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diatonic harmony, essential, improvisation, modes, pentatonic, pentatonic scales, playing, practice, practice tips, scales, song, songwriting, steve vai, structure, Students, technique - January 17, 2023

The Pentatonic Scale

The pentatonic scale is a five-note scale that is commonly used in guitar playing, particularly in rock and blues music. The scale is made up of the root, second, third, fifth, and sixth notes of a major or minor scale. One of the most popular and widely used pentatonic scales for guitar playing is the minor pentatonic scale. This scale is made up of the root, minor third, fourth, fifth, and minor seventh notes of a natural minor scale. The minor pentatonic scale is often used in blues and rock music, and is a great scale for soloing and...

My 9 Essential Guitar Practice Tips

Learning the guitar is just like learning to swim, you make time and practice
otherwise you may drown. The questions I get most are 'how long should I practice for, and what do I practice? These 2 questions come up in every conversation that I have with new students about learning the guitar.

That answer is really dependent upon what sort of guitar player you would like to
become. If you just want to play a few chords, then you may not want to put in the thousands of hours, it would take to master the guitar.

Regardless of the type of player, we all need structure in our practicing, and we need to discipline ourselves to make it happen on a daily basis.

Below are my 9 essential tips for creating a better guitar practicing routine.

Overcoming A Negative Thought Bias

By consciously choosing which thoughts to hold onto, and which to get rid of, puts us in a unique position of ultimate power. You could walk through this life acting as if you already are, and know that just by doing so you are that...

Max Hart in The School of Rock

This last weekend I took my family to see the theatre production of the "School of Rock" (SOR), now playing at Capitol Theatre in Sydney.

As you may already have been aware, one of our best students, Max Hart is one of three actors playing the role of lead Guitarist Zack Mooneyham.

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June 4, 2019

Teaching the Teacher

One of our students Campbell (pictured above), started taking lessons with us at Alien Guitar Secrets mid last year. In that time, Campbell has improved his guitar playing exponentially. Just before we broke for the Easter holidays, I was able to teach Campbell how to construct chords (triads) from the Diatonic Modes of the Major Scale. Well, after 2 weeks of no practice I got to see just how much sank in from our previous lesson. Not being what I would call shy, Campbell grabbed the whiteboard markers in hand and took the opportunity to teach me (the teacher) what...

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