Blues Guitar Lesson – Major and Minor Pentatonics

In this lesson I will be introducing you to a concept that has a surprising lack of coverage on YouTube. A lot of blues players pride themselves on being able to create different moods on the guitar - Being able to switch between light, melodic and sweet sounds to aggressive, quick and hard hitting sounds. Now, a lot of this comes from a players character and feel towards the music, but we can work towards this style of playing by simply switching between major and minor pentatonics. So, if you began life as a rock player like me, then you'll have spent a lot of time tackling your minor pentatonics. This is great, and I highly recommend a thorough knowledge of the 5 pentatonic shapes, but we also need to understand the major pentatonic. For this lesson we will need the pentatonic shape 1 and 2. The concept I want you to get into your heads is being able to combine the pentatonic shape 1 and the pentatonic shape 2 on top of each other. This sounds crazy, but if you are playing over a blues backing track in the key of C (not C minor or C major... just C blues), then you can play your C minor pentatonic scale as follows: You can also play your C major pentatonic scale (shape 2) as follows: Put the two together, and you have an instant way to create different 'shades' within your improvising. The major pentatonic over the track sounds sweet, melodic and is often played with a lot more space than the minor, purely because it is easier to create melodies. The minor pentatonic has a much more aggressive feel, especially when used to

Congratulations to our March Students

Congratulations to Matt & Hoppy with their finished Custom Colour Strats. Both played and sounded great, really difficult to choose between them; the 50's style blue finish or the more 70's looking black on black. Both iconic looking. 2 great Students, 2 great guitars.

Build a Custom Made Guitar

If you are looking for a first rate course to build a custom made guitar then you are in the right place. During the course you will spend 3 days building your own electric guitar. If you have ever thought to yourself, " How do they make that" or more importantly, "I'd love to make my own guitar", then we can not only provide high quality instructor lead training on how to build a custom made guitar but also something remarkable. A custom made electric guitar that most of our course members can't belive quite how good it plays and sounds. If you would like to know more about joining a course to build a custom made guitar then please check out our guitar courses page for more information, course availability and bookings.

Custom Guitar Construction Course

In this electric guitar building course you'll focus on making the most successful electric guitar of all time: the bolt-on-neck design. In almost any music store, these guitars outnumber others five-to-one. The course will cover: Body & Neck assembly, Pickup Installation & installation of all Electronics, the Professional Setting up of an Electric Guitar. For more information on the course, including availability and booking please go to the courses page

Hot News – Guitar Technician Course

Update: It's here.... We spent a few months building the best guitar tech course for pro guitar setups and it's finally here. Check out the guitar course details here. We working hard on creating a new course. A single day with us will give you the essential guitar tech skills to setup like a pro. Our single day course will teach you all the essential skills require to setup guitars to perfection. We'll add the course to the official course list as soon as it is ready. If you want to be notified about the course, please email us or go to the contact page and use the form.