Improve your sweep picking

THIS MONTH, I’D like to talk about the paramount importance of the right, or pick, hand — how it’s the keeper of time and the thing that gives us the groove while we play. I’ll demonstrate some exampl

Richard Barrett is on a mission to make you a better blues player – with full audio examples and backing tracks

AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT of playing music is being aware of “where” you’re playing in the beat and how it relates to the groove being laid down by the rhythm section. This concept can be broken up into th

IN MY PREVIOUS “Blues You Can Use” columns, I focused on what I consider to be essential rhythm guitar and accompanying single-note patterns that exemplify Chicago-style blues guitar, as heard in the

In the second part of this lesson, Richard Barrett asks you to lend your ears to the sounds of the silver screen for real-life context

TODAY I'D LIKE to talk about downpicking — picking or strumming consecutive downstrokes — and why it can be so musically effective. This is something I learned from studying the riff-writing style of