Greetings fellow metal guitarist!

Let me cut to the chase by asking you something, 

• Is expressing yourself on the guitar something you find difficult or confusing? 

• Do you feel stuck using the same old “boxes” whenever you play? 

• Does it feel like you write the same riffs over and over? Or have trouble developing your ideas?

It’s not the end of the world if you answered yes to any, or all of these.

In fact, you are part of the overwhelming majority of guitar players.

However, it can be a frustrating plateau. I know from experience…

In fact it wasn’t until 15+ years into my guitar journey that I started to be able to express myself freely on the instrument.

What was the turning point? 

I learned the fretboard. 

For so long, being creative felt like such a guessing game to me. I was just trying different notes randomly, waiting for my ear to tell me if it sounded “right” or not.

It felt like trying to find a piece of coal in a pitch black room. 

But once I learned the fretboard: I finally had the “words” necessary to craft musical sentences and paragraphs, and articulate exactly what I wanted to say.

The truth was: before I knew the fretboard, I didn’t have the ammunition to develop my ideas. 

I always like to use the “painter” analogy with my students.

Trying to be creative when you only know one scale shape or box, is like trying to paint a picture with just a red paintbrush.

Sure, it’s true that you could paint a decent picture with just red, but over time, you might seek out more variety.

You might try to “break out of the box.”

But you can’t, because you are limited in how much of the fretboard you can use.

You don’t know any other scale shapes, or have any other tools to help you bring variety to your playing.

You only have a red paintbrush.

The No-Nonsense Guides serve to give you these other tools: things like the pentatonic system, modes of the major scale, arpeggios, triads, shell voicings, modal interchange, intervals, non-diatonic scales, and a lot of other things — will become your other paintbrushes.

Then, when you have your “blue”, “green”, “yellow”, “purple”, “orange”, etc. paintbrushes, guess what?

You’ll be able to “paint” whatever you want.

You’ll not only know the whole fretboard inside and out, you’ll know how to apply that knowledge when being creative.

Learning the fretboard completely changed my guitar journey. It finally allowed me to feel in control of what I was playing on the guitar, and I am extremely proud to say that this transformation has already been experienced by thousands of students who have gone through the No-Nonsense Guides.