Here are some links and lists that might help your guitar playing.
My Writing
The Essential Beatles
Blank Staff, TAB and Chord Blocks
Other Instructors
While I was Associate Editor at Guitar One magazine, I published numerous articles and columns on playing the guitar. Any issue of Guitar One published between the summer of 2000 and the final issue in the summer of 2007 will have a significant amount of my writing in it. Contributions included performance notes on how to play the transcriptions of songs found in every issue, "Strum It" arrangements of songs especially suited to acoustic guitar and voice, the "Acoustic Cafe" column which addressed the techniques common to acoustic guitar in greater depth, and occasional full-length articles. Unfortunately, all this writing has no web presence at the moment. I am looking forward to uploading all this text in the near future. Stay tuned.
The Beatles remain a high standard for guitar music. If you'd like every recording they released to the public as a band, you can find it on these albums:
Please Please Me (March 1963)
With the Beatles (November 1963)
A Hard Day's Night (June 1964)
Beatles For Sale (December 1964)
Help! (August 1965)
Rubber Soul (December 1965)
Revolver (August 1966)
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1966)
Magical Mystery Tour (November 1967)
The Beatles (a.k.a. the White Album) (November 1968)
Yellow Submarine (January 1969)
Abbey Road (September 1969)
Let It Be (May 1970)
Past Masters, Vol. One (singles from 1963-65)
Past Masters Vol. Two (singles from 1965-70)
I would also highly recommend the Beatles "Anthology" series of albums for brilliant versions of their songs as they were working them into their final forms. Many of these "in-progress" mixes show off the songs with just acoustic guitar and voice, and also show how amazingly flexible they were as musicians and songwriters. For example, George Harrison recorded a demo of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" in D minor, capoed up five frets to G minor. Then, a month later, the full band recorded it in A minor, played in open position on guitar - a completely different set of chord shapes!
For good guitar riffs, consider:
Day Tripper
Back In The USSR
Birthday
Come Together
Dig A Pony
I Feel Fine
I Want You (She's So Heavy)
Lady Madonna
Nowhere Man (great solo AND a great chord progression)
Revolution
While My Guitar Gently Weeps (great solo AND a great chord progression)
For great chord progressions, try:
For No One
Girl
Here, There and Everywhere
I Want To Hold Your Hand
I'm Only Sleeping
If I Fell
Let It Be
Michelle
Penny Lane
She's Leaving Home
Strawberry Fields Forever
Things We Said Today
We Can Work It Out
Yesterday
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Some VERY challenging guitar:
Blackbird
Here Comes the Sun
Norwegian Wood
Something
Taxman
All My Lovin' (the strum!)
Other Instructors
Graham Tichy plays everything from jazz standards to Roots rockabilly to English Invasion pop. And he's a fine instructor, too! Check out his web site:
www.GrahamTichy.com
Blank Music Paper, TAB, Chord Blocks, etc.
Here is a collection of PDF files you can click on and print to create your own blank staff paper, blank TAB, blank chord blocks, etc. before I created these files, I scoured the web to see what was available. I found plenty of free downloads, but few that I found useful. I won't enumerate the problems solved in these files; you just go ahead and enjoy them. They all fit on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet of paper. NOTE: Click on the highlighted text below the images, not the images themselves!
Chord blocks 20 per page
Chord blocks 12 per page
Staff paper - 8 staves
Staff and TAB - six strings, four systems
Staff and TAB - four strings, four systems
TAB for four strings
TAB for six strings
NOTE: CLICK ON THE HIGHLIGHTED TEXT BELOW, NOT THE IMAGES ABOVE!
If you're really serious about writing out music on good quality paper, get a few packs of D'Addario's Archives music manuscript paper. (Click on the previous text to view it; it'll open in a new page.) This is the paper I've been using for decades now, specifically Item LL8S, the looseleaf paper with 8 staves. I use it whenever I want to write out a really nice chart, or when I'm preparing manuscripts for publication. Many of you have seen me grab a sheet of this and write out a chart in standard notation, or grab a ruler and a UniBall pen to add a line for TAB notation. The paper takes pencil and ink extremely well (no pencil smudging, no ink blotting), it holds up to multiple erasures, it has a really nice weight, and the texture is creamy-smooth with a nice tooth for pencil work. It also has a very neutral pH so that the paper will not discolor or become brittle with age. It's $5 for a pack of 50 sheets.
Whole Tone Scale Backing Tracks
The whole tone (WT) scale can be a tricky one to practice alone. It is SO ambiguous! If you have a basic looper-plus-drum-machine, you can certainly roll your own, but for expediency, you might want to check out these YouTube backing tracks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8bBdEG0iUc&t=178s A straight-eight, half-time groove at 68 bpm. It uses the C# WT scale with the pitch A as the "tonic." Kind of a Police groove. The first twenty seconds are filled with the creator playing over the track, then you get the click count-in and 4 1/2 minutes of groovy WT ambiguosity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kqT6Muvso Another straight-eight groove, quasi-half-time at 131 bpm. It also uses the C# WT scale with the pitch G as the "tonic." A bit eerie, like a Dream Theater interlude. No creator noodling, no count-in, just 10 minutes of alien contemplation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l-PAe5DIFc Yet another straight-eight groove, a rockin' boogaloo beat at 144 bpm. This uses the C WT scale on a variety of chords, interspersed with a non-WT E major chord, as follows:
||: D9(no5)|%|D7(no5)|% :||(4x)
||: E major |%|A#+ |%:|| (8x)
This form repeats a few times, giving you almost 7 minutes of WT workout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpM2b-7Ff20 Here's a swing-eighths groove (although not quite swingin' in the traditional sense) at 126 bpm, using a C(#5/b5) harmony. Four minutes of C WT.
REMEMBER THAT YOUTUBE AUDIO CAN BE SLOWED DOWN OR SPED UP FOR A WIDER RANGE OF TEMPI! CLICK ON SETTINGS, THEN PLAYBACK SPEED. ADJUST TO TASTE.