ION INDIE MAGAZINE March 2015, Volume 10 | Page 132

"Downtown Tommy Guitar Lesson #1"
Photo credit: Jen Pezzo

Hi everyone! This month I would like to begin sharing some helpful
pointers with our readers who play guitar. There is infinitely more
information available now than when I began 35 years ago, and if
your goal is to be a great musician, YouTube is filled with
instructional material to suit every taste. I had good guitar
teachers and bad ones, some of whom just wanted my money
while stringing me along with Mel Bay books and "Mary Had A
Little Lamb". I play Progressive Metal guitar, but love Blues and
anything Jimi Hendrix, and wove all of that together to become an
award-winning guitarist and live performer.

My suggestion is this: Play along with the radio, mp3, computer or
whichever medium is available to you, and start to play along
using basic major (do, re, mi) scales on one string, up and down
the length of the guitar neck, one at a time. This will help you
improvise over chord changes, which is the essence of being a fine musician. If you never learn to improvise
tasteful, concise musical statements that sound as good slow as they do fast, you are land-locked into
just playing a lick here and there you learned by playing tabs or by ear. I meet a lot of players who can play
the intro to "Crazy Train" by Ozzy, who couldn't do the rest of the song, or only the chord progression. Then
there are those who can play tabs or sheet music note for note, but cannot improvise over a simple chord
change. It is alright if you just want to plunk around on guitar as a hobby, but serious musicians need to have
solid skills improvising. Try that exercise on each string, E-A-D-G-B-E, playing a chromatic scale up and down
the guitar neck one note at a time, paying attention to melody and harmony.