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!

NOTE: CLICK ON THE HIGHLIGHTED TEXT BELOW, NOT THE IMAGES ABOVE!

Chord Blocks 12 per page Twelve blank chord blocks. There's plenty of space for the chord name, alternate fingerings, analysis, instruction, etc. 45.4 KB
Chord Blocks Small Twenty Chord blocks. A little more compact, but there's still plenty of room for names, fingerings, etc. 69.6 KB
Staff 8 staves Eight staves of well-spaced staff. This will print out almost identically to the Archives LL8S paper (see below). With eight staves per page, there's plenty of room for stems up, stems down, title, instructions, etc. 102 KB
Staff and TAB for four strings Staff and TAB for four-stringed instruments like bass, mandolin, etc. Four systems per page. 17.9 KB
Staff and TAB for six strings Staff and TAB for six-stringed instruments, four systems per page. 21.6 KB
TAB for four strings TAB for four strings. Eight staves per page. 21.3 KB
TAB for six strings TAB for six strings. Eight staves per page. 20.7 KB

Unfortunately, D'Addario/Archives no longer sells their LL8S manuscript paper. I used this paper for decades, but I guess it wasn't popular enough. But hope springs eternal! In January 2024, I hope to have a few reams of similar paper printed up. I also expect to print up the blank chord boxes and tab paper that you see above, all on heavy 24 lb. stock with the same properties as the Archives paper: It will take pencil and ink extremely well (no pencil smudging, no ink blotting), hold up to multiple erasures, have a soft off-white wheat color, and the texture will be creamy-smooth with a nice tooth for pencil work. It will also have a very neutral pH so that the paper will not discolor or become brittle with age. 

 

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.

23 Scales over an A7 chord!