This is a backing track in E minor, with drums, strings and bass.
The track has strings, drums and bass guitar. The guitar fills quite a low register, so to make room for improvisation, I placed the strings quite high up.
The bass guitar is playing a single E note, with the strings filling out the e minor harmony, with violins I & II playing octaves, moving between the E and D note, to create an E minor 7 feel:
This is a backing track in d minor, with drums, strings and clean guitar. The backing comes from my original piece, Love In The Rain
You can download this backing track here.
Here are the two (slightly) different parts for the clean guitar:
Guitar Pro is a great way to create professional and clean looking guitar tabs, but sometimes it has some annoying defaults.
One such default is the stem lines that Guitar Pro insists on showing:
To remove these, do the following:
The following is a review by one of my readers, Krisztian Andeo. You can check him out on Instagram here
Hi Sam, Would like to send some feedback to you if I may. I purchased your book and another one from Hungary half a year ago. The other book’s title is (in English): Music, as the Instrument of Happiness The subtitle is: Get from the bathroom to the stage!
One of my readers recently wrote:
Hey Sam,
Thanks for the message! I’ve had a skim read so far - looks like some great
advice in there!
I wondered what your opinion is on guitarists learning to read conventional
notation - particularly the note pitches rather than just rhythms alongside
a TAB? Classical and jazz guitarists will tell you it’s a necessity,
whereas rock, pop and other genres might say it’s optional… To me it
seems that the reinforcement of note pitch to neck location that happens
when reading conventional music might benefit all guitarists (particularly
those that struggle with “learning the fretboard”) - would you agree?
Recently, a reader messaged me about how he can get his son to practice guitar more. He wrote:
“hoping to encourage my son who is 12 to practise more. I don’t think he is that excited by his music lessons, but would like to improve”
Here was my response:
Getting kids to practice is a tricky one. They’re usually at a level where they can’t do anything too exciting (although if his teacher got him playing to a simple backing track, that would probably be exciting).
When you start out creating music, as a guitar player, the drums are probably not the first thing on your mind. You’re thinking about writing a great riff, how to capture your guitar and get a great tone.
So when you’re at this beginning stage, having drums that exist is usually good enough. Going to an Apple Loop, or Logic Pro’s Drummer is usually where most people start off - even the built in drums in Logic Pro are great for getting started.
The major scale is the most important scale in music theory, and today we will have a brief look at how to play it on guitar.
The major scale has seven notes, which we label 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
The first note, note 1 is the root note. This is the note that we start from.
Root notes are sometimes referred to as the key.
The first step to getting more form your guitar practice time isn’t doing practice, but thinking about who you want to be as a guitarist.
Do you want to play rock guitar? Rhythm guitar? Lead guitar? Classical guitar?
Do you want to be able to compose or improvise? Read music? Or play songs from tab?
What genres do you want to play?
Do you want to play in a band?
If you’re a musician wanting to put your music on iTunes, Spotify, Tidal and Deezer (and the myriad other options), then you need a music aggregator. Let’s look at what they are, what your options are and which aggregator is suitable for you:
A music aggregator is a 3rd party company that will submit your music to all the different online stores and streaming services. There are well over 100 streaming services and stores, and your aggregator will:
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