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While learning new chords can often be daunting, even the trickiest chord shapes can feel not so scary when you’re able to relate them to shapes you’re already comfortable with. Any chord shape can be mastered with enough practice and elbow grease, but you might be surprised to learn just how many chord shapes are out there where you’ve already put in the bulk of the effort without even knowing it

  Two-handed tapping is a fun technique that allows you to grab ahold of notes generally outside of your reach and often leaves audiences dazzled by its flashiness. While you shouldn’t learn tapping purely because it’s flashy, most guitarists would be lying if they told you that it wasn’t at least part of the appeal. But for all the awesome things a solid tapping technique has to offer, a surprisi

  The thundering guitar crunch that opens “Your Love”, the debut single from longtime New York City Guitar School teacher Clayton Hopkins’ new solo project Claytones, perfectly sets the tone for the song’s remaining four minutes. “Your Love” is a full-throttle rock and roll tune painted with the throwback sounds and textures of 80s arena rock, a fact which the song makes known from the moment it s

  The concept of keys itself isn’t too daunting. Most students I’ve taught have an easy enough time grasping the concept that each key contains seven specific notes that all work together, and that those seven notes can be arranged to form a specific set of chords unique to that key. However, what seems to give musicians more of a challenge is knowing exactly what key they are in. Those with

  A lot of guitarists will either jam on a scale or play chord shapes they already know. Scales and chords are often taught as separate entities, and many guitarists never think to blend the two. However, this kind of thinking can be pretty limiting. Within each scale lies all of the chords in that key. If you learn how to find chords in a scale, It can be easy to incorporate them into otherwise s

  It’s often said that most improvised solos can either be categorized as “vertical” or as “horizontal”. These designations refer less to objective musical elements, and more to the mental approach taken by the improviser during the solo, which is why you will sometimes hear these concepts referred to as “vertical thinking” and “horizontal thinking”. But whatever way you like to frame it, the conc

It can be difficult to keep track of all of the different types of chords, as well as their relationships to each other. However, understanding different chord qualities is important for songwriting, improvising, or just all around being a musician. I’ve found it helpful to think of different chord types as a spectrum, much like the color spectrum. Below is a simple version of this spectrum that c

  Tapping is a dazzling guitar technique with tons of flair that’s an awful lot of fun to play. But despite all its flash, tapping can be a tricky technique to integrate organically into your playing. There are many different exercises, tricks, tips, and techniques to help guitarists overcome this challenge, but in this piece, we’re going to looking at one of my favorites. There isn’t a good forma

As more and more New Yorkers are getting Covid-19 vaccines and the general cases are beginning to decline again, the city is beginning to finally wake up from its year-long, pandemic induced slumber. Many businesses, industries, and education centers are looking to return in non-virtual capacities, and The New York City Guitar School is among them. But as the New York City Guitar School is prepari

  When trying to write a riff, the sheer amount of options available can be pretty daunting. You can play literally anything, which sometimes makes it hard to know where to start. As a result, it can be an easy temptation to revert to muscle memory and turn out more riffs that are rather similar to things that one has already written.  This can make writing songs in riff-dominated styles like meta