Learn How To Play Killer Blues Guitar Riffs That Are Both Intense And Clean
Do you want to know how to play truly KILLER blues guitar riffs? Most guitarists (falsely) believe that playing blues guitar phrases as aggressively as possible also means sacrificing accuracy.
Wrong!
Fact is, it is not very difficult to play blues guitar riffs that are both aggressive AND clean. The secret to doing this is simultaneously playing with power in your picking hand while effectively muting all the strings that aren't being played.
Watch the video below and I'll show you exactly how to do this so you can start playing killer blues guitar riffs right away.
Click on the video to begin watching it.
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How To Track Your Guitar Progress Weekly To Get Better Fast
When you track your guitar progress weekly, you quickly see big results in your playing. Track your progress consistently and you get benefits such as fixing mistakes in your playing before they turn into bad habits, spotting weaknesses in your playing and practicing more efficiently.
The following are 3 big reasons why consistently tracking your progress on guitar on a weekly basis makes you a better player faster:
Reason #1: Your Guitar Practice Becomes More Effective
The majority of guitar players only notice they’ve made progress in their playing many months after the fact. This means they spend many months practicing before they even know if what they are doing is effective for getting results.
This is extremely inefficient!
Tracking your progress in weekly increments keeps you from wasting time on ineffective practice and helps you improve the quality of your practice in real-time.
Result: you become a better guitarist in less time.
Reason #2: You Understand What You Need To Practice To Get Better
Tracking your progress helps you determine exactly which musical skills are holding you back from becoming a better guitarist. This helps you understand the things you need to practice next.
When you no longer rely on guessing about what to practice next, you become a better guitarist much faster.
Reason #3: You Avoid Being Held Back By Your Weaknesses
Many guitar players fail to make significant progress because they are held back by under-developed playing skills.
When you track your progress each week, you quickly identify the skills that you’ve neglected to practice and how they hold back other aspects of your playing. Have you ever heard the saying, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link?”
This saying holds true for guitar playing as well. For example, someone who wants to become a great lead guitarist may have excellent technical skills, but if they neglect other skills like phrasing, fretboard visualization or ear training, they will still remain weak as a lead guitarist.
Don’t make this same mistake by not tracking all areas of your guitar playing every week!
Learn The Worst Mistakes Guitarists Make While Tracking Their Progress
To get better at guitar fast, you must track your progress weekly and avoid the mistakes mediocre players make.
If you track your progress in ineffective ways, you end up wasting your time, getting poor results and developing bad guitar playing habits.
Quickly become a better guitarist by not making these common mistakes that others make while tracking their progress:
Mistake #1: Relying On Random Music Theory/Aural Skills Tests Online
Free musical skill testing websites you find online don’t track your progress in all areas of your musicianship. At best, they only track one or two.
Tracking skills in isolation does not help you understand your musical strengths and weaknesses or tell you which of your guitar skills are out of balance. This makes these types of tests not only useless for guitarists, but ineffective for tracking your musical progress.
Mistake #2: Tracking Maximum Speed & Not Paying Attention To Anything Else
Many guitar players only focus on tracking their maximum guitar playing speed for any given technique or practice item.
Making this mistake causes you to neglect countless other areas of your guitar playing that need to be tracked, such as: fretboard visualization, ear training, two hand synchronization or music theory.
This mistake is crucial because focusing on only one area of your playing limits your ability to become a great overall guitarist. You become a better guitarist faster by tracking ALL areas of your playing rather than just your speed.
Mistake #3: Tracking Progress Too Infrequently
It’s crucial to track your progress every week in order to know how effective your practice is and identify weakness that hold your playing back.
Guitar players who only track their progress once every few months or for a short period of time whenever they suddenly feel motivated do not get any benefits from it. Tracking your progress inconsistently in this manner makes it nearly impossible to see trends in your playing.
This prevents you from tracking how your strengths and weaknesses change over time.
“Before the online guitar lessons, I had a lot of trouble with phrasing. I couldn’t make good note choices, I was always fishing for the next note. I was trying to think of ways that I could play, but it didn’t sound good. I didn’t know how to write songs, it was absolutely terrible, everything sounded the same. I couldn’t really… I didn’t feel confident with my playing. I definitely couldn’t build speed for anything, I was really sloppy and I was dissonant… and it was really painful to play.”
I chose Tom Hess because when I read his articles they blew my mind away. I got so much out of that, that I didn’t get anywhere else.
