Rock & Roll 101

April 14th, 2025

We chatted for the lesson today.

April 7th, 2025

We visited today during Joss's lesson.

March 31st, 2025

We worked through trying to find some melodies again today - specifically Mary Had a Little Lamb and Row Row Row Your Boat.

I suggested he try to learn those melodies this week, and number each note to help him memorize the intervals between notes on the first scale we learned (3/3/4/4/3/3)

March 24th, 2025

Joss is not feeling great today so cancelled.

March 17th, 2025

We worked on the intro of James Bay, Let It Go.

March 10th, 2025

We just "shot-the-shit" today in lesson time.

March 3rd, 2025

We continued working on leads, and reviewed some scales, and talked about how to make ABAC, ABAB, etc patterns,

Also reviewed where C, D, E, and G are on the G string for finding a scale position.

Did some leads in the key of G and key of D.

Talked about bending and vibrato.

February 24th, 2025

Not coming today.

February 10th, 2025

Joss is still in Portugal.

February 3rd, 2025

Joss is in Portugal today.

January 27th, 2025

Today Joss and I learned the next pentatonic scale, and just wasted time chatting.

January 20th, 2025

Joss wanted to learn the solo in Fix You, which turned out to be pretty easy. We then learned to play it with D chords, and then also with C chords.

January 13th, 2025

January 6th, 2025

We spent the lesson continuing what we've worked on in the past few weeks: finding the 1 in a song, and figuring out what key it is.

We also talked a bit about scales as numbers, to work out some melodies.

December 30th, 2024

We went over some melodies trying to find one, and then worked on the guitar picking pattern for Every Breath You Take.

December 23rd, 2024

Joss and I worked through trying to find the "doh" note in a few different song. We then played little solo ideas over those songs in that key for a bit before moving on to another one.

December 16th, 2024

Joss didn't have it in his calendar to come today.

December 9th, 2024

December 2nd, 2024

Here's the guitar thingy-
https://beginnerguitarhq.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Majorpent-1024x640.png

November 25th, 2024

We continued with pursuing the lead thing - I showed him a new shape, that's on the "other side" of the home row. This video covers some of the details we spoke about today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkkyUIDSSEo

November 18th, 2024

We continued working on the pentatonic scale, and Joss did some soloing over it. I explained how the two half steps of 4 and 7 are added to the 5 notes of the pentatonic scale to make a full 7 notes.
We played around in the keys of E minor and G, to start, then down to C, and later to D. I suggested he focus on only learning the 4 and 7 up at the top of the scale, and save the lower 4 and 7 until he's comfortable with the top ones.

November 4th, 2024

Joss brought his amp in to show me - very nice!

We learned the first shape of the pentatonic scale - I describe it as 3,3,4,4,3,3 - to describe the frets that are shaped on the neck.

He played some melody ideas along with me (which I played chords). We first played in G, where the G string is on the 12th fret. We then did D, C, and E on the 7th, 5th, and 9th frets respectively.

I showed him where the blues note is for the pentatonic scale, and how to bend it.

January 5th, 2022

December 21st, 2021

Tonight Joss has a birthday party for Findley!

December 14th, 2021

Joss came with a song he wanted me to show him how to play by Lewis Capaldi, Before You Go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpmawc8gAjY

We talked through how to play it with conservation of finger movement - playing the D with the pinky helps, so the first finger is free to move through the bass notes.

We then talked about scales, and he showed me the G scale. We added the C this week, and then we talked some more about how to follow a melody by thinking of the numbers of the scale.

For Shivers, one can play the numbers of the melody at the same time as they do the rhythm of the guitar part, which makes for a really neat sound.

December 7th, 2021

Joss and I went through the songs for Sunday, and worked out chords that he wasn't sure about, etc. It's mostly Christmas Carols which are really hard to play. I recommended he take the easy-way and not play the verses of O Holy Night, since the chord changes are weird and fast.

November 30th, 2021

Joss has a headache and won't be able to come tonight,.

November 23rd, 2021

November 16th, 2021

Joss has a sore back tonight - we're going to try tomorrow night instead.

November 9th, 2021

We didn't do much in the way of guitar tonight, but enjoyed some great chats!

November 2nd, 2021

October 26th, 2021

We worked on some finger picking of Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvLT_J9Uv4o

October 19th, 2021

Josh has written an awesome new song called geppetto. He played it through for me and then I made a few suggestions about changing up his Melody habits, and perhaps changing the key for the chorus. We talked about how to go from the five chord to the one chord by adding a seventh. This is a good way to get back and forth between the chorus and the verse. When you're in g to start, you can play an e7 to get to a. Then you can play a d7 to get back to g.

October 12th, 2021

My back is killing me, so I cancelled lessons today. :(

October 5th, 2021

We looked at a couple of songs from the kids folder in my Google Drive. Down by the Bay and Hallelujah have melodies and chords written together, and it might help to use them.

We also talked about the difference with major and minor chords (having three or two halfsteps between the first and third notes).

September 28th, 2021

Josh and I played guitars together a bit, but it was more jamming and fooling around than a music lesson. :)

We pulled down the electric guitar for a bit.

September 21st, 2021

Joss was away to his favourite place Tuesday night.

September 14th, 2021

Joss has been working on a song by Ed Sheeran in C, and we talked about other ways to play it (with inversions), so that the whole hand doesn't move around so much.

