Author: Mark Wein
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War Stories, Ep. 1 – Learn Your Songs!
The old adage “Experience is the best teacher” is pretty accurate, although I’ll add one refinement to that which is that “someone else’s experience is also good too”. I tell my students all the time that they don’t need to repeat my mistakes. Benefit from my pain and embarrassment! One push I’ve been making the…
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Using Minor Pentatonic Scales for Dominant Chords in Blues
It’s another week of “classic” lessons as I wrap up my online summer classes. This is a favorite lesson of mine because it is one of the simplest ways for me to get students to sound better quickly with their pentatonic scales when they play blues or even over a static dominant chord such as…
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Gig Fatigue.
I just finished five nights in a row playing at the Orange County fair on Sunday night and I’m still in something a fog. I woke up this morning (Tuesday) and realized that I didn’t even write my blog for the week. I figured this week I’d share some observations and lessons learned from the…
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Harmonized Lines for Blues Guitar
I am in gig and school meltdown this week so I decided that instead of rushing through a new lesson I would bring back a classic for you. This is one of the videos that I made for the Truefire.com “Next Top Guitar Instructor” contest a few years ago, and in the lesson, I am…
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How I learn songs REALLY FAST!
This week the cover band that I play in is doing five nights in a row at the Orange County Fair (more info here although this is just for the first of the five dates) and as we usually try to do when we play back to back nights in the same venue we attempt…
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Playing in the Pocket – Static Lick Ideas
This lesson is about my favorite kind of repeating licks. I realized that I have a few good examples of this in my own recorded repertoire so I used bits from the last rock album that I did with the band Felt back in 2002. Apologies in advance for the editing on this one. My…
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I’m a terrible guitar shopper.
WARNING – LOTS OF GUITAR PORN AHEAD! I own several nice guitars. Pretty much every one of them has a story that starts out “I was actually shopping for X, but I ended up with this Y guitar”. The reason for this is that I sometimes have a preconceived notion of what I want but once I…
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Playing in the Pocket with Chuck Berry and T-Bone Walker
This week we are continuing to work on playing single note ideas and solo bits in time by working with a few classic blues and rock and roll licks that we all play to death but don’t always play in time. Click here for the PDF: Playing in the Pocket with Chuck Berry and T-Bone Walker…
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Where does my sound come from?
This is a big topic and one that I am going to revisit occasionally in this blog. Today we are starting with the brain. I already hear many of you thinking “what does the brain have to do with guitar tone?” and the reality is that it has EVERYTHING to do with it. The brain…
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Playing in the Pocket with Yngwie!
This is the first in a series of lessons where we work on playing single note lines in time. One of the most common issues that I run into with students who have played for a while before coming to me is that they generally don’t have a concrete concept of how time in music…