From Slaying Ghouls to Teaching Stairway

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.

Improvising 201: Spinach for Dinner

Popeye Eating SpinichWelcome 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 ™:

Improvisation 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:

Am Pentatonic Scale

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:

Am Pentatonic Scale Tablature

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:

Penance

Don’t end up like Larry!


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

Blog On Safari

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.

New Chord Charts Available

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:

Revised songs:

Have at ’em!

Improvising 101

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. Those are 8’s by the way, not 0’s.  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 download my 12 Bar Blues in A Jam Track. It’s a 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 a pentagram or pentagon.

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!

The Digital Divide

You hear a lot of talk about computers isolating people from each other, and I think in many cases that’s true, especially if your job involves staring at a screen all day. But computers also have great power to bring people together over long distances. I’ve had visitors from India, Sweden, Singapore come to this blog and drop a note. And this morning I got this email from a reader in Chicago:

—————————————

Hi Rob:

I found your chords on-line last night, and I want to thank you for putting that stuff up. When I found your list of songs, I called my wife in and said we have to move to Seattle, cuz I found a teacher whose list of songs scarily matches my own interests.

I took guitar lessons here in Chicago for a while (at the Old Town School, you may know it), but it’s my seven-year-old son taking them now that has re-energized my own playing and practicing (each day we compare the pads that we’re building up on our fingers). I can’t free up a regular time for lessons right now, but I’m finding the chords for songs I like on the Internet and getting in more practice almost every night than I ever did before.

I really appreciate all the work you’ve done to put everything on-line. You’ve given me months of new material, nicely laid out and a great match for my skills and interest. You may not make money from your web site, but you are making me a better guitar player. Thanks a lot.

Peter

——————————————

Thanks to everyone for visiting my blog. I’m traveling this weekend but I’ll have some new material on improvising posted on Monday.

–Rob

Heartwood Guitar Instruction Releases Nanochart™ to Public

Hey Everyone,

I’ve developed a new way of writing chord diagrams that I’ll be using in all future chord charts, and will eventually include them in currently posted chord charts too. Here’s some press about it:

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 28, 2005

Seattle (AP) — Guitar teacher Rob Hampton announced in a news conference today his company’s development of the Nanochart™, the world’s smallest complete chord diagram. Chord diagrams are used in guitar sheet music known as “chord charts” and “tablature” to illustrate chord fingerings.

Out With the Old

Online chord diagrams typically come in two varieties. The most common is a single row of six characters identifying which fret is played on each string. “x” signifies muting or not playing a string, and “0” signifies an open string. Here’s an “A” chord diagrammed in this manner:

A: x02220

While this format is compact, it doesn’t show which fingers should be used, confusing beginning guitarists. The second variety of chord diagram does show fingerings, but by the time the transcriber writes it out, everyone’s lost interest in the song. Here’s an “A” chord in this format (commence Jeopardy theme song):

  A
xo   o
------
''''''
------
''123'
------
''''''
------

In With the New

Nanocharts™, utilizing cutting-edge nanotechnology, are compact, quick to write, and show which fingers should be used. Here’s that same “A” chord in Nanochart™ format:

       123
A:   x02220

The top line (normally in bold) shows the fingering, and the bottom line shows the fretting.

“Nanocharts™ will change the course of history,” said Hampton at Wednesday’s news conference. Stock in Heartwood Guitar Instruction (HGI) fell slightly to $1.32 in light trading.


Hampton beta testing the Nanochart™

Pick-Hand Flight School

Students in my recent workshop at Pick-Hand Flight School,
West Point Military Academy. I didn’t take any guff from those cocky flyboys.

What’s the hardest thing about playing guitar? Sore fingers? Sore neighbors?

I’d say the hardest part is hitting the correct string when playing single notes. Consider the rock star up there on stage. He’s singing into the mic, so he can’t peek at his guitar. Even if he could, his goldilocks are in his eyes, the lights are in his eyes, and the smoke machine has engulfed the whole stage in a whiteout. As the rock star finishes howling the chorus, his picking hand, a lost pilot in a storm cloud, cuts through the mist toward the B string for the first note of the guitar solo. It has no runway lights to guide it, no GPS, no control tower–only its arm which rests on the top of the guitar more than a foot away. How can the pick possibly connect with the B string, with room for error of just one centimeter, when its point of reference is so remote? Mayday! Mayday!

