Jeff's Guitar Tools
Two players and a genre taken apart, a band to play with, and the chords and scales to play over it.
Everything runs in the browser, from a page you can open anywhere. Pick a tool, or start from one of the places below.
—
—
Simple
Variant
recorded
Shapes
Drill
Key
Scale
Ask about
Shape
Play
Which note of the chord is this?
Click the note you heard, where you heard it.
Drill
Key
Tempo
80 BPM
Notes a beat
Beats a chord
Pattern
Scale
Pattern
Notes a string
Direction
Pattern
Strings
Shapes
Box
Position
Mode
Track
Key
Length
Chords
Style Deep Dives
Deep dive 1
Jimi Hendrix
The thumb over the neck, the split chord and its hammered colors, the 7♯9, the minor pentatonic over a major chord, the box at the 12th fret and the one above it, the wah — and every side of him the records show: the soul ballad and the major one, the fuzz riff and the riff rock at speed, the slow blues and the fast shuffle, the country blues and the one-chord blues, the funk, the cycle, the R&B, the waltz, the minor rock strum, the jazz shuffle with the wah. Fifteen feels with rhythm, lead and mixed parts, a riff after every scale, the catalog by album, thirty short lessons built around improvising rhythm and lead together, every hard technique linked to a human explaining it, and every claim cited.
Open the study →
Deep dive 2
Psychobilly
The rockabilly under it — the boom-chicka and its 6th, the walking pickup line, Gallup's triplet pull-offs, Luther Perkins' palm-muted train — what the Meteors, the Klub Foot, the second wave and the third did with it — straight eighths in minor keys, the ♭2 and the ♭5, downstrokes and gallops at two hundred, tremolo picking, the Bigsby dip, the slapped upright — and everything the Reverend Horton Heat plays besides: the honky-tonk shuffle, Texas swing, the Tex-Mex polka, straight-eight rock and roll, the slow blues, the lounge ballad, the bluegrass crosspick. Fifteen feels with rhythm, lead and mixed parts, a riff after every scale, the Reverend's catalog by style, thirty-three short lessons built around improvising rhythm and lead together, every hard technique linked to a human explaining it, and every claim cited.
Open the study →
Deep dive 3
Stevie Ray Vaughan
One hand doing two jobs: the Texas shuffle's bass line with the muted upstroke between, the thumb chords of the minor strut with a riff under them, the 9ths and 13ths of the slow blues slid in and the Albert King box over them — bends stacked, curled a quarter tone, two strings at once — the open-string runs from Lonnie Mack, the horn stabs of the funk blues, Lenny's maj13 and its 6th chords under the bar, Riviera's ii–V in octaves. Eight feels with rhythm, lead and mixed parts, a course of eleven lessons built around improvising rhythm and lead together, every hard technique linked to a human explaining it, and every claim cited.
Open the study →
Each study is also a course — the same page as lessons, one piece at a time, with the place kept in this browser: Course at the top of either page, or the line on its card once you have started.
Favorites
The things you starred, each with the link that reopens it as it was: a card on a deep dive, the Jam tab as it was set, a drill as it was set.