Summit Guitar School

News and Tutorials

Play Like a Pro!

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Have you ever wanted to sound like John Mayer or Jimi Hendrix? It really doesn’t matter who your favorite guitar player is… The best of the best know things you don’t know… One of the big topics novice guitar players have trouble grasping is chord inversions…

Chord inversions are the doorway to sounding more like your favorite guitar players. Learning your open chords and barre chords are just the beginning… Yes! There is so much more to learn about chords… By learning your chord inversions you can play more tastefully up the neck, you will be able to play more chords with less movement, and you will be able to outline chords with individual notes. By learning to outline the notes in each chord you will be able to play more tastefully. But how do you learn to do this? There are some steps you have to take to be able to make this happen. The first step is to commit to learning it. After that you will need to learn some basic music theory.

I am working on creating some content that will help fast track some basic theory knowledge. Please subscribe to the newsletter for updates on premium content. In the meantime you can short cut that stuff and start memorizing the triad inversion patterns. Some would say this is working backwards but I do not think so… Because the guitar is so centered around patterns it is a great use of time to start memorizing these shapes…

I have created a 3 part lesson series that covers these triad inversion shapes as well has how to use them. Here is the first lesson in the series. I hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to send me an email… Heck, send me an email just say hi! That’s fine as well. Let me know what kind of lessons you’d like to see in the future!

Have a great day and enjoy this free lesson.

Brett

Here is the first lesson on triad inversions.

Bringing Value to the Guitar Community

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If you are into guitar you know that there are limitless resources online. Whether you are just starting out or you are a seasoned player there is literally something for everyone. I think the one thing that I love to see more than anything is guitar players and teachers building each other up.

There are endless YouTube channels and Instagram pages that are either teaching guitar or simply showcasing ideas and skills. Whatever your flavor is, you can find something to satisfy your pallet. Social media platforms have become the ideal place to showcase your skills as a musician. Notice that first line of that sentence. Social media, is meant to be social. It isn’t solely meant for putting up content in hopes of getting a gig or finding a student. We as musicians of all walks of life should be building one another up no matter the skill set. A lot of people on Instagram are simply showing their progress as new guitar players and some are seasoned professionals. I believe that we should be building up guitar players of all skill levels within the community. If we start looking at these platforms as places that we can build up and encourage people I think we would see a huge shift in the community. These platforms are built to be self satisfying, meaning that they encourage us to post and check our phones constantly for likes and comments.

Imagine this…

Instead of picking up our phones to check on views, likes, and comments we picked up our phones with the sole purpose of building other guitar players up. I am a firm believer in adding value and encouraging guitar players and musicians wherever they are in their musical journey. One comment to a beginner can mean way more and have a huge impact that you or I may never see. Let’s attempt to be a light in the self satisfying world of these social platforms. I can promise you that adding a positive or encouraging comment on someone’s video will only add to your own happiness as well as impact on the world.

I challenge you to make a positive or encouraging comment on 3 accounts next week. Try it out and let me know how it went. Have a great week and check out our latest lesson on our YouTube channel.

5 Free Premium Lessons…

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Subscribe to our email list for 5 free strumming pattern lessons.

For beginner guitar players strumming patterns open up a whole new world. Learning a few key strumming patterns can really unlock the possibilities for most beginner to intermediate guitar players. There are several short concepts that can really make it easy for guitar players to add some new strumming patterns to their arsenal. Songs are written at different tempos and with different time signatures which can make it difficult for some guitar players to figure out what kind of strumming pattern to use. These lessons will help you figure out exactly what kind of strumming pattern you should use for almost any song. I have developed a simple formula that will help you understand what strumming pattern to use on any song.

By subscribing to our email list you will get access to these 5 strumming pattern lessons as well as our monthly newsletter. The newsletter is always a bonus lesson that applies to beginner and intermediate guitar players. Each month I will cover a concept that I see guitar students consistently struggling with. Some months the lesson will be on a popular new song. In those lessons I will break down each section, strumming pattern, and riff. Thanks for following along with me on your guitar journey. I hope I can be of some help to you all. Let me know in the comments how you think we are doing and what topics you’d like to see me do a lesson on in the future.

Thanks,

Brett

How To Tune

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In this video I explain in depth how to use a clip on tuner. These are the most popular tuners on the market right now. A lot of beginners have trouble tuning their guitars so I thought this short tutorial would be helpful for a lot of people.

Beginners have a lot of trouble tuning because they aren’t sure which note each string is supposed to be tuned to. The main problem is that the tuner doesn’t know what string you are on. It will only guess which string you are tuning based on the pitch it is reading. This means that you, the guitar player, has to know what each strings correct pitch is supposed to be. In standard tuning the guitar string names are 6-E, 5-A, 4-D, 3-G, 2-B, 1-E. A really easy way to remember this is to memorize this phrase… Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie. Another important thing to remember is that the 6th string E is the biggest string. A lot of students get confused on which string is which number. Always remember that the biggest string is the biggest number. The biggest or thickest string on guitar is the 6th string which is the low E. Biggest string = the biggest number… The smallest or thinnest string on the guitar is the 1st string which is the high E. Smallest string = smallest number.

I hope this short tutorial on tuning really helps a lot of people. Enjoy and subscribe to our monthly newsletter for more exclusive content and free lessons.

Have a great day,

Brett Blakemore

Spring Student Showcase

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We had a great turnout for our spring showcase.

This is a great opportunity for all of our local students to get up on stage and play something they have been working on.

Music can positively affect people of all walks of life so it just seems right to share it. We love to encourage all of our students to get out and play. It is a great motivator to practice more as well. It just makes sense. You wouldn’t want to go to every basketball practice and never get to play a game right? We want to treat music education the same way so twice a year our local students get an opportunity to get out there and play. Every spring and fall we have a student showcase. I am thinking of live streaming the next one. What do you think? I am also trying to come up with ways for our out of state students to get an opportunity to perform as well .

Ready To Let Go Tutorial

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This is a great new song from Cage the Elephant. As soon as I heard this song I knew that I had to teach it. We have a lot of beginner guitar players watching our videos and I knew there were some people out there that would love to learn this song. In the video I break it down chord by chord and section by section. Because we are keeping this as beginner guitar friendly as possible I am only teaching the chord version here. There are a few specific guitar parts that are played throughout the song but for this tutorial I am leaving those parts out to keep it as easy as we possibly can. Be sure to subscribe to our email list so we can send you some exclusive free lessons as well as some other great content. Let us know how we are doing with our lessons in the comments below. Have a great day!

Brett