(Ayla plays Hey Joe on guitar)
- Hi everyone.
My name is Ayla Tesler-Mabe
and I just played the iconic intro to Jimmy Hendrix's
version of Hey Joe.
And it turns out there is a hidden exercise in that song.
And in five other songs that I want to show you today
that you might already know and love.
If you learn how to play them,
not only will you learn how to play an awesome song,
you will have a great exercise to work on,
to progress in your guitar playing.
All right,
let's get right into it.
The first song is, Hey Joe,
but I want to show you probably
my favorite riff of the entire song
that comes right after the guitar solo.
And this is a great one to work on finger dexterity
and chromaticism, and it's just a great riff all around.
And this is what it sounds like.
(Ayla plays Hey Joe)
So again,
this is a great rift to work on using all four fingers,
chromatic walk-up the frets you can see here.
I'm chromatically walking up the frets
with my four fingers
and this riff forces you to do that.
Again, if I play it slowly,
this is what it sounds like.
(Ayla plays guitar)
And in the original song.
I don't think he quite resolves up to this last note here,
but for the sake of making this an exercise, why not?
You can also just go down to the low E string
or an E chord, something like that.
But again, notice how I'm using all four fingers like this.
One finger per fret,
and this will help you build flexibility
and the ability to stretch with your fingers.
It's a great warm up as well.
And I think it's an awesome riff to know.
All right, moving on to the next song.
This is a blues rock classic from the late fifties,
and this is such a great song to work
on chord changes, to work on the pentatonic scale
and to work on playing in a triplet type feel,
which is great
if you ever want to look at playing blues music
or rock music that comes from the blues,
and it sounds like this.
(Ayla plays Rumble on guitar)
So that was Rumble by Link Wray.
And this is a song that I always wanted to learn how to play
because it's been in so many iconic movies
and it's an iconic song in its own right.
But it turns out if you learn it,
you're going to be working on so many skills
like I said, previously, chord changes,
moving from this D Sus cord to an E Major,
A Major,
at the end you move to a B7 chord
and this is just a great chord shape
to know in general.
But my favorite part is the very end.
This lick here.
(Ayla plays guitar)
For many reasons firstly,
you're playing in a triplet feel
and this is a great,
great exercise for playing in cool time fields
because we have triple, triple it.
Which I played wrong because I was speaking while playing
and you don't need to do that.
You just need to play,
but think triple it, triple it, triple it,
but what you're playing is.
(Ayla plays guitar)
And it also turns out that you'll be working
on the minor pentatonic scale while you're playing this.
And that's an awesome skill to learn because if you learn it
it's where you start
if you ever want to learn how to improvise.
And for example,
if I were playing over this track
and I didn't want to just play chords,
I could use the notes in this lick here to improvise.
(Ayla plays guitar)
Such a great exercise and such a great song.
And I think it's really worth working on.
Don't forget to download this track down below
to practice this song
and maybe even try improvising over it
if you're feeling adventurous
and you want to give it a try
and I hope you have fun.
So this next song is truly one of my all time favorites.
And I know I say that about a lot of songs
because I love so much music,
but this really is one of my all time favorites.
And this is such a great song to learn,
to work on chord embellishments,
because if you've ever wanted to learn
how to play that Hendrixian style,
where you're embellishing every chord change.
with beautiful licks,
this is a good place to start using open chords
and some really nice licks to get you on your way.
It sounds a little something like this.
(Ayla plays Something on guitar)
All right so that was Something by the Beatles.
If you didn't already know, beautiful song.
And the first thing to look at with this,
is all the different chord shapes that you go through.
C Major, C Major Seven,
C Major Seven
or C7,
they mean the same thing and then F Major
and then D Dominant Seven, D7
and then G.
So already, if you go through those chords
on their own or with the track,
which you can download down below,
that's a great exercise in chord changes,
but hold on, there's more,
as you may have heard when I was playing,
I did add some more strumming instead
of just holding the chords 2, 3, 4, 1,
2, 3, 4.
I did add some extra strumming in there.
(Ayla plays guitar)
And for a start with getting the chords down,
strumming them, letting them ring out,
but know that there is room for you
to work on some more embellished strumming,
maybe take a listen to the original
and hear the way
that George Harrison plays through the song.
It's very beautiful.
Most of all,
the song allows you to work on chord embellishments
because when we get to that F Major chord,
there's a little
(Ayla plays guitar)
embellishment lick sounding like that.
And when you get to the end of the song,
instead of just holding this G and letting it ring up,
there's that really beautiful embellish lick
to throw on top.
But there's another reason it's great to work on.
You may have heard when I was playing through the song,
I had some cool effects on my instrument.
(Ayla plays guitar)
And what that is, is a type of modulation effect
called Univibe
And I had some tremble on there.
And if you happen to have Chorus, Haser, Flanger, Tremolo,
Univibe, anything like that,
you could try experimenting with them
and seeing
if you can get a really luscious, nice sounding tone.