There’s no simple solution. Instead, there are all manners of shenanigans guitarists employ to keep their picking hand from getting lost. And as Chekov wrote, “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” So strap on your parachutes flyboys and flygirls!

Pinkie Posting–Bad!

This is when you plant the pinkie of your picking hand on the pick guard. Plenty of proficient fingerpickers pinkie post, but plectrum pickers should pass. Posting restricts the wrist, which will result in ragged (uneven) or retarded (slow) rhythm when wreaking rock riffs on your Rickenbacker.

You can see Kurt Cobain posting during the guitar solo in the MTV Unplugged video of “Come As You Are.” Don’t try this at home, kids. Kurt was a musical genius, but guitar technique was not shipped in his genius kit.

Planting Palm on Bridge–Better, but Still Bad!

This is when you dig your palm–right where the karate-chop part joins the wrist–into the top part of the bridge, where the 6th string connects. I used to do this all the time. It gave me security when I was on stage playing with The Lotus Eaters, a Grateful Dead cover band. I barely knew how to play a major scale–I think they let me play because I had long hair–so I needed all the security I could get.

The problem is, both your movement and tone is limited (picking that close to the bridge produces a bright, brassy sound).

Planting the Pick–Good!

This only applies at the start of a musical passage when you’re not playing something already, but it ensures you start on the right foot. Simply slip your pick in the space above the string you’re about to play. We have missile lock!

Brushing–Good!

Jay Roberts, my most recent guitar teacher, has these bratwurst fingers that, as he picks, graze across the pickguard. This only works on the treble strings (unless you’re hand’s huge), but it’s a great way to stay oriented without restricting wrist movement. Plus, brushing is the only picking technique approved by the American Dental Association.

Other forms of brushing: Touching the bass strings with the palm while playing on the treble strings, and grazing the bridge with the palm (which brightens your tone but at least you can pick freely).

A final note: Brushing is a great technique, and most good guitarists do some form of it, but it’s really hard to teach. My students wrinkle their nose and say it feels weird. I suspect that when you’re still trying to remember what the notes in a C major scale are, all this brushing voodoo is way too much to think about. But keep trying until it feels right.

After all, this is a WAR, people! One wrong note, and…

Gifts From the Guitar Gods – Easy Songs that Sound Hard

“Hey Zeus, check out this cool riff I learned!”

A couple days ago a blog visitor was telling me how much she was enjoying learning “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, and asked me if there were some similar songs I could recommend.

“Wish You Were Here” is such a great song for beginning and intermediate guitar players. Usually, gorgeous guitar songs are out of a beginner’s reach–my private students will often ask me to teach them a song by a virtuoso like Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer, Suzanne Vega, or James Taylor, and I have to either simplify the song until it’s barely recognizable, or tell the student to wait (which throws my little teacher’s heart into spasms).

But every once in a while, the guitar gods hand us a gift–a song that’s both beautiful and easy to play.

Here’s a list of Gifts From the Guitar Gods, starting with the easiest songs I know for total beginners, and ending with some divine intermediate songs for mortal fingers. Most titles are linked to chord charts I’ve written for my students. For the songs that involve more than simple strumming, I recommend doing an internet search for tabs or Guitar Pro files.

Gifts for Total Beginners

These are the most common songs and riffs I use in the first few lessons with my beginner students.

For What it’s Worth – Buffalo Springfield – No one knows the name of this song, but most adults recognize it by ear. It can be played with just two chords (E and A) if you simplify the chorus. It’s the easiest guitar song I know, and it sounds great when I play the electric guitar riff over it. Use the folk strum.

Eleanor Rigby – Beatles – My guitar arrangement of this song has just two chords during the verses (Em and C), and a very cool-sounding voice leading part in the chorus (Em7, Em6, C, Em). I teach it using the folk strum or 8th note downstrums. With really young kids–5 through 8 years old–I mute the three bass strings with a piece of felt. Then they can play the whole song using just one finger on the second string: 3rd fret for Em7, 2nd for Em6, 1st for C, and open for Em. When I play along to fill in the bass notes, it sounds great.

Good Riddance – Green Day – Most of my younger students are into the pop-punk bands like Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Sum 41, All American Rejects, Good Charlotte, and of course, Green Day. Unfortunately, most require power chords, which are easy to play after a few months of practice, but what do you do in the mean time? Most easy songs sound like Mary Had a Little Lamb to these kids’ ears. Thank goodness for Good Riddance–a four-chord acoustic song that, when slowed down and strummed using the folk strum, is easy but still rocks

Smoke on the Water – Deep Purple – Young students are often best introduced to the guitar with single-note riffs or licks instead of chords. The Smoke on the Water riff, played in “E” on the 6th string, is super-easy and sounds cool. If students want to learn the whole song, I re-tune them to drop-D and have them play power chords on the 6th and 5th strings.

