Paul | Guitar Lessons and Performance

Little Wing changes

“Little Wing” is one of Hendrix’s most popular songs and has become a standard, with interpretations recorded by musicians in a variety of styles. It is ranked number 188 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

How to play blues patterns over “little wing” changes. Once you have the chord changes under your hand and some sense of the blues/penta patterns in a couple of positions, the next hump to get over is your phrasing. I like students to start simply with just two or three note phrases that respond to the chord and resolve back to the target note. If this sounds interesting, just reach out- the first online lesson is free!

“To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also. ” -Stravinsky

Paul2026-10-14T08:55:29-04:00

Guitar Lesson: strumming guitar

Strumming guitar is one of the first skills most guitar players start with. No matter what stage we're at with our playing though, we can all learn to strum more accurately... and more interestingly! Below are some resources you might find helpful. Take a look at the video and print out the two pdf files for your own use. Practice the strumming patterns slowly and once you see how this works, you can easily understand how to strum songs you hear. Or even better, you can make up your own strumming patterns!

Paul2026-10-14T12:10:16-04:00

Keeping a Guitar/Ukulele journal

Keeping a Guitar Journal

Or bass, ukulele… really, whatever you want to keep track of your effort on.

One way that I know to stay on top of your practice and keep it moving in the right direction is to keep a practice journal. It’s very handy! You can use it to track your practice dates, length and frequency; use it to note any questions you might have that you can bring up later with your teacher or jot down some interesting lyrics or chord changes, tunes you might want to add to your repertoire. Make notes about your instrument like when you change your strings and what brand and gauge they are. It’s pretty valuable to keep personal notes for yourself about your playing and practicing all in one place!

I use a loose-leaf binder and 3 hole punch, but many guitar students just keep notes on their tablet or phone. Whatever physical method you use, there’s real value to tracking and noting your progress!

Here are a couple of pages to get you started, Blank chord sheets and tab sheets for uke and guitar both, a “circle of fifths” sheet and a page on strumming patterns:

blank guitar chord sheet

blank guitar tablature

circle of fifths

strumming patterns

uke blank tab sheet

uke blank chord sheets

“Music is the […]

Paul2026-09-21T11:54:20-04:00

Ripple

How to play Ripple on ukulele… the first part of “Ripple”, anyway.
“Ripple” sounds pretty cool on the uke to me!

You can do this! Just be patient with yourself and go slowly. There’s a tab, video and an audio file of the tablature to follow along with. I would start with just the first phrase- “if my words did glow”- just that one part. Get it so it sounds as nice as you want it.

You’ll notice in the video you can hear two notes at at time which makes the playing sound a little fuller. That is the melody note and a harmony note which is generally just a chord tone! what that means is that we’ve found the melody note in a chord… and in some cases the adjacent melody notes are all in the same chord, which is pretty convenient because your hand is already in the right place.

The MP3 file below is exported from the MuseScore file that made the tab/notation so follow the tab to see exactly what is happening in the audio file. The video file, I took some liberties (and made a few errors). It is a great song though so give it a try!

PDF tabs and notation

“A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.” – Benny Green

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Paul2026-09-21T11:54:02-04:00

How to play Eyes of the world on uke

how to play eyes of the world on uke. Sounds pretty cool on the uke to me!

How to play Eyes of the World for Ukulele: Here are tabs, lyrics, chords and notation for “Eyes of the World” and chord charts too. The audio file below is a midi representation of the notation in the file linked above. It’s not perfect certainly but it will give us a place to start!

Paul2026-09-21T11:53:13-04:00

How to play “love of my life” fingerstyle on guitar

how to play love of my life fingerstyle on guitar

The audio above is the midi playback from a Musescore file and the pdf below is the notation for it. In other words, the notes are written in MuseScore and we are able to output both the pdf of the sheet music/tablature and the audio as an .mpg file directly from that! Musescore, btw is an excellent tool for any guitarist and it is completely free, which is amazing to me considering what you can do with it. Find out for yourself- download the program from musescore.org

Love of my life tabs and chords part 1

Paul2026-10-10T17:10:50-04:00

Travis picking example

You can get a lot of mileage out of using thumb and index finger! Travis picking: named after country-and-western pioneer Merle Travis, it’s a style of fingerpicking characterized by the steady thump of an alternating bass that underscores rhythmic patterns and melodies on the treble strings. Moving the thumb to an adjacent string lets you play more “plectrum-style” as well, so you can certainly make your playing more interesting than either style separately.

Paul2026-09-21T11:52:46-04:00

Building chords from the 5 string

Building chords from the 5 string!

Building chords from the 5 string. We know the C scale has no flats or sharps and also that we can play Major chords (triads) with the 1, 3 and 5 scale notes. We can figure that combination out from any note on the 5th string! For instance a C Major is made of a C, and E and a G (1,3 and 5): C D E F G A B C

We know that the “two strings up and two frets back” rule can give us the same note but an octave up. We can do that from the 6 string and the 5 string. Let’s concentrate on the 5 string first. So C on the 5 string is at the 3rd fret and consequently, on the 5th fret of the G string. That gives us our one note in two places!

Starting with C on the 3rd fret of the A string, we can see D on the open D string, E on the 2nd fret, F on the 3rd and G on the 5th. The G on the 5th fret is important to us! Now we have 1 […]

Paul2026-10-08T08:01:47-04:00

funk on a classical guitar

There’s nothing quite like jamming out over the top of funk changes and you don’t even need to be plugged in to do that! Once you understand the blues scale- even in one spot on the neck- well, you can either look at it like it’s easier to play reasonably decent lines, or harder to make mistakes. Or both, I guess!

This tune is in C#m, so that’s the 1 chord. Since its a minor chord, the 3rd of the chord is flattened. That tells us what notes are going to work correctly when we play them over the top of the chord. To get started we can play C# (root note) E (flat 3rd) F#(4th) G#(5) and B (flat 7) and if you want to call these guys by their fancy-pants name, that would be “C# minor pentatonic”.

How I generally start with something like this is by remembering that if I’m on the the 1 chord, I need to keep coming back to the 1 note! It might sound crazy to just play one note over the chord but think about it – just concentrating on that single note lets you focus on making making interesting rhythmic patterns rather than worrying about where to put your fingers and scales and modes and all that other stuff. So try this: listen for the 1 chord […]

Paul2026-10-05T17:41:29-04:00

How to play “8 days a week”

Here’s a great Beatles tune with pretty simple, hand-friendly changes. You can certainly play this just by strumming the changes but you can also pick individual notes out of them- and even better, the melody notes are not difficult to get out of the chord shapes at all. Give it a listen and reach out to me if you’re interested in more information about how to play “8 days a week” solo finger style on acoustic guitar.

Lyrics and chords here!

Paul2026-10-05T08:21:13-04:00

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Building chords from the 5 string!