A very common question from students is how we can tell which chords as "in key with" a particular scale. This came up today on /r/guitarlessons so I thought it might be worth a quick post.

Fill your boots -- my 400-page Slonimsky book for guitarists is now available as a free download. The scale book has had over 4000 downloads in just a few months, but I suspect this one will be a little more narrow in its appeal...

Ornette Coleman is revered as an important and prolific composer, perhaps the only one from the free jazz tradition who's so widely-acknowledged in this field. So why aren't there big books of the hundreds of tunes he's written over the decades? Who knows, but I did manage to find some transcriptions on the web and thought I'd collect them here as a service to the next person who goes hunting for them.

I've been practicing quartal voicings today and ended up knocking together a little tool to help me do so. It's a kind of "modal metronome" and I thought it might be worth sharing here.

Most guitar students do fine until they hit one particular topic that culls them like a dose of plague hitting a too-large population of water buffalo: modes. The word alone is enough to strike fear (or guilt) into the hearts of many players, even some who've been playing a long while.

We all think we know what it means for me to play, say, the D Natural Minor scale. The scale contains the notes D, E, F, G, A Bb and C, so if I play D Natural Minor then I play all and only those notes. Simple. Or is it?

Just wanted to pass on a quick recommendation of jazztrumpetlicks.com, a trumpet site by Greg "Sweets" London. Yes, I know, it's a trumpet site; well, we can learn from players of all instruments, and there are some very cool ideas here in "lick" form.

I always play with a thumbpick, and have for decades. I get asked about this a lot because it's extremely unusual for someone who doesn't do a lot of acoustic fingerpicking. I believe the thumbpick can be a very good choice for electric guitarists, and here I'm going to say why.

I see a lot of students asking how they can improve their playing, what they should be working on or which books to study. What many seem to forget is that we don't work the guitar; we play it, and we should just play with it sometimes.

I'm very pleased to report thtat since I made it freely available exactly a month ago, Scale and Arpeggio Resources has been downloaded 1046 times. If you don't already have your copy, get it here!