Welcome to Guitar Player magazine - The complete acoustic and electric guitar package

 “Notice how Wes locks in with the rhythm section during his solo, especially during the second half? How about those quick, stuttering octaves? And that chord solo—yow! Beginning with bluesy melodic phrases and voicings, the chordal ...

“Flames used to shoot out of my guitar,” says Brad Gillis. Yes, he’s speaking literally. “I found a finger-mounted flash pot at this magic shop in Seattle back in the ’80s, and I attached it to the back of my headstock. At Night Ranger ...

In the late 1960s, rock began to evolve from short pop songs best suited to the lo-fi bandwidth of AM radio and cheesy sounding 45s to higher-fidelity, stereo-ready FM, long-playing albums (a.k.a. LP’s), and increasingly powerful home ...

It never gets boring hearing Louisiana slide genius Sonny Landreth play slide notes and fretted pitches simultaneously. (This works because when Landreth frets a string behind the slide, it drops beneath the slide and rings unimpeded ...

Chord dictionaries are helpful, but they’re certainly no miracle cure for stale voicings and tired chords. If you want to actually learn how to use new grips, you may need a deeper book, such as Mel Bay’s new expanded edition of ...

“Chances are,” wrote the late, great Howard Roberts in the September ’79 GP, “you’ve spent much more time running through scales than practicing interval skips, and, consequently, stepwise lines on adjacent strings predominate ...

How do you get over one million hits on YouTube? Joe Cefalu surpassed that mark by posting a great video lesson on how to break out of the common pent- atonic scale box that confines so many rock and blues players.

“Wild Thing,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie,” are among hundreds of famous songs that have employed the workhorse chord progression known as the I-IV-V. In this context, each Roman numeral conveys a chord’s relationship with a ...

It’s a testament to the monumental influence of “Purple Haze” and other landmark Jimi Hendrix tunes that rock guitarists are more likely to refer to the grip in the grid to the right as the “Hendrix chord” than by its proper name, E7#9. ...

As you can see in Ex. 1, the notes A, C, and E—the chord tones that spell an Am triad—can be arranged in myriad ways. One challenge guitarists face is that there are typically several ways to finger the same chord or riff. For instance, ...