy an awesome old Yamaha 12-string acoustic with a magnetic pickup. I explain how the strings are laid out on a 12-string guitar, how to tune and play it and of course demonstrate it all - both the acoustic sound in the room and the magnetic pickup through my amp. The sound of a 12-string is not for everything, but it sure is fun to feel like you're producing the sound of 4 guitars at once.

Published: 06/12/2025 Published: 06/12/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from Garry asking for tips on bending with vibrato. Adding vibrato to our bends is one of the greatest and most vocal-like sounds we can make on the guitar, but it's tricky and something a lot of people struggle with. So I'll offer my best advice using a methodical and patient approach that will get your bends singing with vibrato. The basic idea is to bend up to the note we want and then release the bend ever so slightly. After that you repeat this basic motion, while being vigilant about nailing the original pitch every time you bend back up. If you focus on accurate pitch and consistency, the speed will come when it wants to. If you try to rush speed, it will most likely sound terrible. I also share a few insights on some recent releases I've had. One is an instrumental pedal steel album I made to help my son sleep and the other one is the new Cam single "Alchemy" that I co-wrote.

Published: 06/04/2025 Published: 06/04/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to the very common question of how to break through from one level of playing to the next. These categories can often be redundant, but I do find that an interesting leap happens when you go from being a "beginner" to reaching what could be called "intermediate". This is the point where you can start to feel the flow of real music making, and you're ready to go play with other humans. There's no one exact definition of this, but in this episode of Insider I go through all the skills that I consider being part of an intermediate skill set.

Published: 05/29/2025 Published: 05/29/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share one of the most important bits of advice I wish I had gotten early on. The advice is simply to not wait for anyone's permission before you start following your ear and your intuition. When you find something that sounds good to you - even if you just find it intriguing - go fearlessly in that direction. The more rules you break in that process the better! It's great to be humble, listen and learn, but at the same time we need to actively break as many rules as we can. I also show one of the instruments I've set up to help me break out of my own predictable patterns, which is a Gibson 335 with a rubber bridge and flatwound strings - tuned down to C#. After showcasing the instrument I breakdown a riff that you can use in standard tuning - or tuned down to D or C#. Whatever you do, don't ask permission!! Trust your ear.

Published: 05/21/2025 Published: 05/21/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share some insights about playing banjo live on American Idol last night. I also demonstrate the instrument I used, which is a six-string banjo or "Banjitar". This is simply an acoustic guitar with a banjo body, and you can play it like a regular guitar or more like a banjo. To demonstrate the banjo-style playing I breakdown a simple but powerful riff. This riff can be played on any guitar you have, and you'll feel the driving power of the banjo sound - even without the actual instrument in your hands.

Published: 05/15/2025 Published: 05/15/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share what I call my "guitar world map". This is something I drew up for my one-on-one students to hang up in their practice space, and it includes everything I can think of that has to do with learning guitar. This is helpful for getting a bit of a birds eye view of all that there is, but more importantly it can help you see what areas you might be neglecting. Some because they're not relevant for you - for example neglecting soloing if you're an acoustic guitar player wanting to accompany yourself singing. But others might simply be an oversight. It's okay to spend a long time (even months or years) favoring one area, but it's always good to keep an eye on the "world map" to know where you're at.

Published: 05/08/2025 Published: 05/08/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I show a super useful electric strumming pattern that I heard on the radio this morning. Not only is this useful enough to carry a modern as well as a classic tune - it's also a great example of how you can break up your barre-chords to make them more interesting and easier to play. Finally it's also a great workout for your rhythm and counting abilities. The pattern is one-bar long, but it gets extra interesting when you change chords in the middle of the bar on the upbeat. This pattern can serve as the foundation for a whole world of cool electric rhythm playing, and we can absolutely keep building on it if you would like to.