The First Cut is the Deepest – Sheryl Crow – Just four easy chords. Listen to little Helena Klein, just 7 years old at the time this was filmed, sing this at my first-ever Jam.

Be Here to Love Me – Norah Jones – Not a very well-known song, but if you love Norah, you’ll love this one. Four easy chords.

Come as You Are – Nirvana – If you strum this song in Em (using, you guessed it, the folk strum pattern), it’s just four easy chords. Another favorite first song for beginning rockers.

Wasting Time – Jack Johnson – A simple bass-strum song by a pro-surfer-turned-moviemaker-turned-musician. It’s nice and slow but my students always rush it. I’ve found that imagining you’re sitting under a palm tree on Maui helps to keep the tempo down.

Gifts for Intermediate Players

Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd – The intro to this song is made easier by a technique used in many sounds-hard-but-isn’t songs. The third and fourth fingers are parked on the second and first strings, third fret, creating a G chord if you strum the 1st through 4th strings. The first and second fingers cruise around the bass strings, changing the bass notes from G to A to C to B, to create different variations on the G chord. I call these songs G-whiz songs, as in, “G-whiz, I can actually play this!”

I now offer an in-depth song lesson on how to play Wish You Were Here.  But it as a one-off, or become a member to access all my premium lessons.

Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls – Another G-whiz song, and a campfire favorite.

Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town – Pearl Jam – Yet another G-whiz song. Easier to play than it is to say!

All I Want is You – U2 – G-whiz, another one?! You could spend your whole career playing guitar in the key of G and never get bored….

Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day – Once my Green-Day-obsessed students learn Good Riddance, they often graduate to this song. All the chords are easy except for the B chord, which I have them play as a power chord at the 7th fret, 6th and 5th strings. They usually have to slow down for that one chord, but it’s a small price to pay for being able to rock like Billy Joe Armstrong!

Building a Mystery (live acoustic version) – Sarah McLachlan – The guitar part is kind of complicated, with little embellishments at every turn, but they’re all nice and ergonomic–no big stretches or difficult picking.

Cannonball – Damien Rice – One of my recent discoveries, Cannonball is a great two-guitar song, with a G-whiz rhythm guitar part and an easy-but-hard-sounding lead riff.

Over the Hills and Far Away – Led Zeppelin – This is a challenging song for a beginning or intermediate guitarist–it’s fast and furious the whole way through–but Jimmy Page divides the work between the left and right hands through liberal use of hammer-ons and pull-offs. I learned this song in high school, and got by for the next ten years having terrible right hand technique–I just hammered-on and pulled-off every note that was too fast to pick. Just think of what you can do if you learn this song AND practice scales every once in a while!

Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin – I’ll never forget my buddy Paul McCann telling me “You gotta hear this song by this band Led Zeppelin! It’s like eight minutes long and it starts off all slow and then it starts rockin’ and I think it’s about suicide!” Since then, I’ve heard Stairway to Heaven approximately 7 gazillion times, and I still like playing it. The intro/verse progression is lovely, and it’s easy to fret and pick.

I hope you have fun with these Gifts From the Guitar Gods. What’s that? You were hoping for a ’58 Gibson Les Paul? Sheesh….

 

Music Theory! Wheeee!

I’m sure there are people out there who enjoy reading about music theory. I’m sure there are also people out there who like to watch their fingernails grow. I’m going to take a wild guess and assume you fall into neither category.

I mostly taught myself to play guitar, and didn’t pick up much music theory until I started teaching about three years ago. It’s not that I resisted learning it–it’s just that it was never presented to me in the proper way, so of course it was confusing and boring. Articles in my guitar magazines were either too simple or way over my head, and my high school friends who I jammed with were as clueless as I was.

Then a few years ago, I discovered Bruce Emery’s books. These books have taught me so much about both teaching and playing. They present theory and technique in a clear, logical manner, but more importantly, they make me laugh. I have a hard time paying attention to anything if it isn’t making me laugh every two minutes. These books are so entertaining, they’ve achieved the highest honor a work of literature can receive in the Hampton household–a place on the back of the toilet.