Work continues on the funky original tunes!  I’ve got one with funny, freaky vocals and two instrumentals.  I have lyrics for these.  Maybe I’ll get around to recording them eventually!  Enjoy!

I’ve been working on some original songs.  I spent some time last year covering a bunch of old funky tunes.  One of my goals with this project was to learn about songwriting, arranging, recording & production by having to completely rebuild these great tunes, learning & playing all the parts.

It was also a great way to prime my creativity to write some funky originals of my own!  Enjoy!

One of the reasons I play guitar is that I was inspired by watching the Monkees TV show.  I can still remember being 7 years old, tuning into those reruns & thinking it would be the greatest thing in the world to live in a beach house with bandmates, play music & have zany adventures every day.

I’ve been having fun doing covers of old pop tunes.  Here are a couple of them!

I got a Boss Katana 50W amp!  I made some demos of the various tones, settings, effects.  All the way from clean jazz.

To funky blues.

To crunch tone rock.

Here’s the whole playlist.  Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLlnl5iWw43icBvpfQQUpzkOKfLncd-bL

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!

These are the first two demos of a new project I’m working on.  The idea is to play old jazz standards in a blues trio format: Strat, bass & drums.  I might even sing a few!  For now, these first two Duke Ellington tunes are instrumentals.  Enjoy!

Here’s a short lesson on sequencing pentatonic minor in 3s to use as a fast blues lick.

I have in depth GT tutorials on playing this pattern across the fretboard in all 5 pentatonic boxes.

Major pentatonic
https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=722

Minor pentatonic
https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=185

Enjoy!  Play more guitar!

Melancholy melody & atmospheric texture.  And zany video effects.  And most importantly, robots.