Published: 05/01/2025 Published: 05/01/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I answer a question from Nick about the rhythm guitar parts I play while the users solo in the blues course. I've been so pleasantly surprised that so many people are interested in the rhythm guitar vocabulary, so in this episode I offer my number one trick for making your blues rhythm parts sound more exciting and advanced. We'll start out with a simple chord "upgrade" and then we'll use some basic knowledge of triads to spread out our parts all over the neck.

Published: 04/23/2025 Published: 04/23/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we continue our deep dive into the all-important topic of EQ. We'll take our knowledge of the basics of EQ from last week and apply that understanding to the knobs on my Ampeg tube amp. After going through the functions, we'll use it all to dial in the different tone terms from Ben's original question - "Muddy", "Shimmery", "Chunky" etc.

Published: 04/17/2025 Published: 04/17/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I answer a question from Ben (our CEO) about the many different terms we use when we talk about EQ - muddy, shimmery, chunkey, presence, etc. This all comes down to the topic of EQ, which is a crucial thing to understand when you're dealing with guitar tone. So in this episode we'll build up a solid understanding of this all-important concept and also explore how all of it pertains to your guitar tone and the controls on your amp and pedals.

Published: 04/10/2025 Published: 04/10/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I offer my best advice on two separate questions about fatigue. The first question has to do with the very physical fatigue that we feel in our hands when we first start out fretting notes and chords. The other one is a more psychological phenomenon that the user referred to as "tone fatigue", where we get so caught up in dialing our tone that we eventually lose our perspective entirely and never actually get to practice. I'm all too familiar with this pitfall, and I have lots of great advice on how to avoid it.

Published: 04/03/2025 Published: 04/03/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I share one of my favorite tools that always has and continues to help me level up my lead playing. This tool is to write the most amazing solo you can imagine over a given backing track. It's a fun process where you first imagine something and then figure out how to play something like it. Then you rehearse and memorize it lick by lick until you can play the whole solo the same way every time. It's a fun and super rewarding process that can boost your lead playing to whichever level is just outside of reach.

Published: 03/27/2025 Published: 03/27/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from Sascha, who asks for a formula for finding octaves around the neck. I share a few different ways to find octaves and unisons, and then we talk about how to use this for navigating the neck and playing the same lick in multiple places. We also explore how to use octaves for jazzy leads and fun rock riffs.

Published: 03/20/2025 Published: 03/20/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I offer another way to more or less instantly level up your sound by paying attention to your TOUCH. One of the coolest things about the guitar is that we have our fingers directly on the strings and that gives us almost infinite possibilities for how to shape our tone. Once you throw different types of amps and pedals into the mix you start to see why it is that no two guitar players ever sound exactly alike - even if they played the exact same guitar and amp.

Published: 03/13/2025 Published: 03/13/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we explore a topic that isn't really covered by anyone, which is jazz for beginners. Jazz can be incredibly advanced, but it is fun and helpful to learn some of the basics even in the earlier stages of your journey. Not necessarily to become a jazz player, but simply to experience the power of the aesthetic and the building blocks from this style of music. We'll use a simple progression, a tone trick and our full major scale to explore some simple jazz improvisation concepts - at a level where most people can join.

Published: 03/06/2025 Published: 03/06/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from Lyndon and explain why standard tuning is standard and why it makes sense to use it - even when it seems like it would sometimes be simpler to do almost anything else. I also explain and demonstrate the unexpected magic of a cheap, but super inspiring guitar I have borrowed while we're at the rental house in Nashville. This leads to an interesting breakdown of the frequency spectrum of an acoustic guitar.

Published: 02/27/2025 Published: 02/27/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we continue our journey into the exciting and boundless world of home recording and production. Last week we recorded two simple guitar parts into Pro Tools and today we'll add effects, amp modeling and do some basic mixing.

Published: 02/20/2025 Published: 02/20/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I present the very basics of how to use recording software. Getting into home recording on any level is one of the best things you can do for your learning and your overall creative journey, and I hope this episode will help you see why. Next week we'll continue to work on the song we started today and get deeper into the exciting and limitless world of home recording.

