The lydian tonality

This month, Richard Barrett explores how a chord can sound completely different when its basic note order is rearranged

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

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

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

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

It’s not often that a single life spans such vast and varied terrain—poverty and privilege, failure and triumph, disruption and discipline. Yet Gérard Lopez, the ever-driven Spanish/Luxembourgish entr