In this lesson I&#8217;m going to break down the first solo from Distorted Dreams by my band McRocklin &amp; Hutch. As well as teaching you how to play the notes step-by-step, I also cover all of the finer details &#8211; little tips and techniques that you can apply to your own playing to improve your note clarity and expression.
The solo isn&#8217;t too difficult technically, but it does feature a lot of cool techniques and phrasing which I cover in detail as I break things down. Most notably, it includes a hybrid picking section which sounds great but is also a super easy introduction to the technique if you&#8217;ve never used it before.

Distorted Dreams

Text/PDF

Guitar Pro

Thomas McRocklin

Hybrid Picking

Lick Breakdown

Technique

Distorted Dreams Solo 1

Introduction

Breaking it down

Hybrid picking section

Melodic finish

The finer details

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to show you a pretty crazy lick of mine, using the Mixolydian mode. Don&#8217;t worry if you aren&#8217;t confident with modes, there&#8217;s actually only one note difference between Mixolydian and Major, but it gives this lick a totally different flavour!
Although it&#8217;s fairly short, this lick packs in a ton of different techniques including alternate picking, legato picking, sweep picking and a really cool sounding string skip octave section right at the end.

Connor Kaminski

Alternate Picking

Legato

Modes

Sweep Picking

Mixolydian Lick Breakdown

Lick Fast

Lick Slow

Full Explanation

Rhythm playing is one of those areas that is often overlooked, whether it&#8217;s because your timing isn&#8217;t so great or you just don&#8217;t have enough elements to create really killer sounding riffs.
This lesson covers every aspect of my approach to rhythm playing, and it&#8217;s packed full of tips and insights that you&#8217;ll be able to pick up and apply to your playing today, whether you&#8217;re just starting our or you&#8217;ve been playing for years!

Chords

Pinch Harmonics

Rhythm

Riffs

Tips and Tricks

Heavy Rhythm 101

Palm muting

Open strikes

Chord vibrato

Alternate picking

Using silence

The arcade sound

Breaking up chords

Pinched harmonics

Muted picking

Wylde vibrato

Open notes

Power and depth

Adding variations

Alternate picking chords

Rhythmic flair

Pentatonic scales are extremely useful but it&#8217;s very important to understand what they are and what you can do with them, or else your playing can easily become very boxed in.
In this lesson I&#8217;m going to teach you all about pentatonic concepts and how I approach using them in my own playing. I&#8217;ll show you how you can keep your licks sounding fresh by jumping in and out of pentatonics and adding additional notes as well as contrasting them with additional arpeggios and scales &#8211; which is something I do all of the time!

Improvisation

Pentatonics

Scales

The World Of Pentatonics

The Shapes

Breaking Out Of The Box

Adding Contrast

My Favourite Positions

Another Favourite

Clear Skies

Welcome to a brand new series where I&#8217;m going to pass on all of the studio tips and techniques I&#8217;ve developed over  the years. Everything from dialling in the perfect guitar tones to which compressor to use on your mastering bus.
Before I became a full time music producer and mastering engineer I used to find all of the little decisions you need to make throughout the recording process really overwhelming &#8211; which really sucked the creativity out of the recording process for me.
This is a continuing series which I&#8217;ll be adding to every week. Follow along for insights and don&#8217;t forget to join the members chat to let me know what else you&#8217;d like me to cover!

Music Production

Production Tips

My overdrive guitar EQ method

Removing noise from a DI guitar tone

Today I&#8217;m going to show you guys a really cool warm up arpeggio exercise that includes: sweep picking (both ascending and descending), slides, taps, economy picking, bending and vibrato all wrapped in one lick.
So if you&#8217;re looking to work on multiple techniques all in one this is the perfect lick for you!

Jesse Michel

Arpeggios

Economy Picking

The Combo Warmup

Main Arpeggios

Final Arpeggio

Outro Section

This tongue-twisting solo contains a ton of awesome techniques, so as well as breaking down how to play the notes I&#8217;m going to focus heavily on teaching you the techniques themselves &#8211; so even if you don&#8217;t learn to play the solo note for note you&#8217;ll be able to take the skills you&#8217;ve learned and apply them to your own playing.
At the end of this lesson I&#8217;ve included a bunch of really fun and useful exercises that get you used to delivering these techniques in the real world.

Backing Track

All I Want From You Solo

Breakdown Part 1

Breakdown Part 2

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Do you want to learn how to create monsterous, massive sounding riffs? In this lesson I&#8217;m going to break down my entire riff creation process from the ground up and give you all of the tools you need to write your own huge, monster riffs easily.
We&#8217;ll look at how we can make our chords sound massive, simple methods to make your riffs more exciting, and plenty of other tips and techniques that will really bring your riff ideas to life.

