There’s still a lot of guitar in modern pop music, despite the use of sequencers and programming. The folks over at TrueFire have just released a new guitar course called Pop Survival Guide featuring the talents of Massimo Varini.
It looks like a great course looking at strumming patterns, chord shapes, electric guitar etc. It’s not for beginner guitarists but would suit someone who has been playing for a while and knows the basics.
There’s some ideas in this course that I already use, but looking at these sample videos I still learnt a couple of new ideas.
In this first video, Massimo shows you some different strumming patterns over a 12/8 time signature. I especially like the way he strums harder on some of the strings to make them louder.
This next video shows some strumming and arpeggio ideas that are useful when the guitar is backing the vocals and there’s not much else in the mix. The added 9th on the Em chord is very nice – listen to how he holds it through other chords.
In the next video, Massimo uses a capo and talks about the CAGED system. I love using a capo, particularly when recording acoustic guitar.
In this video Massimo cover what he calls ‘safe’ chord extensions. There are some great ideas here.
In this last video he talks about finding the right notes to build up a good pop guitar solo.
I love the ideas he plays in this last video and I’ve been working on them tonight before I wrote this post.
This seems like a good series of lessons. What I’ve shown here is only the tip of the iceberg! The course has 72 videos and 242 minutes of teaching! That’s a lot of content that can help you improve as a player.
You can learn more over at the Truefire site.
<<<Click here to go to the TrueFire website>>>