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Dear NYC Guitar School Community, For the past two decades I have devoted myself to making learning guitar as absolutely accessible, achievable and easy for my students as possible. “It’s easy to play guitar!” I shouted. “Anybody can learn to do it!” I strove to make every chord, every progression and every piece of theory as easy as possible as NYC Guitar School grew from a single room to thousan

  Ukuleles are quite similar to guitars. One of the perks of playing fretted instruments is the relative ease with which new instruments in the family can be picked up, and going from guitar to ukulele is no exception. It might not be quite as direct a one-to-one translation as going from guitar to bass, but the broad strokes are still pretty similar. Notes are fretted the way, each fret represent

  Pentatonic scales are a great way to start improvising on guitar. Pentatonic patterns are simple and easy to memorize, and they remove some of the riskier note options, essentially ensuring that every note choice will land safely. However, those riskier notes that the pentatonic scale removes can also be some of the most effective note choices when used well. So while the pentatonic scale is a g

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