Each lesson contains the following sections:
• INFO: The Info page gives you valuable, additional information
on each lesson (this is the information shown below).
• PLAY ALONG: The Play Along feature gives you background
tracks to practice with.
• TAB/NOTATION: A complete Tab/Notation section is provided
for each lesson.
• HANDS: A Hands section provides actual video or a Flash
animation of the Hand movement required for the lesson.
• MAIN TUTORIAL: The Main Turorial of the lesson allows
you to step through each fingering of the lesson one at a time.
PLAYING MELODIES AS PART OF A CHORD
I once asked a seasoned sax player about soloing over chord changes. He always had great ideas and seemed to weave his improvised melody lines in and out of the chord changes with such mastery that I just had to know what he was thinking while he played and what advice he had for a young player.
His reply seemed a little curt at the time but it has proven to be a great guide for me in the long-run. Here's what he said, "If you're playing the chord changes of the song on your guitar then almost all the notes you'll want to use are already under your fingers..." that seemed so obvious, yet I had overlooked the simple genius of his thinking.
In this lesson, you'll see that the melodic line is most often a note that belongs to the chord at that point in the song. When you learn to play this one, you'll have guitarists drooling over your prowess at playing chords AND melody at the same time when really all you're doing is picking out and emphasizing those chord tones that make up the melody!
PLAYING THE "BLUE" NOTES
Are we talking blues here? No, it's really just a bad pun. In the tutorial itself, the notes with a blue background are the notes that make up the melody. Be sure to emphasize them as you play. I've notated the right hand with pick only but if you've got some experience at finger-picking or classic guitar, you'll find it a little more comfortable to use that right-hand technique for this. If you decide to use the pick, you'll need to learn to blunt strings selectively. This is explained in the TIPS screen of the tutorial.
