Even the beginning guitarist can easily learn to play the Eagles' song "Hotel California." The song structure is built upon seven simple chords, some of which have the same or nearly identical finger settings. The way in which these chords combine, though, is rather complex. Interpreting the music of this song seems as difficult as decoding its lyrics. Ger Tillekens here contributes to the debate by analysing the basic chord pattern as an expanded Spanish progression that gives the song its Spanish feel and acts as to keep it firmly locked into the moment.

VITABS is a guitar tab editor inspired by the legendary Vi text editor. It is created with convenient editing and fast keyboard entry in mind. Keyboard mappings are modeled after Vi and Vim.

The best way to get started with modes is to look at the scales you can get from the pitches in the C major scale. By starting the scale on notes other than C, you get six other scales with completely different emotional colors. You can read the modes of C major off the diagram below. Pick any note and read clockwise to get the mode starting on that note.

When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. The good news is that the blues scale is a universal solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t work with blues scale. It works in blues, of course, but also sounds terrific in rock, country, jazz, reggae, funk and much else.

E.g.: 3. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.

The distinctive chord which opens A Hard Day's Night became one of the most iconic sounds in The Beatles' output. Instantly recognisable, it was the perfect beginning to the group's debut feature film.

Since posting my cover of Elliott Smith’s Tomorrow Tomorrow on YouTube a few months ago, I’ve received several requests for help from enthusiastic guitarists looking to learn the song themselves. Rather than address everybody in a brief reply, I thought I would make a thorough post explaining how I learned to play the more difficult parts of the song. If this post doesn’t cut it, let me know! I’ll be happy to field any further questions that you may have (post them as comments to this blog entry so that I see them when I go to make edits).

Tomorrow Tomorrow
as written by Elliott Smith
as performed by Robby Grossman
originally appears on the 1998 album "XO"

The Mozilla hacks blog has details on an awesome web-based guitar tab player experiment from developer Greg Jopa. Using Mozilla’s experimental Audio Data API and the Vexflow HTML5 music notation rendering API, Jopa’s guitar tab player displays interactive sheet music that traces the notes of a song as it plays.