Picture this: You’re playing for a sold-out crowd of shrieking fans, and as your band pounds its way toward oblivion, you near the climax of your guitar solo. You go into a crouch, ready to launch yourself into a well-rehearsed backscratcher punctuated by a window-shattering power chord. Unfortunately, you’re stepping on your guitar cable. You leap, the plug rips out of your guitar jack, and when you land to strum that final chord, you might as well be playing air guitar.

Even if the only person in the audience is your husband’s pet schnauzer, self-inflicted unplugging is humiliating. Here’s a simple way to prevent it:

Before plugging in, thread your guitar cable between your guitar strap and the body of the guitar, right above the rear strap peg, from back to front. Now, instead of ripping out your cable, you’ll rip a back muscle. Problem solved.

Oh, and update your stage antics. Backscratchers are so 80’s.

I’ve decided to start sprinkling tips among my longer tutorials and articles. Here’s the first…

Barre chords are the scourge of the beginning guitarist. Like a bum knee, a prison record, the inability of matter to exceed the speed of light; barre chords hold us back. The next time an F minor chord messes with you, mess back with this:

• Check your thumb placement. Your thumb should be pressing against the back of the neck, on the fattest part, behind the area where the 2nd finger’s hanging out.
• Check your first finger placement. It should be parallel with the fret wire, so close it’s just barely touching the side. Roll your finger a bit toward the nut, so that the bony side of the finger is digging into the strings instead of the strings digging into what my student Casey calls the “chub.”
• Stop pressing so hard. That first finger’s only responsible for fretting some of the strings, so don’t try to press down on each string with equal force. For example, when playing a standard barred F chord, press hard with the tip of your finger on the 6th string, and dig your knuckle into the 1st and 2nd strings, but let the finger rest lightly over the other strings.
• Take heart. Often you can transpose a song to avoid barre chords. Also, some great guitarists never play barre chords–BB King, for example, played his way to greatness pretty much one note at a time. As he said in the U2 documentary “Rattle and Hum,” “I don’t do chords.”

Please comment if you’d like to add your own tips for playing barre chords. And if you’d like to submit a tip about some other aspect of guitar playing, email me.

Big Fuzz tossed me a musical baton tonight. This is one quiz I can ace….

Total volume of music in my PC:
20.57GB of mp3’s, plus another 60GB or so of tracks I’ve recorded

The last CD I bought:
Exile on Main Street - Rolling Stones

Song playing right now:
Gone - Jack Johnson

Five songs I listened to a lot recently:
16 Military Wives - The Decemberists
Why Would You Wanna Live - Wilco
Neighborhood #2 (Laika) - Arcade Fire
3rd Planet - Modest Mouse
Finest Worksong - REM

The baton is now passed to the following people:
Bud
Rachel

For the past two years, I’ve been teaching out of a one-bedroom apartment in a building with paper-thin walls. During that time, my business grew from a handful of students to about thirty-five. While my neighbors have generally been gracious with their noisy neighbor, I’ve decided that it’s time to move and give them some peace and quiet.

So starting next month, I’ll be living—and teaching lessons—in a beautiful old house I’m renting in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood. This move is not only a great improvement for my business, but fulfills a dream I’ve had since I was a kid.

The house is a great setting for teaching. It’s got views of the Olympic mountains, hardwood floors, a fireplace, and a big backyard that might be fun to teach in during the summer. Just as important, I won’t have to worry about disrupting my neighbors when I’m working on my own music. I started recording songs for an album a year ago, but had to put things on hold after recording “Hail! Thunder! Lightning! when I realized my repetitious singing (sometimes I need to practice one line over and over again) was probably driving my neighbors to the nuthouse. Now I’ll have a room dedicated to recording, with a nice tube mic on a stand, a variety of amps, moving blankets ready to be hung on hooks to deaden echoes, and a remote monitor and keyboard connected to the computer-based recording setup in my office.

The only other time I’ve felt so strongly about a place of my own was when I was a kid playing one of the very first multi-player internet games. It was a role-playing game called Scepter, and was similar to the text-based games made by Infocom (Zork, etc.) where you explore and interact with a vast world by typing simple commands (north, up, look, kick fire-breathing hamster, etc.). My favorite aspect of the game was that when you got rich enough, you could buy a house. The house was simply a few lines of setting description that you could compose and would be displayed to everyone who wandered into your corner of the cyber-grid of the game. I spent a good part of my 8th grade summer vacation slaying ghouls and selling vorpal blades to earn enough gold to buy my own place, and when I finally signed the “title,” I sweated over the description until I finally settled on something like this:

You step into a spacious, peaceful, well-lit home. A warm breeze wafts through an open window. On the wall are a mandolin, an acoustic guitar, and several other musical instruments. This looks like a great place to kick back and have a cold one.

