I love heady, high-concept guitar lessons, but this isn’t one of them! I wanted to share some very cool and extremely useful blues turnarounds with you that I u...
One thousand years from now, musicologists will have had ample time and perspective to refine the short list of musicians and composers from our times, whose wo...
It’s late in the evening, the sun has just sunk below the horizon and TrueFire is hosting one of our traditional house concerts for local student members, frien...
We all have our own personal lists of favorite guitar solos? I’d bet dollars to donuts that at least one of your favorite solos was recorded on a Steely Dan rec...
Imagine you were told that some day you will be a caricature in a cartoon. You would probably say "Yeah right"! Well, that's exactly what happened to me…
Bes...
Fareed Haque has been voted the “Best World Guitarist” by Guitar Player Magazine. Of course, that made total sense, but it also got me wondering…what exactly is...
We know the power of music, and most of us believe that it can lead to world peace. Yet, how many of us use it to its potential? I had not until this summer whe...
David Hamburger was the very first artist who dared to collaborate with us back in the day when instructional books, audio CDs, and DVDs ruled the music educati...
We can’t say it enough — the not-so-secret ingredients of TrueFire are the artists and educators that we are privileged to collaborate with. Not just amazin...
The world of jazz is an interesting world comprised of a complex, dense musical language. For someone looking to start learning jazz it is often very hard to si...
Hey there everyone in TrueFire Land! I hope all is well and that you’ve been enjoying all of the great articles, lessons, interviews and podcasts provided in Tr...
Greetings from the Jersey Shore! Last time we met in Riff was the debut issue where I served up a lesson on some cool encounters with the 7#9 chord. All three e...
The spectrum of jazz-inspired blues guitar styles is pretty wide ranging. You’ve got classic blues artists like T-Bone Walker, Pee Wee Crayton and Lonnie Johnso...
Many of the world's most popular guitar players, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, played in what is called a “power trio.”...
The first year of my journey with TrueFire was filled with exciting challenges; I was asked to completely revamp the production workflow, make the best of the s...
One of the reasons my recent TrueFire course, Chord Navigator: CAGED Triads, seems to have struck a chord (pun intended) is that we guitarists play rhythm most ...
Larry Graham created the slap bass technique to emulate the role of a drummer. Larry took the dilemma of not having a drummer, a challenging situation, and turn...
When I first moved away from a small town on the Florida coast to pursue my dream of playing music in Nashville in 1990, I set my sights on being the best a...
The augmented scale is a six-note scale made up of two augmented triads a half step apart. You can start the augmented scale on different scale tones to get spe...
Most guitar players avoid using wide intervals because the nature of scale and arpeggio patterns tend to keep the fingers confined. Piano players have a great s...
“I’ve always been very intense about anything I wanted to do. I think that’s part of my character, being intense about whatever it is I want to get into, whethe...
ABOUT RIFF RAFF
Hi there, my name is Shane Theriot. I’m a professional musician and guitarist. I like stories. I mean I REALLY like stories. Over the yea...
RIFF sheds light on the hearts and minds of TrueFire’s artists and educators, but nothing speaks like their music…it’s like a study “In their own words.” En...
The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand resonated in the ears of 211-million people around the world after its release in November 29th of 1963. 18-million of tho...
