Reggae is a ton of fun to play, once you can settle into the groove. This lesson features a chord progression pulled from “I Shot The Sheriff” by Bob Marley – just the chorus part, which goes Eb, Dm, Gm. Eric Clapton has done a few versions of this song too, if you want to see how it can be applied differently.
The main thing to take away today is getting a feel for the rhythm – whether you’re on the bass or the guitar.
Some of you have been asking questions about how to go about improving your improvising, and / or soloing. This lesson is a direct response to that, although to really get to the heart of this, you need to spend some time going through the Essential Guitar Techniques lessons – all of which will teach you different ways to add flavor to your solos.
It’s very common for players to struggle with making their solo sound more like a solo, and less like a scale, and it is important to realize that achieving this is as much about “feeling” where the notes are and where you want them to go as it is about logically deciding. For that reason, this is a bit of a tricky topic to teach, especially when we’re not in the same room together, so grab your guitar and settle in, because this lesson is a good long one that is really going to get at the heart of this issue.
As usual, any remaining questions are welcome in the comments section below.
This is the first lesson that Colin and Jonathan have paired up on, so let us know what you think about it!
This lesson is for both guitar players AND bass players. Having an understanding of the other instrument will really help you out as a player, and will give you a better understanding of how your own playing relates to the rest of the bad.
We’ll teach you a simple progression and give you some tools that you can use to jam with others over the progression.
This is the second lesson in our series on jamming with the bass and guitar.
Please make sure you’ve first gone through lesson 1 in this series.
On the bass you’ll review the major scale, as well as learn some more tips on walking the bass with a 12 bar progression.
On the guitar, you’ll learn a couple new chords that sound great in 12 bar progressions, and also more from the jamming front.
So you want to learn how to shuffle on the bass? We’ve touched on this in other lessons, though this one gets specifically at the heart of the matter.
Playing a shuffle on the bass tends to go hand in hand with a walking bass line, one of the most fun things to play on the bass. In this lesson we also cover playing a shuffle on the guitar, because understanding how the guitar and the bass parts interact is quite important.
In this lesson we’ll take a look at a cool chord progression and how we can apply that to both the guitar and the bass.
Bass players – please make sure you’ve checked out Jonathan’s lessons on stacking thirds as well as using compound intervals. (Not to mention everything up to that point too!)
The chord progression we’re using here is C#m, A, E, B.