The Monster Riff Toolkit

Getting Heavy

Driving Right Hand

Square DreamZ

When I was playing on stage with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, one of the ways that I really stood out in some of those shred battles was by introducing some funk in my playing.
Today I&#8217;m going to teach you some of those methods so you use them to create your own fresh sound! I&#8217;m even going to share with you a technique I learned from my time living with Steve Vai which I use almost every time I play guitar.

With Solo

Funk

Bring The Funk

Left Hand Rhythm

The Slide

Hitting it HARD

Kick and Snare

Let's Jam!

There&#8217;s a lot of information out there about pick slanting, but what is the correct information for you and how can you start using it to improve your playing?
The good news is: I&#8217;ve done the research for you!
I&#8217;ve put together this definitive guide to the subject, which will explain exactly what pick slanting is and how you can start using it within your playing &#8211; without undoing any of your existing technique.

Tim Hutchinson

Exercises

Picking

Pick Slanting 101

The Basics

Outside Picking

People say that tone comes from the fingers, but this doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s magic or that you can&#8217;t learn it. In reality it&#8217;s just a combination of many small factors that build up to add expression and depth to your playing.
In this lesson I&#8217;m going to break down 5 progressively more complex licks to show you all of the subtle elements that you can build into even the simplest phrases in order to elevate them to the next level.

Full

Say More With Your Notes

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to teach you an awesome alternate picking lick inspired by the likes of John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert.
If you&#8217;ve seen my instagram you&#8217;ll probably notice I like playing this lick &#8211; a lot! Now you can too! I&#8217;ll even teach you an exercise that will help you nail that nice clean pick attack. Let&#8217;s get to it!

PDF/Text

Kieran Johnston

Exercise

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to show you my top tips and techniques for creating more explosive guitar solos!
For each of my tips I&#8217;ll breaking down these a lick and show you why they&#8217;re effective and when to use them &#8211; as well as walk you through the more difficult parts with plenty of advice and insights that you will be able to apply to any aspect of your playing. Strap in and let&#8217;s go!

String Skipping

Explosive Solo Tips

Freeing Your Fingers

Creating Space

Overbending

Position Shifting

Changing Pace

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to teach you an awesome string skipped arpeggio sequence, very similar in style to one of my all-time favourite guitarists &#8211; Paul Gilbert.
I&#8217;ll break this lick down for you and include plenty of insights and tips &#8211; including how you can put some variations on this lick and extend it with tapping, as well as some examples on how you can incorporate it into real-world playing situations.

String Skipped Arpeggios

Variations and Exercise

Does your playing turn to mush when you try to pick at a high speed? In this lesson I&#8217;m going to take you on an epic picking journey and show you everything you need to know to improve your picking speed without sacrificing note clarity.
We&#8217;re going to push your hands to their physical limits &#8211;  and then I&#8217;ll show you the only exercises you ever need to know to level up your picking speed (including a pattern which has improved my picking speed more than any other exercise I&#8217;ve ever learned).

Chromatics

Speed

Improve Your Picking Speed

Finding Your Limit

Note Sync Exercise 1

Note Sync Exercise 2

The Most Useful Picking Pattern Ever

Real World Picking

The Burnout

As guitar players it&#8217;s very easy for us to get stuck playing the same shapes. Instead of trying to break away from this, sometimes all you need to do is inject some new ideas and techniques to add a little more flavour into the shapes you&#8217;re already playing.
In this lesson I&#8217;ll show you how to spice up standard pentatonic shapes by demonstrating a lick that uses a variety of techniques, I&#8217;ll break this down for you and show you how it all comes together.

How To Spice Up Pentatonics

One of the questions I get asked a lot is &#8211; what tuning are you in? I always play in standard tuning, but the way you approach chords and phrasing in different keys can completely transform the way they sound.
This lesson gives you all the insights into my approach to playing in my favourite keys. I&#8217;ll show you how to re-train your fingers to come up with some amazing sounds based on familiar shapes and how to layer harmonics onto chords to create epic soundscapes.

Theory

My Favourite Keys

F Sharp Minor

E Minor

B Minor

Hey guys, it&#8217;s Kieran here. I&#8217;ve got an awesome legato lick which I&#8217;m going to break down and I&#8217;ve also got some cool exercises to go along with it to really build up that left hand strength. Let&#8217;s do it!

