Ted Gioia's 8 bits of excellent advice for musicians
Plus, how to use triads all over the neck with Guthrie Trap
It’s May 21st, and we’re back with another full issue of the Six String Sunday Club newsletter. We’re already 3 full weeks into the Chasing Sound songwriting challenge. This week was all about recording - you can check out my full post about that here. If you have any questions about recording or mixing, feel free to reach out! I'm here to help. I just received the drums for the song I wrote, and I can't wait for you all to hear it. We have one more week left in the challenge, and it's all about mixing - one of my favorite parts.
If you think it's too late to join the challenge, it isn’t! Just change the weeks up, and create your own 4 week plan. Head to ChasingSound.com to check out all my tips for each week.
Alright, let’s get into this week’s links!
The Best Guitar Links of the Week!
- Guitar Lesson: Opening Up the Neck Using Triads with @guthrietrappmusic - Guthrie Trapp is one of my favorite guitarists on YouTube. His lessons are always great, and usually focus around the CAGED method. Recently he just put out a video for ArtistWorks where he talks all about how useful triads are. Guthrie has a course coming up soon on TrueFire, and I can't wait to see what he teaches there. I'll report back here in the newsletter once I go through some of the lessons.
- The Virtual Guitar Roundtable with Jared James Nichols, Guthrie Trapp, & Richie Faulkner - Speaking of Guthrie, he sat down with two other monster guitar players - Richie Faulkner of Judas Priest, and the awesome Jared James Nichols. They spend some time shredding, but the real gems are them talking about guitar and answering viewers' questions.
- This ONE Audiation Exercise Will Change Your Ear Training FOREVER! - Similar to Trapp, I love Levi Clay's helpful videos and instructional books. He's one of the best transcribers I know, and I got into Guitar Pro mainly because of his videos on the app. Levi put out a great video this week talking about audiation, and what it means when you're learning or writing guitar lines. Later in the week, he continued talking about the idea in a different video, which you can check out here.
- I’m a huge fan of
’s The Honest Broker newsletter right here on SubStack. He’s one of the reasons I moved this newsletter over to their platform in the first place. He put out a fantastic article a couple weeks ago that I wanted to share here. It has some sage advice for really any musician. You can check out the full post in the link below.
- The Best Way to Learn a SCALE or MODE First!! (fretLIVE Guitar Lesson) - So many guitar teachers have talked about the benefits of learning scales or modes horizontally across the fretboard. Pow Music put out a video on the topic this week. If you haven't seen their awesome video to fretboard animations, you gotta check them out.
- Blow Everyone's Mind with These Blues Bending Techniques! - Marty Schwartz talks all about some sweet blues bends this week. If you haven't messed with quarter tone bends in your solos, this is a great video to start with. I also liked Marty's 10 riffs using the blues scale video, which he came out with this weekend. The riffs feature some of my favorite players. That video is right here.
- 5 Guitars You Think Are Good (but they're not) - Let's be honest, this is basically a 5 guitar gear demo video...but damn, do those guitars sound awesome!
- Writing Guitar Tabs – Paper or iPad? Here's How I Do It - David Pots puts out some of the most fantastic looking guitar tabs / song sheets on the internet. In this video he shows us how he writes tabs, both using paper, and using the great Notability app.
- Music Reading: essential knowledge or pointless for the modern guitarist? - But is writing down or reading notation even worth it? Anyone can play the guitar's channel makes the case for why reading music will help make you a better musician, without a whole ton of effort.
- Boss reinvents the SDE-3000 Digital Delay rack unit as two feature-packed pedals – and one is preloaded with Eddie Van Halen’s live settings - Boss suprised everyone this week releasing two amazing delay pedals. They took the SDE-3000 rack unit and made 2 floor units. The one I'm most interested in though, is the SDE-3000EVH which is the Van Halen version. Not only does this pedal sound great, it also has Eddie's presets loaded up!
- How to use chords in a blues guitar solo - I loved this Kirk Fletcher-esque lesson on adding more chords into your blues solos. If you're bored of just playing pentatonic runs, and you'd like to add more chords to your solos, you should check this lesson out!
- “It Has the Best Guitar Tone Stevie Ever Got on Record”: Watch Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Showstopping “Love Struck Baby” Music Video - Texas Flood is somehow 40 years old this year. I had a lot of fun watching Stevie's video for "Love Struck Baby". I'll never forget watching his live DVDs when I was first learning guitar. I just sat there in awe at watching SRV pulling these notes out of the sky - it was like magic.
Hey did you know, not only do I talk guitar each week, but I also teach it!
Try out a half an hour to see how much you can learn when you know the right things to practice. Whether you want to learn guitar, recording, mixing or more, I can help you out!
Fantastic guitar digest, really. Covers so much: technique, approach, psychology, theory, notation, guitars, gear... wow! I'd add this, from Jack Ruch, about rhythm guitar fills https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Yhy_qjyBMg