I’m twenty years older now, but I still dream of having that peaceful place to welcome my friends and make music. I can’t wait for all the boxing and sorting and cleaning is over, and I’m in my new home, my guitars on the walls, the window open to the warm breeze, and that cold beer–as good as I imagined it years ago–resting in my hand.

Welcome to Chef Hampton’s All-You-Can-Stand Improvisational Guitar Buffet. Our first course is boiled spinich–a bland, soggy scale exercise that is nonetheless packed with vitamins and minerals. Fortified with clear diagrams and video clips, this meal is an important part of a beginning guitarist’s diet. Bon Appetit!

In Improvising 101, the appetizer to today’s meal, I introduced the A minor pentatonic scale, which, despite its complicated-sounding name, is the simplest scale for budding improvisers to learn and use. You may want to give it a taste before continuing, because the next course is going to be…how should I put it…a character-building experience for your taste buds.

I’m talking about repetitious practicing–in this case, playing the A minor pentatonic scale up and down, up and down, for a good while. There’s no way to avoid this kind of repetition if you want to learn to improvise with spontaneity and grace. In fact, practicing scales is part of the Improvisational Guitarist’s Nutrition Pyramid ™:

As you can see, foolin’ around is the foundation of an improviser’s practice routine. Foolin’ around includes using your intuition, experimenting, doing it the wrong way. Play Mary Had a Little Lamb backwards. String your guitar with dental floss. You’ll be participating in a time-honored tradition of tinkerers and tweakers, from Leo Fender to Leo Kottke.

Learning other people’s licks is also important. While great artists strive to go beyond imitation, they always draw inspiration from their predecessors. When you listen to a great guitarist improvising, what you’re hearing the sum of all the music they’ve learned before, spiced with their own creative genius.

But repetitious scale practice is an important part of your diet too. So let’s dig in. To start with, here are a couple of ways of looking at the scale pattern we’re using–first a diagram, and then with tablature:

Above is a diagram of a four-fret section of your fretboard. The horizontal lines are the guitar strings, with the high E string at the top and the low E string at the bottom, and the vertical lines are the fret wires. Each dot is a note in the scale pattern, and the number tells you which finger to use. Those orange circles are “A” notes, which are the “root” notes of the Am Pentatonic Scale. We’ll talk more about root notes some other time.

You might be wondering where this scale is supposed to be played. We’re going to play in 5th position, meaning that the first finger is going to hang out on the 5th fret, but this pattern can be played anywhere up and down the neck. Move the hand up the neck, and you’re playing in a higher key. Move it down the neck, and you’re playing in a lower key. Scratch under your armpit and make hooting noises, and you’re a mon key.

Back to the scale. Here’s the tablature version of the scale pattern:

Let’s memorize this scale pattern. It’s easy, because with this pattern, there are just two notes per string, and one of those notes is on the 5th fret. The other note is either played with your pinkie (on the 8th fret) or with your ring finger (on the 7th fret). Let’s call strings with notes on the 5th and 8th frets pinkie strings, and strings with notes of 5th and 7th frets ring finger strings.

Memorize this: The 6th, 2nd, and 1st strings are pinkie strings. All others are ring finger strings.

Got that memorized? OK, we’re almost ready to play the scale. But first, the Six Scale Practice Commandments. It’s really, really important that you practice this scale using proper technique:

• Thou shalt avoid mistakes by playing slowly
• Thou shalt place thy thumb behind the neck so that thy fingers may part like the Red Sea
• Each note shalt sound good
• Thou shalt play in rhythm
• Thou shalt use alternate picking (alternating downstrokes and upstrokes)
• Thou shalt not sound choppy, but with one note flowing into the next

Now watch a video of me playing the Am Pentatonic scale using impeccable technique. New Orleans, here I come!

Now it’s your turn. I recommend practicing this in four five-minute intervals, with a brief break in between. You want to stay focused as you practice, and after five minutes people’s minds tend to wander. With this practice schedule, in a week you’ll be smoooove.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to get off on the right foot and follow the Six Commandments. Just look what happened to Larry Underwood of Fremont, CA. Larry rushed when practicing his scales. Now he plays Barney the Dinosaur covers for bored kindergartners:

Don’t end up like Larry!

Eat everything off your plate and I’ll be back in a while with dessert…

Sorry about the absence. I’ve been exploring the exciting world of Domain Transfer for the past couple weeks. All I’ve got to say is, it’s good to be home.

