ElectroKraft just released their new Magnedyne electric guitar pickup for the Fender Stratocaster. The Magnedyne single coil pickup allows you to adjust its tone with a little control knob based on the top of the pickup.

The Magnedyne has no active electronics so your guitar tone is as true as can be. This pickup will be great for guitarists who frequently change their electric guitar pickups to obtain different tones. Check out the ElectroKraft website for more information.

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Guitar Accessories – Magnedyne Pickup

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In terms of the body’s shape, feel and weight, this electric guitar is pure elegance. It has been redesigned slightly but mainly in terms of the guitar ‘horns’.

The new DragonFly comes in a twenty-two fret neck and also a HSS (Humbucker-Single-Single) pickup for the greatest variety of tones possible. Guitar players can now more easily switch out the stock Duncan pickups to the ones of their choice as modifications have been made to the pickup mount.

The retail price comes in at about $4500 and is available in 4 different shades of pure sweetness. To find out more details about it’s features, visit the Parker Guitars website.

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Parker Guitars New DragonFly

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This is a great Youtube video for you to start off with if you want to learn power chords for guitar. This guy covers plenty of really good tips on how to form the chords with your fingers and things not to do to get the best sound possible on your electric guitar.

After watching this video, check out the article I wrote on how to play power chords and this will give you more useful information. The article also contains power chord charts that you can follow and learn.

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Power Chords For Guitar – Power Chord Exercises

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The power chord sounds great, both clean and distorted, and can be used in a wide variety of musical styles. The reason you would want to learn how to play power chords is because this voicing sounds powerful, due to the non-dissonant nature of ‘perfect’ intervals that the power chords are built upon. The perfect intervals are unison, perfect fourth, fifth and the octave.

Ever notice that if you turn up the overdrive and distortion on your electric guitar, and strike a standard chord, it sounds really bad? This is because there are many more notes in a standard chord and playing all the notes with distortion on just makes it sound really messy.

On the other hand, power chords sound just great with loads of overdrive and distortion as they are built only upon two notes.

The main ingredients of a power chord are the root, and the perfect fifth. Therefore a power chord in the key of E would contain the notes, E and B and would be referred to as an E5. The root and fifth can be repeated as many times as desired so if you repeat the root note up the octave that will provide an octave interval and if you place a perfect fifth below the root note that will give you a perfect fourth.

Learn These Power Chord Shapes

How To Play Power Chords

These are the usual open shapes that you can start learning how to play power chords with. The G5 sounds really good and has a classic rock type of sound. Many riffs have been written with these chords. Included here are also the E5 and A5 power chord charts. Most would just play the bottom three notes.

Learning how to play power chords in these open shape positions will allow you access to many of your favorite rock guitar songs, but you’ll need to learn the moveable shapes as well if you want to be able to play in different keys.

Moveable power chords forms

The great thing about the moveable shapes is that the root is on the bottom string, so as long as you learn the note names on the root string, you can play these power chords in all keys. The second and fourth-string shapes are not used as often as the sixth and fifth-string chords, but you should learn them anyway to increase your ‘voicing’ variety.

The chart below are some other shapes that you should also learn fingerings for and practice. If you take a fifth-string root chord and double the fifth as a bass note on the low E string it will sound ‘de-tuned’, giving you a very powerful ‘growling’ effect.

Less used power chords shapes

So time to put what you’ve learned from this ‘how to play power chords article’ and put it into practice! Flip on your overdrive and distortion and let her rip. Play around with the overdrive settings and find a setting that you like or that you’re trying to emulate.

Quick tip: don’t push the overdrive up too much. Sometimes less is more.

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How To Play Power Chords Easily

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Learning to play the guitar and learning to maintain your guitar go hand in hand – Please do learn to maintain your guitar especially if it’s a relatively expensive one. You will enjoy playing the guitar more this way and it will have a better tone overall. Also, be sure to change your strings as soon as you start to notice some corrosion happening on the strings.

This Youtube video’s pretty hilarious but it gets the job done. He first shows viewers how to use lemon oil to clean the fretboard and also how to use tape to protect while you use steel wool to keep your frets clean and shiny. Word of warning – MAKE SURE you use the finest steel wool you can find, if not you can really damage your frets whilst cleaning. Also be sure to tape up your guitar pickup as shown in the video. The reason is because the pickups are magnatized and filing away at your frets will create fine metal shavings that will stick to your pickup and you’re going to find it very hard to remove.