Published: 02/12/2025 Published: 02/12/2025 Upgrade

This week on insider I'm coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee, where I'm doing some recording and songwriting this month. In this episode we'll talk about putting ourselves out there, and some of the many different ways to approach that. This is based on a question from Berk who is being encouraged by his wife to go sit in with a band at an open mic night, but is worried about making a fool of himself. Throughout this conversation we reference the topics of many past Insider episodes.

Published: 02/05/2025 Published: 02/05/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we talk about a topic that is very often mentioned in your messages to me, which is age. So in this episode we'll talk about what your age actually means for your guitar playing by looking at four important periods in life and the superpowers and pitfalls that each of these phases present. That way we can learn from each of them and know what to look out for as well.

Published: 01/29/2025 Published: 01/29/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider we dive deep into the rabbit hole that is right hand picking technique. This is where you most often find the answers to why you keep making the same mistake or can't get a certain lick past a given speed. This is also where you find the key to effortlessly playing really fast.

Published: 01/22/2025 Published: 01/22/2025 Upgrade

This week on insider I respond to a few different gear related questions - what is my number one guitar(s) and why? Which tube amp should you buy if you don’t gig, and you don’t want a solid state amp? And finally what do you do with that one string that just won’t get in tune?

Published: 01/15/2025 Published: 01/15/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I offer another powerful tip for leveling up your playing - no matter where on your guitar journey you find yourself. This is the concept of restraint or holding back, and I'll show you a few examples of how this can be used as a tool to boost the sound of your lead playing, rhythm playing and even your writing.

Published: 01/09/2025 Published: 01/09/2025 Upgrade

Happy New Year! This week on Insider, I sum up the most important bits of advice we've explored since the very beginning of Guitar Insider. This will help anyone new to Insider or if you've been with us from the beginning it will be a helpful reminder. Most importantly this will serve as my best advice for moving into 2025 with music on your mind and your guitar in your hands!

Published: 01/02/2025 Published: 01/02/2025 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from Jace who found a video online of a singer and guitar player using a really cool right hand technique. This particular combination of pick and finger picking is something I’ve been exploring for years, because I never found that my thumb could dig in hard enough to pronounce the bass strings the way I need when I play live, with a drummer or simply prefer a slightly more aggressive right hand touch. I also found it limiting to have to change right hand techniques or equipment for different songs and sections. With this hybrid technique you can do all of that and switch seamlessly within the song!

Published: 12/23/2024 Published: 12/23/2024 Upgrade

This week on Insider I respond to a question from Marco who asked about becoming and/or sending song ideas to a music producer. First of all this begs the question of what a music producer actually does. And how does that differ from the role of the songwriter, artist, session musician and engineer? Even though streaming services are undermining the profitability of music making, there are also new exciting avenues opening up that we’ll discuss today. And with the absence of traditional gatekeepers, plus the amazing affordability of pro level recording and production equipment, it seems professional music making has never been more accessible.

Published: 12/18/2024 Published: 12/18/2024 Upgrade

This week on Insider I start a series of episodes where I share some of the best ways to level up your playing. These concepts can be used whether you're a beginner or an experienced player because - as with anything else in music - there's always a higher level to reach for. This week we explore the concept of playing PARTS. This happens when we customize our chords and note choice, picking, strumming, tone etc. to fit the rhythm, the mood and the movements of the particular song we're playing. One of the best ways to work on this is to use any song you like to listen to, learn the chords and then come up with a new guitar part that fits it. The goal is to sound like your new part was always there. I'll use one of my own songs to demonstrate this, but you can use any song you like.

Published: 12/11/2024 Published: 12/11/2024 Upgrade

This week on Insider I answer a question from Eev, who's asking tips on being heard properly when playing in church - without overpowering the other musician. This leads to an interesting exploration of the surprisingly complex topic of volume. We'll discuss how things like amp wattage, speaker cabinet size, EQ settings factor in - and even how carefully determining what your role is in any given situation can help you find the balance between blending in and being heard - without risking overpowering anyone else.

Published: 12/04/2024 Published: 12/04/2024 Upgrade