Brad Carlton 7 Topics For The Guitarist

Finger Exercises
Be aware of and eliminate unnecessary tension
The most important things if you want to have great technique is

economy of motion and conservation of energy–never squeeze
harder than you want to.
Practice your picking dynamics and practice keeping your fret hand
relaxed as you increase your picking dynamics
Sound/squeeze notes with your pick hand fingers only when they
need to sound.
Practice relaxing your pick hand fingers while keeping your fingers
on the strings.
The fret hand is the athlete, the pick hand is the artist.
Practice hybrid picking.
Stretching is one of the best things you can do if you want to have
great facility with the fret hand. Be slow and relaxed and controlled.
With the fretting hand, attend to where your thumb is, where you’re
placing the fingers relative to the frets, the position of your
shoulder–you sometimes have to drop your shoulder to play certain
voicings cleanly, you may have to change your wrist position, etc.
When you’re practicing motor skills things, such as an Eadd9

voicing, up in first position, you can do trills with each finger while
holding down the rest of the chord, you can think about what the
chord tones are, you can think about what scales the chord can
belong to, you can look at the intervals in the chord, you can try out
different fingerings, etc.
Speed is a byproduct of accuracy.

You want to know how to do muted strumming.
You never squeeze harder than you need to to get something clear.
Make sure your instrument is properly adjusted. Guitar playing isn’t

so much about strength, it’s about leverage and efficiency. Playing
with a badly set up instrument might make your hand stronger but it
won’t make you a better guitar player. You can make your hands
stronger at the gym.
Axes of the guitar: the string axis, the fret axis, and two diagonals.
Learn to move your fingers without gripping.
Always link theory to every physical exercise you play.
Hammer ons and pull offs are the best way to develop speed and
endurance and agility.
Practice everything at different dynamic levels.
With electric, practice with different levels of gain.
To make big stretches you have to pull your elbow in, drop your
shoulder and wrist.
Viewing the fretboard

You’re going tend to hear music through your instrument, which can
limit what you can hear. Brad experienced this when he first started
listening to jazz and he realized he couldn’t figure out what the
chords were he was hearing because they were on keyboard and
he wasn’t used to those kinds of voicings, he only knew guitar
chords.
Be a musician who happens to play guitar. Practice things that are
un-guitaristic. Brad thinks like a piano on the guitar. To work out
voicings, he goes through every possibility even if they’re
technically challenging or impossible. Because if he’s arranging
something with multiple tracks he can play cluster voicings that are
impossible to play at once divided up in two tracks.
Whatever you’re practicing, try to play it every possible way. For any
given riff:
• Look at how it lays out in different positions in terms of how many

notes there are on each string. Each layout will lend itself to
different kinds of articulations, slurs, etc.
• See and hear how it fits into a chord
• Find every possible place you can play it
• Every possible fingering
• See how it sounds over every possible bass note
Keep searching for all the possible treasures.
Always organize riffs by the chords they go over because the

chords come first.
See things on the neck in terms of geometric shapes but always

analyze them over all the possible bass notes.
If you play something only with one fingering, you only know it one
way.
When you’re soloing, you want to be able to see the duplications of

chord forms.
Practice both position playing (along the fret axis) and playing along
the string axis. Each one lends itself to different approaches and
teaches you different things about the neck.
Always visualize what you’re going to play next before you play it so
you can move there gracefully when the chord changes (you can
also anticipate it or come in late on purpose).
You never quit studying: there’s always something new to learn. The
more you study, the more it lights up, little by little.
Don’t see your fingerboard through the fingerings, see the notes
first.
Knowing where on the neck to play

something that you hear
Don’t see things through your fingers. Look at the neck in terms of
sound. Music is a listening art, you must be a very good listener.
You want to train yourself to know what something is going to sound

like before you play it.
Brad plays a simple two note melody and shows several possibility
of harmonies that could go under it.
For any given melody note, there are 12 possible bass notes.
Analyze all the different chords you can play under a given note.
Pre-hear where it is you want to go.
Practice ear training–hear something then visualize where to play it.
Link your ear to the fingerboard, not to your fingers–any given note
can be played with many different fingerings depending on what
sound you want, what chord you’re playing under it, etc.
First you want to learn to hear lines. Once you have musical ideas,
practice singing them and then finding them on the neck.
Clear out your head and really listen to the first note you play and
then think where that note takes you. That brings you into the realm
of intervals. Brad gives the example of perfect fourths. Practice
soloing with perfect fourths for a few minutes every day, for
example. This is a great way to link your fingers to your imagination
because after a while, you’ll hear a perfect fourth and instantly know
how to play it.
Take one small thing and stay on that one thing for a while in a
particular place on the neck until you can pre-hear it and know how
to play it.
You’re always striving to equip yourself to follow your musical

inspiration wherever it goes.
Don’t be afraid to play as slowly as you need to.
Playing with another guitarist (or

keyboardist)
Allocate the workload in terms of registers. For example, one
person can play a bubble part in the low register while the other can
play two or three note clusters on the high strings.
Every guitar player should know how to play bubble parts. It brings
a great texture in many situations. Often it’s the only thing you can
play with a keyboard player because they can tend to overplay and
hog the sonic landscape.
Know your theory so you know how to extend chords and add
extensions the higher strings.
Another thing to try: sync up with the other guitar player so exactly
that you can’t hear that two of you are playing.
The other guitarist has to be a team player too.

