Extrememeasures

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

WHEN I AM composing and arranging music, I like to think as an orchestrator. As the guitarist, I try to represent just about everything that’s in the arrangement — the drum syncopations, horn parts, k

AN ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL element in blues guitar is the turnaround. It is a basic function of blues music that the turnaround happens at the end of the progression and flips it over back to the beginni

LAST MONTH, I talked about how I devised the primary riffs in the title track to my 2023 album Hard Wired, which is played in drop D tuning (low to high: D, A, D, G, B, E). I’d now like to share some

IN A 1992 Guitar World feature that celebrated the release of Spinal Tap’s reunion album, Break Like the Wind, it was reported that lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel had been, at some point during the band’

ANOTHER OF THE many Gibson guitars that I love (are there any that I don’t?) is the ES-350. This is a semi-hollow “jazz box” type of guitar, deeper than a ES-335 but still kind of skinny when compared