• What Golf Can Teach You About Focus

    Many of you know I’m taking golf lessons on the side and have practically fell in love with the game.

    But I just had a revelation that could help you with your focus.

    Think about the golf course for a second…

    There are 18 holes.

    You start at hole 1…

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    Justin Bieber Never Say Never Piano Chords

    In this post, I figured I’d switch things up by showing you how easy it is to pick out Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never Piano Chords.

    For years, I’ve been preaching how most popular songs use extremely simple chords and the same recurring patterns over and over.

    My 4-year old daughter, Jadyn, like many other young girls is a huge fan so she pulled me to the piano and made me learn Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never chords…

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    Blast From The Past: How The Piano Made Me A Popular Guy In High School…

    As many of you know, we’re moving into our next home. With 3 kids now, we’ve outgrown our current place.

    So with that comes packing and reorganizing stuff. And since my wife has adopted this “decluttering” philosophy, it means methodically going through EVERYTHING to see what deserves to be kept, donating and trashing everything else… not just throwing stuff in boxes and figuring it out later (as I probably would have done).

    In all that, I came across my old high school yearbook. I flipped to this one page and there I was, “Mr. Jackrabbit!”

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    Another Approach To Modes & Improvisation (Advanced)

    Yesterday, we briefly introduced modes.

    We learned that although they have fancy greek names and sound all intricate, they are no more than individual scales that simply start and end on a different tone of the major scale.

    So you literally play ONE scale but you start and end on different notes of that scale, depending on the mode you want to play. It’s that simple.

    What I’ll show you now isn’t quite as simple…

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    The Secret To Modes

    In your playing, there comes a time when you start getting into soloing and improvisation… and one place to start is “modes.”

    Every major scale comes with 7 modes. At first glance, they can appear intimidating: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian.

    These are greek names to describe each mode of the scale. They sound harder than they are to play, trust me! Let’s get started…

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    Ask Jermaine: “What Are Minor-Major 7 Chords?”

    This week’s question is about “minor-major 7” chords and comes from Amy S in Phoenix, AZ:

    “Jermaine, I’ve heard of major and minor 7 chords but I just heard someone say minor-major 7 and thought they were joking until I realized this chord really exists. Do you mind shedding some light on it?”

    My Answer…

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    Here’s A Quick Way To “Open” All Your Major Chords

    This lesson will be short and sweet.

    There are many ways to play chords.

    You can play them exactly as written in root position, first, and second inversion… but this gets boring.

    Or you can choose to be more “stylish” with your chord voicings. One of the ways you can switch things up is by understanding “open” voicings…

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