🎸 What’s your feel-good riff of the summer?

Plus: My favorite underrated band, a killer Guitar Pro deal, and a new newsletter every guitarist should read

This week, in addition to all the great links that’ll make you a better guitar player, I’m recommending one of my favorite bands, looking for your feel good song recommendations and more.

Before we get into all of that goodness, I wanted to let you know about two things that have made a huge impact with my own guitar playing. The first is Guitar Pro - I’ve long recommended this tool that’s amazing for writing and reading tabs. If you want to practice transcription, I can’t recommend this app enough. Plus, many of the albums I’m into offer tabs for Guitar Pro - most utilize GP’s MIDI instruments, but a handful of artists have even included the real album audio as a package deal. Right now the folks at Guitar Pro are running a summer sale where you can get 20% off. Use my link to help out Chasing Sound at no additional cost to you.

The other thing I wanted to recommend was Guitar Vivo’s new newsletter. I’ve already raved about their guitar books, where they work with top educators like Tim Lerch, Ross Campbell, Martin Miller, and many more. Now Luke Lewis who runs Guitar Vivo is launching an educational newsletter. The first issue recently went out, and was all about the best ways to think about chord voicings. I can already tell this will be a newsletter I’ll check out regularly. To sign up, head to Guitar Vivo’s site, scroll to the bottom and fill out the form. Looks like you can get 10% PDF versions of their books that way too.

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🔊Turn This Up

This week’s album recommendation is The Pleasure And The Greed by Big Wreck. I remember seeing videos from this album on MuchMusic back in the day, and instantly thought it was Soundgarden (one of my favorite bands). It turned out to be Ian Thornley of Big Wreck - and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with the band and Ian Thornley’s music (BW, his solo work and Thornley).

The Pleasure And The Greed is filled with 16 amazing songs, and from front to back the playing and production is fantastic. I remember reading interviews with Ian when this album came out, and him mentioning the producer had to reel him in, otherwise he would have kept adding more and more guitar to these songs. I initially loved this band for two reasons: the incredible songwriting and Thornley’s passion for creating those iconic walls of sound, similar to Jimmy Page’s work in Zeppelin.

I won’t recommend any specific tracks from this album, because I think the entire thing is worth listening to. But I will say that just about every person I’ve recommended this band to has thanked me because they end up loving them so much. The greatest part is that this is only one piece in Big Wreck’s awesome catalog - if you end up liking them check out the rest of their albums, the two Thornley albums, and some of Ian’s solo albums. Let me know if you end up digging this band!

❓Sunday Sound Off

It’s officially summer and that usually means more shows, more time with friends and family, and all around good vibes. So this week I’ve got a simple question:

What’s a song or riff that instantly makes you feel good when you play it? Whether it’s something that physically feels fun to play on guitar or it just puts a smile on your face in general, I’d love to hear it.

🏡 The Player’s Corner

Update: Last week it looks like something wonky happened with Simon Allaway’s rig photo in the newsletter. It’s updated on last week’s post on Substack, but I wanted to post the photo here as well for subscribers reading via regular email.

Here’s what Simon had to say about his setup: “The core of it is the overdrive pedals. I mostly use the white King of Tone clone (top left) which was built from a Stewmac kit. And for a bit more gain the Gearbox left hand side (bottom left on the board). For solo boost the right hand side of the Gearbox is a Tumulus. Time based effects coming from the two Strymons and the TC Plethora X3.”

Want your rig featured in the next issue of Six String Sunday? Reply to this email or comment on Substack!

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🔗 This Week’s Guitar Links

• The CAGED System In Under 10 Minutes - Should you learn CAGED, should you learn the fretboard another way? My personal opinion? Learn the guitar in as many ways as you can. It's the ultimate way to make connections and learn concepts for good. In this video, Andy Guitar explains the CAGED system in under 10 minutes - the video features the shapes you should learn, how to move them around the neck, and uses examples from John Mayer and the Beatles to show how it could work for you.

• Learn Modes from Bright to Dark for better understanding - This is one of my favorite videos on teaching the modes. Tim Lerch show us all the modes from brightest to darkest, and also shows us the chords that these modes work over. If you're into Tim's teaching, I can't recommend his books with GuitarVivo enough. They're more in the vein of resources, but I love having them on my bookshelf.

• How Paul Practiced for Hours a Day Without Burning Out - How do you practice for hours at a day? Split up your time - some focused practice, some practice while watching TV, etc. This is exactly how Paul Gilbert did it when he was becoming the shred master he is today. John Bjork shows us the basic ideas of what worked for Gilbert - slow and repetitive exercises, with not a lot of force, that improved his speed and accuracy over time. I like this idea, but I'm also a fan of Ben Eller's idea of incorporating speed bursts into your practice to push yourself. If you want even more advice on practice, including warming up, practicing your picking and more, I found this video with Intervals' Aaron Marshall great.

• The Shred Guitar SECRET: Combination Playing! - If you’re still in the mood to practice shred guitar, you should check out this video from Ben Eller who I mention above. He explains combination playing - in this case combining alternate picking with legato. All my favorites use this type of playing - from Guthrie Govan to Vai, Satriani and more. Eller shows how this type of playing benefits us, not only technically, but also from a tone perspective as well.

• “Built to make tuning faster, more precise, and effortless”: Band Industries’ Roadie 4 – a noise-immune automatic tuner – builds on its acclaimed predecessor, with some key upgrades - It’s not often I'm excited about gear, but I really want to check this tuner out. I remember when I was working at Sam Ash, we recieved the Gibson Robot guitars when they came out. Lots of people were excited about them, but ultimately they had issues, and no tech seemed to want to fix the tuners. With that being said, this technology in a device that's not attached to a guitar, seems very promising. The Roadie 4, which tunes your guitar to whatever tuning you like is on Kickstarter right now. I put a reminder for myself to back this before it closes its campaign.

• How To Solo With TRIADS: The Formulas For Certain Success! - Charlie Long put out a helpful video this week that shows us three different formulas to use triads effectively. Things like adding tension to your leads, spreading the fretboard out by visualizing triads, and much more. If you want even more help with finding triad shapes across the neck, check out this video from Daniel Seriff. He goes over major, minor and diminished shapes that are easy to move all over the fretboard. Rather than practicing boring exercises, give these triad shapes a try, and see if it increases your fretboard knowledge.

• Double Stop Secrets: Adding Depth To Your Riffs - When I first learned double stops in my teenage years, it felt like magic. I did some of them for my very first guitar teacher and I remember him smiling and saying “oh you found those shapes”. Double stops can add so much to your playing, and in this video from Shane Theriot, he shows us how we can use them inside of our riffs - things like using simple phrases, changing variations, using hammer-ons, and most importantly transposing your riffs to other keys. Check out the rest of Shane’s channel for other great lessons as well.

• Electric Legoland: Jimi Hendrix is now available in Lego form – but it’s missing the Strat - Want to build your own mini Jimi Hendrix out of Lego bricks? Well, now you can! Mopop put together a 255 piece set that uses Lego bricks to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix. The set comes with Hendrix, a stage, an amp stack, a mic, and some sort of a guitar. Looking forward to this shipping!

• The Giacomo Turra victims' shred collab is INSANE - Giacomo Turra will be known as a musical thief, but the guys who Turra stole from have now come together for an awesome shred collab. The song “Slapopocalypse Reborn" features Jack Gardiner, Alex Hutchings, Danny Sapko and many more. And speaking of Alex Hutchings, he recently stopped by Andertons to talk with The Captain. Alex discussed why guitar makes him happy, his outlook on practice, his plans for the rest of the year and more. Check out that video here.