How do you like the new format? It should be a lot more flexible for me, and easier for you. Let me know what you think.

I’ve just posted a bunch of new chord charts of songs I’ve taught recently. I also revised some of the more popular songs by adding chord charts written in my new format.

New songs now available:

• Bowling for Soup - 1985 - Post-punk song requested by one of my middle-school students
• Can the Circle Be Unbroken - Carter Family - Classic country song
• Pacing the Cage - Bruce Cockburn - Gorgeous fingerstyle song, meticulously tabbed out
• I Don’t Believe You - Magnetic Fields - The Fields are current darlings of the indie rock critics (and this song will show you why)
• Daughters - John Mayer - I’m proud of this version: It sounds almost like the original, and is easy enough for beginners to play
• American Pie - Don McLean - The complete, unabridged version of Don McLean’s one-hit epic! 87 pages in all!
• Sweet Virginia - Rolling Stones - I was a big Stones fan growing up but I hadn’t heard Exile on Main Street until my student requested this song a couple weeks ago. Amazing performaces. Mick sounds so sweet in the chorus: “But come on…”
• Roseville Fair - Bill Staines - Don’t know much about this one. My student brought a copy of a friend performing it. I couldn’t find the original version on iTunes, so who knows how accurate this is….
• Father and Son - Cat Stevens - It was fun revisiting this song, which I first learned in high school. It’s still one of my favorites.

Revised songs:

• Eleanor Rigby - Beatles
• Imagine - John Lennon
• With a Little Help From My Friends - Beatles
• Take Me Home Country Roads - John Denver
• Angel From Montgomery - John Prine
• Sugar Mountain - Neil Young

Have at ‘em!

When I propose to my beginner students that they try out improvising, most give me a funny look. It’s something like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, I can’t even play for more than a minute without dropping my pick in the soundhole.” I’d like to say it’s a “Master Yoda, I am not yet prepared to face Lord Vader” look, but I drop my own pick in the soundhole often enough to dispel any illusions of Jedi powers. I can’t even get my girlfriend’s dogs to sit.

Even so, I’m a decent improviser. You can be too. It takes years to sound really good, but you can sound pretty good right away. Let’s go!

Grab your guitar and play these three notes (click here if you need help reading tablature). Play the note on the 5th fret with your first (index) finger, and the notes on the 8th fret with your fourth (wimpy) finger:

If you’ve seen Ray, the movie that came out recently about Ray Charles, these notes might ring a bell. There’s this scene where a young Ray wanders in to a bar to listen to an old man playing the piano. The old man sits him down and shows him three notes, and then they jam. We’re going to do the same thing. (I realize doing this over the internet is an extremely non-blues thing to do, but you can make up for it by calling your boss and telling him/her you quit. There. Now you have the blues.)

Before we jam, practice playing these three notes by repeating this pattern about ten times:

Now go to my Jam Tracks page and click on the “Blues” link. Download the jam track MP3 and play it. It’s a 5-minute recording of 12-bar blues, a common chord progression used in blues songs.

Once you’ve got the jam track playing, start playing those three notes, in any order you like, along with the music. Don’t worry about sounding good, focus on playing in rhythm with the music. You could try playing a note every time you hear the guitar strummed, or play a note every time the strumming pattern repeats. Or your could stand on your head and cluck like a chicken. There are no rules!

Here are two guidelines for making your improvisation sound even better than it does now:

• Vary your rhythm Sometimes play fast, sometimes let a note ring for a while.
• Vary your volume Let some notes whisper and other notes scream.

Incidentally, those three notes the old man taught to Ray, and I taught to you, belong to the A minor pentatonic scale. That means it’s in the key of “A,” it’s got a special “minor” note in it that makes the scale sound sad, and it’s a five-note scale. “Penta” means five, as in The Pentagram, where the U.S. Department of Defense is. What’s that? It’s called the Pentagon? Oh yeah, I always get my symbols of evil mixed up.

I chose to teach you how to improvise using this scale because no matter what note you hit, it sounds good. If you hit a note that matches the rhythm guitar chord, great. If you hit a note that clashes, it just sounds like you’ve REALLY got the blues. Just make your best blues face…

…and keep playing!

Here are all the notes of the A minor pentatonic scale found on the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th frets. You’ll notice there are a lot more than five notes. It’s because they repeat in higher octaves. If this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it right now.

Try adding a few more nearby notes from this scale to the notes you already know, and play with the Jam Track some more. Keep adding notes until you’re using all the notes in the pattern.

Sooner or later, you’re going to want to learn some licks, which are tried-and-true little sequences of notes that you can memorize and weave into your improvising. I’ll share some of my favorites with you soon.

Have fun!