When I was a wee lad first learning how to solo on guitar, my teacher showed me a bunch of cool scales that blew my mind. I thought this is it, this is what I have been looking for to propel me to guitar god status. All I’d need to do is to learn all the scales, be able to play them really fast and shazam, people would surely be reading about me in the magazines! Haha, we can all dream!

I did learn them all and fifty ways to play them up and down the fretboard; building up quite a bit of speed and technique in the process. In reality what those scales gave me was a great warm up routine. What it didn’t do was teach me how to become more musical.

Fast forward too many years to mention and eons of running scales, picking patterns, hammer-on and pull-off exercises. I decided I needed to start warming up in a new way. I set my intention and purpose of becoming more musical every time I picked up the guitar to warm up and devised a three part warm up routine. Starting today...

When I decided I wanted to learn guitar I did it all backwards. Instead of starting on an acoustic, I started out on an electric guitar. It was the ugliest no name $79 dollar electric guitar you could find, but it had distortion and that was all that mattered. I just couldn’t imagine playing Crazy Train on acoustic, lol! Little did I know, that electric was so bad I would have had an easier time playing the songs I wanted on an acoustic.

But usually, the story starts something like “Mom/Dad, I want to learn to play guitar”. Then if you’re lucky, an acoustic guitar appears out of the ether for christmas or your next birthday! Or maybe it’s later in life after you’ve paid your dues with your career and you decide to reconnect with that dream you had as a kid of learning to play all of your favorite songs. I didn’t actually buy an acoustic guitar until about 25 years later. I had already been teaching guitar for about 8 years when my buddy...