Kallicles

I get these questions a lot. For starters

CAGED: is a type of way of looking at the guitar/fret board. There are five movable chord shapes linked with five major/pentatonic scales. I teach this method to my students, it is very effective.

135: is the chord formula for a major chord. For example, in the major scale of C (CDEFGAB) CEG is a C Major, C=1 E=3 G=5 . This can be done with any major scale to find what the independent notes of an (X) Major chord is. There are other formulas too, like 1-b3-5 being a minor chord (1-3-5-b7 is a Dom7 chord)

The blues progression is 1-4-5. What do I mean by this?

Each degree of the major scale has a mode attached to it (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, etc). If you were to create triads (135) starting from each scale degree you would get a pattern of major and minor chords:

In c:

C(eg)-D(fa)-E(gb)-F(ac)-G(bd)-A(ce)-B(df)-C(eg)

thus

CM7-Dm7-Em7-FM7-G7-Am-B dim7

Major minor minor major major minor diminished

This is the guideline a musician will start from when selecting chords for a song as these are the strict chords allowed in the key of C. There are of course substitutions and vamping, but this is the basic gist of it.

So a blues progression in the key of C includes:

CM, FM, GM. The 1-4-5 chords of the scale degrees.

---

Ok, but you don't need all this to start jamming. First, you'll need your pentatonic/diatonic scales. There's this awesome post I came across here (http://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/21xghz/my_gift_to_rguitar_learn_pentatonic_scales/) with diagrams. Then go to youtube and search for a blues backing track in A and begin practice jamming over it improvising with the pentatonic scale. Keep working at it and try to transcribe other solos you can steal riffs from.

Here's a resource for when you inevitably need to play rhythm blues:

http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/Beyond_Blues_Minor_Blues_Boot_Camp

Yep I do.

With students who take a weekly slot of my time I usually try to steer them away from sight-reading. I find that forcing a kid, or even an adult, to slowly go through the process of learning to read is a great way to quickly lose students. Many contemporary artists do not know how to sight read, and I think of it as a different skill that's great for being "a musician" but maybe not required to be "a guitarist". I like to emphasize ear-training in place of musical notation and just rely on charts/tab.

But if I do get a student who requests it, or wants to learn classical composition, we go over musical notation.

Psshhh, you can sweep pick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9IvHoyUJRo

(actually I like this video better, but both are good exercises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heRysecIJ3c )

And yeah, I use the rocksmith arcade all the time. I love the leaderboard (I always try to keep myself in the top 400 at least). In fact, I have a running gag with students that if they can top any of my highscores I'll give them one of my timber tone luxury picks.

Have only had one defeat so far.

Yeah, check out

facebook.com/blood4music

and you should see a how-to on how to redeem your free lesson. Unless you are in the Annapolis MD area all lessons are given over Skype (I set up through a kinect in my room).

There are musical charts (I.e. http://www.justinguitar.com/en/AR-003-Dom7arp.php) but other than that tab is the easiest I've seen.

If you're looking for an interesting/fun way as a beginner to learn songs RockSmith is a really neat tool.