September 1, 2023

The mice in the basement have been working furiously recently and I am happy to announce that we have upgraded the features in a couple membership levels. The Gold Membership now includes all electric lessons. These were originally part of our separate site Totally Electric Guitars and most created by Max Rich. There are over 350 of them and more will be on the way soon.

The Silver Membership now includes access to our Student Review Portal, which was one of our exclusive features going back to our origins in 2009. There are currently over 400 uploads and teacher reviews. You can search them by song or username. There is a ton of useful info there. I hope our Silver Members will start taking advantage of this great tool and post some works in progress for the faculty to review.

We added some new packs and upgraded an existing one. The new ones include Female Artists Volume 2, Contemporary Female Artists, Silver Screen Songs and The San Francisco Scene. We then upgraded Female Singer-Songwriters to include 15 lessons. All these new ones are on sale this week for $10 off the regular price. Of course, all these lessons are included in the Silver Membership as well.

Today’s tip is like something I did a while ago, comparing four different modes by improvising up and down the G string while keeping Ds alternating in the bass. The modes involved were Aeolian (Minor), Dorian, Mixolydian and Ionian (Major), with even a hint of Phrygian.

The noodling that popped up included a tune that was requested as a lesson this week, a somewhat obscure jazzy-progressive masterpiece from 1970 that will be a lesson next week, ending with an improv in A Minor.

I hope to be back next week but guitar camp events are starting and I can’t be sure.

Neil