Legato Lick Breakdown

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to break down three different riffs &#8211; they use a range of different techniques which I&#8217;ll break down for you as we go through each one.
I&#8217;ll also include loads of insights into how you can devise your own blazing riffs by working on simple ideas and elevate them to the next level!

3 Blazing Riffs

Chug Chug

Times

Italian Disco

We all know the feeling – no matter how much you practice at home, you pick up a guitar in a store or get on stage and your mind goes completely blank!
Let’s make sure that never happens to you again! Learn these improv tips and techniques and next time you’re stuck you’ll always have something cool to fall back on.

Download

Shred

Tapping

Don&#8217;t Get Stuck

Percussive Phrasing

Octave Tapping

Bend Extensions

The Shred Cocktail

Hanging On

In this lesson I break down one of my tracks called Follow The Light. First we&#8217;ll break down the intro and chord sections, which sound really huge and busy, but in fact are really straightforward &#8211; once you know the secrets!
The shred part of this track can be pretty difficult though! It contains a lot of different techniques but I&#8217;ll break the whole thing down for you piece by piece. I&#8217;ll even give you an exercise to practice to help you nail the toughest parts.

Follow The Light

Chord Section

Shred Section

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to break down the chord progression from one of my tracks &#8211; Square Dreamz.
But we&#8217;re going to go deeper than that&#8230; much deeper! I&#8217;m going to show you exactly how I wrote this track by using melody to lead the chords without thinking too much about theory! I&#8217;ll teach you this method so you can use it to write awesome sounding chord progressions yourself.

Songwriting

Square Dreamz Chords

Solo Section

How To Build Chord Progressions

Finger Stretching Exercise

In this lesson I&#8217;m going to take my McRocklin &amp; Hutch track &#8220;Distorted Dreams&#8221; and show you exactly how I produce a guitar solo for a real life track. I&#8217;m using Ableton Live, but the principles are the same for ProTools, Cubase and other DAW software.
I&#8217;ll walk you through the entire solo piece by piece from the original recording session and break down all of the production techniques and effects used.

Distorted Dreams Solo Production

Approaching Solo Production

Walkthrough Pt1

Walkthrough Pt2

Wrapping Up

I use harmonic minor in a lot of my playing and I love the sound it provides, but it can also sound very corny if you overuse it so I&#8217;ve developed a lot of techniques to blend it with other complementary scales so that it sounds unique and different, without being too distinctive.
In this lesson I&#8217;ll teach you exactly how I use harmonic minor and go into detail on some my favourite scale positions (with tabs) to show you the best fingering options available.

Harmonic Minor

Disguising Harmonic Minor

What is Harmonic Minor

How I Use Harmonic Minor

Harmonic Minor Scale Position 1

Harmonic Minor Scale Position 2

Harmonic Minor Scale Position 3

A lot of people approach picking as a black and white thing but the right hand is often capable of adding so much to your playing than you might think!
In this video I&#8217;m going to go right from the top, breaking down my entire approach to picking and teaching you how properly utilise picking techniques to unlock extra expression in your playing, power in your chords and speed in your licks.

The Ultimate Picking Guide

My Picking Approach

Rhythmic Picking

Picking for Speed

Expressive Picking

Chromatic Picking Exercise

Pentatonic Picking Exercise

String skipping is one of my favourite techniques to use, it sounds like this mysterious technique but is actually very simple and really effective in making regular scales sound completely unique!
In this video we&#8217;re going to talk about the technique itself, I&#8217;ll break down some licks for you to practice and give you a bunch of tips on how to apply string skipping into your own playing.

Storms (intro)

3 Notes Per String

2 Notes Per String

There are a few things people get wrong when they try to start playing at high speed, so let me show you exactly how to approach playing fast &#8211; from how to practice right up to choosing when and how to apply your new speedy techniques to your playing.
I&#8217;ve also got a great exercise to show you and there are lots of cool tips sprinkled throughout this lesson to get you going from 0-60 in no time!

How To Play Fast

Practicing Fast

Speed Exercise Part 1

Speed Exercise Part 2

Speed Exercise Part 3

When to Play Fast

Today we&#8217;re going to break down a track of mine called Drive. We&#8217;re going to break down the techniques involved and show you how to use controlled, slow sweeping to create a really cool effect on the arpeggios &#8211; I&#8217;ve included an exercise that will really help you master this technique.
I&#8217;ll also show you how you can write and come up with a concept like this by linking together simple ideas and turning them into something mindblowing!

Drive Riff

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