You can do it if you want to, but I don’t clean my fretboard every time I change guitar strings. Only once every few string changes. There is no real need for excessive cleaning. Another reason is if you keep using lemon oil on your fretboard, you could put too much moisture into your guitar neck and cause it to warp a bit.

Good luck with changing strings and cleaning your guitar. Remember that if you have any questions about this, I am always prepared to help. Just click on the ” about me ” section and drop me a message.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzBkBkY6tGY[/youtube]

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Youtube Guitar Tutorials – Changing Your Guitar Strings

Ernie Ball is well-known and a chosen favorite in the Rock guitar industry and is used by guitarists such as Jimmy Page, Slash, Steve Vai, Clapton just to name a few.

My preferred gauge of guitar string is the Ernie Ball ” Hybrid Slinky “, which strings range from 9 – 46. These strings produce a nice rounded sound on my Gibson and its top strings are crisp while the bottom ones deliver a really punchy bass.

Best thing about these Hybrid Slinky strings is that it’s incredibly cheap. I buy a box of 12 each time and that breaks it down to about $3.99 per set of strings. Bad part of it is that my hands sweat a lot when I play guitar and somehow my sweat corrode the strings faster than other guitar players. I wipe the strings down really well but still I will go through a set of strings every 3 weeks or so.

This custom gauge of strings is perfect for heavy riffing in Rock and Metal and also makes a great lead tone. For those of you who play Blues guitar, you will get a great tone for that too.

The strings are super-easy to vibrato and bend because they’re so thin but yet there’s no loss of tone quality. These nickel-plated strings really pack a punch!

I’ve tried Fender guitar strings and also D’Addario’s and I still prefer the feel and sound of the Ernie Ball’s. Two thumbs up!

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Hybrid Slinkys- Ernie Ball Electric Guitar Strings

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The core of the blues scale is the minor pentatonic scale. The only difference between the Blues and the pentatonic minor is one additional note added to the Blues scale, making it a 6 note scale. It is this signature note and when it is used that defines the feel of the Blues.

This Blues scale is very easy to learn if you’ve already mastered the pentatonic scale, because essentially they’re the same. Don’t be fooled by it’s simplicity though as Blues is all about timing and emotion. Without those 2 factors, you can make a Blues scale sound pretty bad!

How can you put the Blues scale into practice?

I started by playing along to Blues backing tracks, and so can you. Don’t worry about how well you play it initially, just have fun and feel the music. You will improve really quickly using this training technique and very soon you will be able to improvise along with a real band.

The best thing about utilizing backing tracks to train, is that you will gain an understanding of how the scale fits in with Blues chord progressions.

Listen to your favorite Blues guitarists and pay attention to the licks they use and WHEN they use it. The timing like I said, is essential. After you’ve memorized the Blues scale, try and figure out which notes on the scale are utilized by these licks that you’ve just heard, and then try playing them on your guitar.

The one BIG secret for understanding your guitar fast, is ” song deconstruction “. This is the learning method I used to improve fast. I just tear the song apart section by section and try to work it out without using any guitar tablature. Give it a try yourself!

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Playing Blues Guitar Lead For Beginners

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This is will be the first in the series of electric guitar effects tutorials, and today we are going to talk about volume swells.

What is it exactly?

Volume swells are an effect used by electric guitar players to create a gradual volume increase, commonly known as a crescendo.

To achieve this effect, a guitarist would hook his pinky finger around one of the volume controls of the guitar. He would then pick a note an roll his pinky to gradually increase the volume from zero.

This effect can also be achieved using a foot pedal that controls the volume. Another effect that is similar called the ” violin ” is achieved by rolling the volume controls back and forth causing a sound similar to a violin being bowed.

Allan Holdsworth pioneered this effect of volume swelling and by using a delay effect pedal he was able to create a lower, thicker more cello-like bass sound.

Using swells can often lead to very emotive sounds which really enhance the electric guitar sound even more.

There are quite a few video tutorials on Youtube that demonstrate this technique. Go see it in action!

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Electric Guitar Lessons – What Is A Volume Swell?