The main goal of this class is to give you an effective approach to practicing that will help you develop excellent technique and give you the tools needed to apply it to songs in a musically tasteful way. 

We will cover right hand technique such as tone, rolls, pick blocking, damping and palm harmonics.  With the left hand, we will focus on techniques such as getting the best tone out of the bar, hammer-ons/pull-offs, slides, slants and playing cleanly in closed position.

There will be a big emphasis on intonation, phrasing and getting a vocal-like quality out of your guitar.  While exploring the fret board, we will find new ways of finding the melody within multiple scale patterns in any key. We’ll cover theories for improvising and how to tastefully apply new licks to a melody. 

We will also spend time on rhythm, fills, ear training, critical listening, playing harmonies and backing up a vocalist. As each technique is presented, we’ll learn how to apply it to song while focusing on building tasteful solos based on the melody.

We’ll do a lot of playing in class.  Don't worry if you are shy about playing in front of others. You’ll get over it quickly in the supportive learning environment we create.  Make sure to bring an audio recording device and a pen and paper.  Tablature will be provided for everything covered in class. 

Looking forward to a week of making music with you.

Mike Witcher