And that is a great skill to have
as an electric guitar player,
because if you can play really well,
which I think is the most important part
and have beautiful tone in your fingers
and just your instrument running through the amp.
If you can combine that with a great sensibility
in regard to the way you construct your tone
and your amp settings, pedals, all of that,
you are going to be flying.
That's a way of saying you're going to be sounding great.
So our next song is a little bit more
in your face, rock and roll.
This is, Shout It Out Loud by Kiss.
(Ayla plays guitar)
All right.
So that song obviously starts
with an iconic arena rock harmonized opening lick
and the part that I was playing.
(Ayla plays guitar)
It's such a great one to work on bending accuracy
and vibrato,
and first looking at bending accuracy.
You're bending up a half step.
But you don't hear it come back down,
you just bend up and then you have
to release the string without taking your fingers off.
Cause then that will happen.
That's not what we want to have happen in this instance,
you release just enough pressure
so that when you release the note,
release the bent, you don't hear it come back down,
(Ayla plays guitar)
Then the last one, you hear it come up and down.
And then you land on this 13th fret,
and try to add a whole lot of rock and roll vibrato on there
really wide and aggressive vibrato sounds great.
So that one's a lot of fun to work on, but of course,
it's so great for working on your bending,
your vibrato
and just the ability to make one note sound beautiful
and great.
(Ayla plays guitar)
So the last song was about working
on single note lead type playing
and this one is,
as you probably saw more chord based
and all about your right hand as well,
that was Simple Man by Leonard Skinner, a classic,
you might've noticed while I was playing it,
I was really watching my right hand
cause I don't usually put that much attention
into picking exactly the right note
at the right time,
the A string versus the D string and the G string, whatever.
But for this one, it's part of the riff,
so it's really important to focus
on your picking accuracy for this one.
So this is a great song for that.
And you can follow along with the tab
on screen to see what I was playing.
And again, this song,
not only are you going to be learning an iconic riff,
you're also going to be working on picking accuracy,
making chord changes while being really precise
with your picking hand, all of that good stuff.
It's so great to work on.
And it's more challenging than you might think,
especially to do all of this while staying in time.
Because even if you play all the right notes,
if they're not in time,
they're still not quite the right notes.
So turn this into a thumbs up
by focusing on all of the aforementioned things.
And this is what it sounds like slowly.
(Ayla plays guitar)
And then it restarts.
Be sure to download the track down below,
to practice along, jam along.
I made those tracks for you with all the love in my heart.
I had a lot of fun doing that,
and I have one more exercise for you in an iconic song.
It's a little bit challenging,
but if you want to get into lead playing
or just work on finger dexterity,
this is a really good one to work on.
And it sounds like this.
(Ayla plays guitar)
So that went by pretty quickly.
If you want to download a slower version of the track
to practice along to, again, it's down below, check it out.
That was the iconic opening lick of the final solo
of Good Times, Bad Times by Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page.
And I listened to this lick over
and over again in slow motion.
And the first part of the lick
is a little hard to make out at times,
as far as the precise timing of what he did,
because he was probably lost in the moment.
And he may not have played it exactly
as an exercise with precision
because that's not the point of music anyways,
but for the sake of this exercise
and extracting the lick
from this iconic opening line of the solo,
you essentially end up
with this really cool way of descending
the minor pentatonic scale.
(Ayla plays guitar)
So essentially you have this repeating kind of motif
that descends down through the scale.
With pull offs.
Pull off.
And once you get more confident with the frets,
you're playing and the strings and everything,
it's really cool to start to emphasize
and accent certain notes, like for example,
instead of playing every note
with an equal amount of emphasis,
ta da da da.
Try to emphasize
Da,
da,
and the reason for that is it further accentuates
this feeling of falling down the stairs
and then landing on your feet,
which is a feature of a lot of,
I think my personal favorite rock guitar players,
Jimmy Hendrix did this a lot, Jimmy Page,
all of those guys, playing crazy stuff
where it feels like you're kind of lost in time
and space and then landing on,
you know,
a part of the groove that listeners
and musicians all can grab onto
and say, "Yes, okay, we've arrived."
Great work.
And so there are so many reasons to work on this, of course,
for finger dexterity,
giving you a cool lick to pull out at a jam session
or anytime you're improvising,
learning how to play the song,
starting with the lick
or even just learning the song all the way through, I think,
is something really cool for any guitar player to do.
So there are six hidden exercises
and iconic songs that you can work on.
I have always been a fan of playing music first.
I always learn things by learning songs,
but sometimes it's fun to look for the exercises
in these songs
that are going to help build your musicianship.
And sometimes it's just more fun
to find these hidden exercises
if you're spending a lot of your time practicing
to a metronome, this might be a fun way to spice things up.
Please leave a comment down below of anything
I may have missed, a hidden exercise in an iconic song
that you know of that you'd like to use
to practice and have a wonderful day.
Thanks for tuning in.
(jazzy music)