Category Archives: The Player’s Room

When I was younger I developed a passion for harmony. I started learning how modes, scales and chords work together to create music. Harmony is the teaching of a set of rules to make music audible. Perhaps the word ‘rule’ is wrong since that word implies something immobile, the enforcement of the wills or wishes…

In the last article on this subject I wrote about my approach to the left hand, concentrating on the wrist, palm and thumb. This time we’ll look at the fingers. First I’ll start out by saying that I seem to have little girl hands. I am fairly short too, at 5’7”, so those who have much bigger…

Gigging at the Edge of Reason is a series I started here on the Seymour Duncan Blog to share stories of gigs that have gone terribly awry for one reason or another. Performing live is an art all to itself. My hope is that by sharing these stories from time to time, we can all…

In this lesson I’d like to look at one of my secret weapons. No, it’s not the magic amulet that lets me talk to animals. I’m still officially denying I have that in case that pesky wizard starts poking around again. And it’s not even my winning smile and sparkling wit. Still officially denying I have those too. It’s circular picking.

In the days before tablature transcriptions and YouTube video tutorials, guitarists had only their wits, ears, piano charts (!) and each other to count on to accurately learn their favorite tunes or material for paying gigs.

It’s a little known secret that mere mortals can repair and maintain their instruments using only hand tools (sssh, this is just between us!). Heck, using prefab or custom-ordered necks and bodies, you can build them too. Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t always need a ton of unwieldy and expensive tools to work on,…

Time and money – two precious resources that musicians never seem to have enough of. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it’s time to record, especially in today’s era of tight budgets and high production values. A poorly managed recording burns time and money.

The easiest thing in the world to do with a seven-string is to go straight for those lowest two strings and simply chug out. But there’s a lot more you can do with them, whether you’re into metal or not. So this month I’m gonna show you some of my favourite seven-string chords – chords which can be useful no matter what style you’re in. After all, doesn’t the extended low range of a seven-string make sense in a context like country, for instance?

Back in the old days, making a record could be an incredibly expensive process, with only a handful of record studios across the country and the only real distrubution of your music being radio (some of which required payola). These days, a 14 year old kid with Pro Tools, an audio interface, microphone and a…

In my last blog about modes, I explained their names and what they are. Now is where the fun begins. We will take a look at each mode in our C scale, and figure out why just playing the notes in a different order makes so much of a difference. Trust me, it does. We will start at the first mode of course. That is right, C major, or C Ionian.