I also suggested that he place his left hand with the pinky on C, and not use the same finger for each note in the left hand, but the pinky on C, the middle on E, the pointing on F and the thumb on G.

He can take out the note in the right hand which he is playing in the left hand to open up the sound of the chord a bit.

September 7th, 2021

Jess brought his new keyboard and we looked at the various functions together, and then moved to working through Hallelujah

This week try to focus on learning the note names - that will help a lot in playing through the songs.

August 24th, 2021

Continuing with piano, we reviewed arpegios (rotating through the notes), inversions (turning chords over), and the major and minor chords. We talked about making a major into a minor by lowerng the third, and vice versa.

We played through Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah again as well.

August 17th, 2021

Joss went to piano today, and we learned the doghouse/ grandma's house. The notes go from A to G, left to right.

We played Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah in C, and skipping the D major and E major until later on.

We introduced inversions, and arpeggios.

August 10th, 2021

We reviewed the run in Child of Love, and talked about how to play that with hammer ons and pull offs.

We also looked at Foot Fighters, Times Like These,
https://youtu.be/rhzmNRtIp8k

which has a guitar part in D, that uses a hammer on of the G string to A and then again on the E string, g to a.

August 3rd, 2021

Joss and Sandi went through Sunday's songs together. We worked out some of the harder parts, and I showed him the B/E and A/E chords high on the neck.

July 27th, 2021

We continued recording today, adding some shaker, Oohs and Ahs (which Joss sang wonderfully! haha), harmony in the bridge, piano, woods sound effects, etc. etc.

It sounds pretty cool!

July 13th, 2021

We recorded Joss' song tonight! Lots of fun.

July 6th, 2021

Today Joss brought a song he wrote this morning, and we talked about patterns, repeating them to make catchy and slightly predictable melodies.

We also talked about alternate chords to use to keep things just a little off balance for the listener.

June 29th, 2021

In Joss' lesson today, we talked about finger picking some, which strings have the bass note (for the thumb) on each chord.

C: A string
D: D string
A: A string
E: E string
G: E string
etc.

We did some jamming in D too.

June 22nd, 2021

Jess and I worked through some fingering of melodies while playing chords. In the process. We started with How's It Gonna Be, and I showed him how the melody at the beginning is really just a D chord, with the Dsus4 and Dsus2 in it. The harder part is when you move to the G chord and you have to change how you play the G in order to have the G string sound while you play the melody part.

We then moved to Shallow by Lady Gaga, and we talked about strategy or learning musical vocabulary that you can make use of while playing the various chords - rather than starting with learning a song by tab. Then you have those "words and phrases" at your disposal when you play any song.

March 30th, 2021

I forgot to take notes after Joss' lesson.

We talked about minor scales, and how they use the same position on the neck as a major scale, EXCEPT they use "6" as the root tone.

This is for a type of minor called a relative minor. We didn't get into harmonic minors yet.

March 23rd, 2021

Joss and his brother both did lessons today, going to 8 pm. His brother received bass lessons, and we talked about the numeric system of playing within a key.

In Joss' lesson, we started out with talking about chords for a song he wrote, and then reviewing how to find the scale for various keys - by locating the "tonic," or root tone of the key on the G string.

March 16th, 2021

We reviewed some of the things we worked on last week like finding the key we're in, I spoke about the app I use which shows the note being sung/played to help find the key of a song.

We also spoke of using one scale for a whole song, even if the keys change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FsrPEUt2Dg

March 9th, 2021

Joss and I worked through how to figure out where to play the "home-row" pentatonic scale in any key.

It works by finding the key on the 'G' string. If the song is in the key of C, for example, then use any existing knowledge of where notes are on the neck to try to find that same note on a fret of the G string. The 'double chess move,' or the 'chess move' (the knight's move) is how to find the octave and the fifth respectively.

March 2nd, 2021

I forgot to take notes after our lesson on Tuesday night.

We moved lesson to 8 - it's great we can be back in person with lessons, zoom is hard.

The main part of our lesson was talking about scales, specifically the first scale I teach - the pentatonic - where we focus on the "home row," orienting it on the 12th fret, and play notes on (starting on the high e string) 12, 10, then b string 12 10, g string, 12 9, d string 12 9, a string 12 10, a string 12 10. A quick way I describe this is to think of them notes in the scale in terms of the number of frets there are on the string, so 3-3,4-4,3-3.

This scale can be played over the key of E in blues, or the key of G (to which the relative minor is E minor).

We jammed a bit like that, then I showed him the "blues note" which makes a pentatonic scale into a blues scale. This is the b string on the 11th fret.

We also talked a bit about moving around the circle of fifths.

February 23rd, 2021

I missed you tonight bud! If you're not going to be able to make it, send me a note so I'm not waiting around. :)

Have a great week!

February 16th, 2021

We continued with the circle of fifths today, and focused specifically with the relationships between the chords. The fourths are to the right of the main key chord, the fifths to the left, around the circle.

The relative minors are directly below the main key chord.

We can move the E chord up to anywhere on the fretboard, and add the first finger as a temporary capo. Then the relationship between the E shapes and A shape chords are transferred to the new place on the fret. So for example, the third fret E shape is now a G, so it's "fourth," the C is found by playing the E's fourth shape, the A. etc.

Complicated, but it starts to really open up the fret board once it becomes second nature.