One of the benefits of going through the internet to find the best guitar lesson content is that you will find some gems. I recently came across this playlist from Guitar World on YouTube and it’s a great series of six videos from 2018 that look at John Petrucci’s approach to the guitar. What better way to learn the guitar than to learn from one of the masters!

Below we’ll get into what takeaways can be had for beginning guitarists from these videos as well as some notes from the individual videos.

You can find the transcription of the video and the lesson examples can be found on the Guitar World website. Oddly the videos are not part of the article on the website so open the article/examples in another browser window while you watch the videos below.

John Petrucci Method Take-Aways for Beginners

Even though John is one of the top players out there today he is also a fantastic teacher, which really comes through in the videos. While there may be some language or concepts that don’t make sense in the beginning you can come back to these and pick up something new each time. 

After watching these videos the things that stuck out to me for beginner players are: 

• Little discoveries, in the beginning, make playing exciting. All those moments of “Oh! That’s how they do that!” really are fun and keeps the motivation and curiosity going.

• Those little things you don’t pay attention to can also make the difference between sounding really good and accidentally destroying the lick.

  • The things you do to address these like preventing extra strings from ringing out will just be incorporated into your playing over time without you really noticing, but make a real difference in the quality of your playing.

• Because there are octaves that are repeating up the neck once you learn particular shapes and patterns you can shift the pattern up and down the guitar.

• If you find learning a technique boring or tedious you can come up with your own riff or etude around the idea to make it more interesting, or combine techniques together so you can address multiple concepts at one time.

Who is John Petrucci?

John Petrucci is one of the top metal and rock guitar players of all time. He was born in Long Island, New York, and has gone on to release 14 studio albums with his band Dream Theater. You can read about all his accomplishments on his website: JohnPetrucci.com.

The thing that sets John apart from most metal players is that he’s able to be melodic with his playing and builds implied harmonies into his riffs. The guitar isn’t so “in your face” as some metal rhythm playing can be.

He’s also one of the most articulate, clean, pickers out there which we’ll cover in a section below. You can tell that he has spent a lot of time with a metronome and trying to get each note he plays to ring out on its own.

Vibrato, Articulation, Palm Muting, and Fine-Tuning Your Playing

With this second video, I couldn’t help but think of how much technology has changed. He speaks to slowing down an Iron Maiden record to learn a solo and realizing that vibrato is a series of fast bends. Although with the comeback of vinyl records you could do this too in order to figure out the songs you like.

The big takeaways for me with this lesson really do hinge on addressing smaller performance issues once you have your right and left hands working together and synchronized. Once you don’t have to worry about which string you’re picking or where your left hand is it’s easier to move on to the articulations. 

The little things that can make the lines sound bad with small bends, extra strings ringing out that shouldn’t be, pulling the strings sharp, or not playing with vibrato. These little things will make even the simplest of guitar phrases sound really musical.

Extra strings ringing out will be a persistent issue, even for the guitar greats. Two ways around this are using your fretting hand’s fingertips to mute the strings next to the note that you’re voicing or preventing the other strings from ringing out through palm muting with your picking hand.

Power Chord Variations

This is one of the main concepts of the John Petrucci sound, so if you’re into Dream Theater or want to have a more melodic rock or metal sound pay attention to videos three and four!

One of the things he learned from Rush was to use the big open chords or adding open strings to the power chord to make the guitar sound larger. This is especially useful if you’re playing in a trio setting.

Power chords, a fifth interval between two strings, sound amazing when turned up loud and distorted, and are a great first thing to learn for beginners. As you progress as a player they are also a great platform to expand on as John shows in the third and fourth videos of the series.

If you’re looking for a progressive (prog) metal sound the third video will unlock a lot of that for you. By using interval inversions, or changing the order of the notes so that something other than the root is on the bottom of the chord, you can imply harmonies with your playing even if it’s cranked loud and distorted.

Something to keep in mind while you play around with power chord variations: You may have to adjust your amp settings. If the gain is too high or if your distortion pedal is adding a lot to your signal you may have to dial it back a bit to make the notes sound like distinct tones. Too much distortion or gain can make these sound muddy and indistinct and could take away from how cool this concept can be!

Navigating Scale Positions in Different Ways

If you find sitting down and learning techniques boring or arduous use your creativity and make up an etude or riff to make learning a technique a lot more fun. This is an idea John said he learned from one of his idols and uses it to come up with new ways of exploring patterns he already knows in new ways.

For example, he shows how you can take a scale shape pattern in a particular position and then outline the triads within the scale shape. Starting with one note per string, then two notes per string, then three notes per string (sequencing in groups of six), finally four notes per string using passing tones outside of the scale

These examples make sure that you’re learning multiple concepts with one example then for an additional challenge you can work on the sequences in different time signatures (ex: 5/4)

Learning scales up one string is an important lesson because you’ll notice that there are repeating finger shapes that make up a scale. If you play a scale-up one string you’ll see there are three shapes that will get you from the beginning to the end of the scale.

If you then expand it to playing the scale across two adjacent strings there will be a total of six patterns. Because of how the strings are tuned and the way the guitar is as an instrument you’ll be able to apply these same patterns across the guitar once you get them under your fingers.

I hope you have found this helpful and that this shows how even with the more advanced lessons there are takeaways for players across the spectrum. Feel free to come back to these lessons over time to see what else you can take away from them as you progress as a player. I know I have some things I’m going to work on now!

thumbnail image credit: Photo by Joey Nicotra on Unsplash