Want to play better guitar?

It might seem odd, but you can play better guitar by thinking about movies. Let’s step away from music for a minute and consider the “Kuleshov Effect”:

Film theorist and director Lev Kuleshov—who helped create the first ever film school—often had his students re-edit D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to learn how meaning was created. Kuleshov and his people even went so far as to re-edit pre-revolution Russian films in order to rid them of the “bourgeoisie” messages of the past. As a result, Kuleshov developed one of the most important concepts in montage theory; this came to be known as the “Kuleshov effect.” Kuleshov cut together several identical shots of an actor named Ivan Mozzhukhin with different shots including those of a bowl of soup, a dead child, and a beautiful woman. Although the shot of Ivan is the same, over and over, his expression seems to change because of the image following it.

This proved to Kuleshov that in cinema, it is the way images relate to each other that creates meaning—not the images themselves. This concept is one of the most important pillars of filmmaking. It is very natural for audiences to relate two sequential images to each other to create anything from an ideological meaning to even […]

The minor pentatonic scale has 5 notes: 1, b3, 4, 5 and b7. We can find all of those on one string by understanding the intervals between them. Let’s start with the 1 note on the 2nd fret of D/4

If we want to play E minor pentatonic on the D string, our 1st note is E, and that’s on the 2nd fret of the D string. If we move back two frets to the open D string we can get our flat seventh, often written “b7” and referred to as a ‘dominant’ 7. In this case, that’s a D, a whole step below E. Moving back to 1 on the 2nd fret (E), we can find our b3 note (G) on the 5th fret one whole and one-half interval above the 1. Next up is the 4 note, a whole step up from the b3 so that’s A on the 7th fret. Now the 5, a whole step up from 4 so that’s B on the 9th fret of D. The pattern repeats with b7 (D) on the 12th fret.

Now this is the really cool part: a ‘power’ chord is a diad (two note chord) with no 3rd! It just has the 1 and 5 notes. Because the A & D strings are a 4th apart, the 5 of any note on the […]