Brad can now recognize keyboard voicings because he’s practiced
close voicings on the guitar.
If you’re playing a song that doesn’t need a second part, just lay
out. If you have everybody playing all the time on 10 it gets old
really quickly. Always thinks of dynamic.
Playing in and out of the key

If you can’t play “in,” you have no business playing “out.” Make sure
you have a handle on the roots and 5ths of any progression you
play.
You can use upper and lower chromatic neighbors of chord tones to
get an out sound. You can also look at it as “slide slipping,” where
for example if the “in” sound is D minor pentatonic, you can play a
little bit in Eb minor pentatonic to get the out sound and come back
in by landing on one of the “in” notes.
Use motifs and move them around to get different sounds.
When you’re soloing, you want to take the listener on a journey. If

you lose them, it wasn’t much of an expedition for them. You have
to keep coming back to something they recognize.
Always have your destination in sight in your brain and on your

neck–always be aware of where “in” is.
Have a vocabulary of things that are palatable to listener’s ears.
Rumba Rhythm
If you learn how to play latin rhythms, it serves you really well for
learning funk rhythms because they both use a 16th note grid work.
You want to always have your hand in the motion of the grid work to
stay in the groove, but you don’t always want your dead notes to be
audible as in the classic funk chicka playing. You want to also be
able to make your ghost notes very subtle, just for yourself to stay
in the groove.
Practicing African melodic lines and rhythms is also great practice

for getting your rhythm playing together.
Practice limiting yourself melodically (such as just roots and 3rds)

and varying your rhythms.
Classical vs Rock Guitar

The problem with having muscle memory is that if you’ve only done
something one way, your hands will automatically go there and it
will be difficult to do something else.
For Brad, classical guitar and rock guitar are two different animals.
Holding the guitar in classical position isn’t practical for wrapping

your thumb around the neck in the way that you need to for rock
guitar.
In rock guitar you don’t play on the same part of your fingertips as
you do in classical guitar.
Classical guitar gives you independence, teaches you how to

stretch, teaches you to hear polyphonically and gives you more
subtlety in how you approach your plucking. You learn to become
more efficient in your finger postures.
If you’re a classical player going to rock guitar, you’ll have to

change everything about the way you play. It’s harder in this
direction because you’ve learned to play the “right” way.
The old classical musicians were great improvisers. They could

improvise fugues.
If you play rock guitar, you’re used to playing rhythm and lead. You
don’t hear the kinds of things that classical players hear, like the
voice leading of inner lines.

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Finger Exercises

Be aware of and eliminate unnecessary tension

The most important things if you want to have great technique is

Practice hybrid picking.

When you’re practicing motor skills things, such as an Eadd9

Speed is a byproduct of accuracy.

Make sure your instrument is properly adjusted. Guitar playing isn’t

Learn to move your fingers without gripping.

Always link theory to every physical exercise you play.

Practice everything at different dynamic levels.

With electric, practice with different levels of gain.

Viewing the fretboard

• Look at how it lays out in different positions in terms of how many

Keep searching for all the possible treasures.

Always organize riffs by the chords they go over because the

See things on the neck in terms of geometric shapes but always

When you’re soloing, you want to be able to see the duplications of

Knowing where on the neck to play

You want to train yourself to know what something is going to sound

Pre-hear where it is you want to go.

Practice ear training–hear something then visualize where to play it.

You’re always striving to equip yourself to follow your musical

Don’t be afraid to play as slowly as you need to.

Playing with another guitarist (or

The other guitarist has to be a team player too.

Playing in and out of the key

Use motifs and move them around to get different sounds.

When you’re soloing, you want to take the listener on a journey. If

Always have your destination in sight in your brain and on your

Have a vocabulary of things that are palatable to listener’s ears.

Practicing African melodic lines and rhythms is also great practice

Practice limiting yourself melodically (such as just roots and 3rds)

Classical vs Rock Guitar

Holding the guitar in classical position isn’t practical for wrapping

Classical guitar gives you independence, teaches you how to

If you’re a classical player going to rock guitar, you’ll have to

The old classical musicians were great improvisers. They could

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