This is a four tune album of guitar instrumentals. There’s one for each astronomical equinox and solstice.

The 32 piano sonatas of the master craftsman are an endless source of enjoyment & inspiration for me. I listen through the cycle at least once every year. This year I decided to do more than listen, study & learn. I arranged & recorded 3 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas for Stratocasters, bass & drums.

Piano Sonata 1 in F minor, Piano Sonata 2 in A major & Piano Sonata 14 in C# minor.

I recently finished updating some of my favorite older tutorials that cover bridging the gap between playing rhythm and lead playing. Here’s a play along excerpt from one of the tutorials.

This is something that I’ve seen many students struggle with: making the transition from strumming chords to playing licks. This is because they require distinctly different physical techniques. Rhythm guitar techniques require relatively large size motions, strumming chords and riffs. But lead guitar techniques require much smaller size, precise motions in order to play a series of single notes that make up a lead lick or fill.

With that in mind I developed a series of exercises that combine both rhythm and lead techniques. You alternate between them, playing a simple chord or rhythm part for a measure or 2, then you switch to a lead fill idea for the next measure or 2. I started with very simple exampes & then gradually increased the difficulty.

I started very simple with one chord for the rhythm part and 4 quarter notes for a fill part.

E Blues Rhythm and Lead 1

The next one turns it up a notch by expanding the single chord to 3 chords to form a whole 12 bar blues and the licks are bumped up to 1/8th notes!

E Blues Rhythm and Lead 2

The 3rd tutorial in the series moves the idea to a fretted key. So it’s still a 3 chord 12 bar blues, but using all barred chords, while the lead fills are expanded to playing all the pentatonic boxes.

G Blues Rhythm and Lead 3

The 4th tutorial is a classic rock move using diads for the riffs and the fills!

B Blues Rhythm and Lead 4

The final 2 tutorials really ramp up the ideas to include fun and classic blues riffs and fills.

C Blues Rhythm and Lead 5

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1849

G Blues Rhythm and Lead 6

Enjoy learning and playing some rhythm and lead guitar skills!

My “Athena” Symphony 5 in G# Minor is now available on CDBaby, iTunes & Spotify.  It’s a 4 movement traditionally tonal symphonic work rendered with virtual orchestral software.

CDBaby

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/christopherschlegel12

iTunes

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/athena-symphony-5-in-g-sharp-minor/id1261405947

Spotify

Enjoy!

I’ve been working on updating this series of GT tutorials on spicing up blues licks.  The central idea is to use the minor pentatonic boxes we know and love as guitarists, but to target chord tones.  This means that you can use those familiar pentatonic boxes as a visual reference, but to add spice by targeting major chord tones from the dominant seventh chords in the standard 12 bar blues changes.

This works well because it’s one of the reasons “blues” sounds like it does: the use of minor notes in a primarily major harmonic context.  So, in order to make our blues sound better, we should incorporate major notes into the minor scales when we play melodic lines!

Notice that if you play the major third of the A major chord along with the A minor pentatonic scale, then you immediately get an distinctly “bluesy” sound.

GT recently made some of the lessons in this first tutorial free to view!

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=217

Here’s a demo of the play along!  Enjoy!

2017 is the year of the robot.  Or at least my robot album.  I’ve already posted some of my robot songs.  I’ll repost them as I get ready to release the album.  For now, here’s a new video of my robot at the discotheque.  Enjoy!

My newest GT tutorial covers four different ways to approach a fundamental jazz guitar technique, a turnaround with a walking bass line.

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=2148

I also published a brief lesson on my YouTube channel covering a fundamental blues lick.

I cover that lick and it’s many applications in more depth on GT.

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=1614

Enjoy!

Symphony 4 in F Major “America” is now available on iTunes.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/america-symphony-4-in-f-major/id1091577305

And, of course, CDBaby!

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/christopherschlegel7

Last year I played a lot of classical guitar. My primary goal was to reshoot about 100 of my classical guitar curriculum video lessons for GuitarTricks.com. These were lessons I did 5-10 years ago, but needed to be upgraded to HD vid, better audio, general production specs.

So, a lot of my studio time in 2015 was spent playing, rehearsing, filming, recording, editing classical guitar music! While my focus & chops were up to the task, I worked on the parallel, secondary goal of recording some of these pieces to release on an album.

Ten pieces made the cut. And this is the resultant album. Enjoy!

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/christopherschlegel6