The main reason I like taking lessons with Tom online is because, number one: yes it was the personalized lessons strategy… I read everything about it, and it was so compelling, just like that he really takes everything that I can or can’t do into account, and then he’ll take what I want to be able to do and then basically map out every step of the way until I get there. And that was just really powerful, and that I’d be able to get feedback every 6 weeks, and the fact that we’ve got the forum. We’ve got instant help and they all really know what they’re talking about… they’re not just like anybody… they… I mean some of them are virtuoso guitar players... I mean, they know their stuff and then of course the mindset of this whole environment. The friends I’ve made here just… I can’t really put into words.
I didn’t have a budget when I started. I had a good enough job that I could take lessons for however long I wanted, so that wasn’t a problem, but I feel like I’ve gotten 100 times what I paid you know.
Matteo Miller, San Diego, California, USA
“When I met Tom Hess, I knew that this is the guy. Just going through the evaluation form, all the questions, different questions, and he was digging deeper and deeper into all my goals and all that stuff... and no one has ever done that with me before, so I felt right away that this is the guy.”
The level that I was at before I went to Tom for lessons was that I could play pretty fast, I could play sloppy, I didn’t know nothing about music theory, so I was kind of unbalanced, I was uneven. I was a good player technically, but I knew very little about music theory. So I wanted to even that out, and Tom has helped me, not only evening that out, but also exceeding my expectations. So now I’m playing at a level that I didn’t expect that I could play at. So that’s... I’m very happy with that.
I like lessons with Tom because of the format basically. He gives a variety of formats... not just one format, like video for example, but also pdf files and audio files that you can take with you if you’re doing something else... you have to do labor that day, laundry or whatever... then you can listen to the sessions and while... you can actually benefit when you’re not even practicing, so it’s a no brainer.Gottfrid Norberg Waxin, Sweden
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
Getting better at blues is easier when you track your progress consistently. Just ask my students who used the tool I designed for this:
"The Guitar Playing Accelerator helps me because it measures things that I never even though to measure. When you’re on the accelerator, it’s very quick, you see, “Ah I thought I knew this… I thought I knew this subject really well... this area really well” ... and either you do or you don’t. And when you get your final score, you see exactly how much work you have left to do, which can be excited or depressing."
The Guitar Playing Accelerator helps you make more progress because you see the areas that your deficient in. You see what’s weak, what needs to be improved and how to improve it.
The thing I like the most about the Guitar Playing Accelerator is that viewing things in ways or looking at the guitar in ways that I don’t when I’m just practicing regularly. So I’m doing chord inversions in weird parts of the neck makes me think okay, I have to be on top of what notes are, where looking at the fretboard and understanding and doing it quickly. So that’s something that on my own I’d have never done.
The top 3 reasons I recommend the Guitar Playing Accelerator is you’ll see an immediate jump up in everything... you’ll do it the first week and you’ll get your baseline for where you are. You’ll come back the very next week and without even realizing it, you’ll be better. You’ll know more. You’ll answer things faster. You’ll look at the guitar differently. You’ll just be better. And next week, you’ll be even better and then better and better. The more you keep doing it, it’s like a snowball effect.
Byron Marks, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA
"Using the guitar player accelerator has been awesome because there were a lot of areas that I didn’t know how to track or that I should even be tracking my results of that area, and so it’s made it a lot easier because now I have that knowledge."
Now I know where I’m getting better, how much I’m getting better, what areas I need to work on more, and I don’t have to ask myself why am I not getting better anymore, because when I look at the data that I have there, it becomes really easy to figure out where I need to go and what I need to do.
I recommend using the Guitar Playing Accelerator because: 1. If you don’t track what you’re doing with your guitar playing, you’re not going to be able to measure it, and you’re not going to be able to improve. And if you aren’t keeping an eye on those things, then you aren’t going to know what weaknesses you have. It’s going to be a lot harder to identify what weaknesses you have and if those weaknesses are preventing you from using the strengths in your playing. So without that, it really makes it hard to identify exactly what you need to do. The other one is the bonuses actually. The bonuses that we get with the Guitar Playing Accelerator are worth more than what you pay for the accelerator itself. So, the bonuses are huge and I love getting those cause they’re awesome.
Brad Litton, Vernal, Utah, USA
Want to become the most creative blues guitar player around? Learn how to do it by taking rock guitar lessons online.