Bob performs every Sunday with his son on violin, Mike Williams at the Charleston Grill, at Charleston Place Hotel.  He performs jazz and classic rock songs on the acoustic guitar to entertain the guests.

He arranges classic rock tunes from Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Guns and Roses to new popular rock such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, and more.  He has been performing there since 1996.

Students are welcome to come and sit and listen to what Bob can do.  It’s free – come sit in the lounge section of the restaurant and have a drink or some food and enjoy listening.

What’s the best way to start learning chords on the guitar and what is the usual progression of learning
the various types of chords? My suggestion is to learn all the basic chords first, which is the logical
beginning. These are the basic chords to start with: A.B,C.D.E,F,G, Am,Bm.Dm,Em,A7,B7,C7,D7, E7and
G7. These chords can all be played on the first few frets of the guitar. Everyone starts with these chords
and you then can play some basic songs. Most songs that you hear on the radio do not use these
chords. Rock groups and other bands use BAR Chords. These are chords that move up and down the
neck. They are called bar chords because you put your finger across the strings “barring” many at once.
This means we can move one form up and down the neck and it becomes different chords. You cannot
move basic chords because of the open strings. When we play bar chords we are controlling the strings
and that’s big. How important are the bar chords? We can say that the Beatles wrote most of their
songs with 8 main bar chords, just moving them up and down the neck. Every fret changes the name
of the chord so with 8 main bar chords we can play ALL major, minor, 7th, and m7th chords in music. I
will show you these chord forms in your lessons. After the basic bar chords we go to intermediate and
advanced chords. These are chords like Amajor7th, Dm7-5, Gaug., G9, Bb13 and F#dim. These chords
are used mostly in jazz and blues type songs.

The final thing about chords you need to know is how to build them. You should be able to play any
chord there is by “building” it. This means you have to know some music theory. Music theory is a
big part of my lessons with you. I had to take two years of music theory in college to really know how
music works. This is standard if you go to music school. Without it you are never going to go very far. If
you want to play some Green Day or maybe Wild Thing then you do not need much theory. If you ever
expect to get into jazz or blues and especially chord melody finger style playing then it’s going to take
forever to develop your playing without a good knowledge of theory of “how” chords work. A couple of
samples of chord development would be

Knocking on Heaven’s door- 4 basic chords G, D, Am, C

Nowhere man- E, F#m, G#m,  Am,  A, B

Georgia on my Mind or Misty- Intermediate and advanced moveable bar chords

I go over all the correct fingerings for each scale in the lessons. Fingering is super important because every finger has a correct place in a good solo. Also without the right fingering you can forget about speed with your leads. Scale speed is also dependant on correct playing with the right hand. The wrist and arm movement is something you want to have right. Too much movement will slow you down and you will not be as accurate with what you are trying to do. I would also highly suggest using a metronome in playing scales. The most knowledgeable teachers I had was my college instructors. They all used a metronome regularly in their playing. Funny thing, the students that need it the most never seem to use one at all. One last point and this is important. You don’t need to learn a hundred scale forms to be a good player. Make sure you have two forms of each, one with the root note on the 6th string and one with the root note on the 5th string. If you can do this you will always be ready to play solos.

Now which scales do you use for the solo? I will need to go over that in the lessons!