As I mentioned in my first post Lesson Zero - ear training and quality of musical hearing is the most important feature of every musician.  Countless music geniuses keep on saying this on many occassions, including my personal favourites Pat Methney and Miles Davis. It is not how many notes we play, not important how fast we can play them as long as our notes are "kicking" by sitting well in time and creating interesting melodies. And inner hearing is the origin of our melodies and our rhytms.

​Ear training is a huge subject and there is plenty of methods and systems.  I have been using Ear Master Pro software many years and it is quite nice but....  But nothing compares to transcibing real music of your heroes.  This is the best and fastest way  to develop your ears and this was the only method available to those masters back then. Again, 

Hi guys, this week I have some mindblowing harmony game for you - based on a great Joe Pass Blues in Bb. Only 3 choruses, 12 bars each,  stuffed with chords like crazy:)  The big thing here is to: 

And there is plenty of great harmonic devices like: 
- tritone substitutions
- secondary dominants
- alterations and color tones in almost every chord

Some more explanation you can find in a pdf I have created with the changes trnsposed to all 12keys: 

Hi Guys, this is first article on my new guitar blog. I was thinking how to organize so huge challenge like learning and mastering an instrument - guitar - in my case, and learning music in general.

Since the thing is so wide let's slit it to smaller pieces that we can digest one by one. That's why I divide the subject of learning the instrument in 3 parts:

1. Physical skills - what you do with your body: muscles, bones, hands,fingers.  This is technique of playing and is very important on any instrument. 
2. Aural skills - what you hear and how you hear sounds. Ability to know what is going on in the music and equally important skill to "imagine" the sounds in your head before you even play them. This includes interval ear training, harmonic ear training and spectral ear training  in both directions; passive and active.
3. Mental skills - knowledge or theory learned and memorized.  Forms of the pieces, chord changes, memorized music repertoire, theory behind chords, scales and improvisation techniques.

Now before we go on deeper in details about all three parts let's state the 1st rule of practicing: