Hamish Dyson
I started playing guitar at age 15. I have played classical, rock and jazz styles for twenty five years, and been teaching around Adelaide for over twelve years. I've taken classical guitar lessons with some great teachers. I am mainly self taught on rock, influences being Midnight Oil, Grinspoon, Cold Chisel, RHCP, Violent Femmes and many, many more. My jazz inspiration is Latin American music such as the bossa novas of Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the arrangements of Venezuealan popular songs by Alirio Diaz. I play an Ian Noyce 'Dolphin' guitar.

My site is made with the freeservers.com site builder
I started my site in 2003, so that my students could get tabs and lesson material during holidays. If I get enough interest in online lessons, or a sponsor for the project I may put it onto a server without the pop-up advertisments.

What is effortless lyrical improvisation?
Every instrument has its own dialect of improvisation, the guitar is really an instrument for chords, this is its traditional voice. The first great guitarist to record single note leads was Django Reinhart in the 1930's. Since the beginning of the 'electronic' guitar with Jimi Hendrix the single note lead developed quickly to be perfected by players like Carlos Santana, John McLauglin and Al di Miola. In single note improvisation, to sound really lyrical you should play something that is singable. You want to be able to play scale passages and broken chords (also called arpeggios or chord runs) freely over a chord progression, which may include changing keys. I recommend using scale passages made from the seven modes of the major scale and the seven modes of the altered scale. (altered scale modes are the same as "jazz" melodic minor and "overtone" scale modes) I will use some 12 bar blues examples to show how to choose which scale to use over which chord. There are other useful scales, and most students learn the "pentatonic" scales to begin with. This site is dedicated those seeking to escape the limitations of the pentatonic scale patterns.

Major Scale Modal Shapes
My discovery of seven shapes for playing modes of the major scale

Altered Scale Modal Shapes
Fingerboard shapes and names of the melodic minor

Some facts on guitar tablature (TAB)
Guitar tablature has been around in various forms since about the year 1500, and I believe it is a very useful form of musical notation. The so called "Classical" or "correct" guitar notation is often effectively unreadable, due to the number of ledger lines and notes on a single stave.

As of November 2004, I have developed my Tab style to a new level, where the count line now has numbers in brackets to show either beats elapsing with no new notes, (held notes or rests) or the timing of notes made with the left hand, that is bends, releases, slides up or down, hammers and snaps. This means that the Tab lines can be simplified a lot.

I am usually leaving repeated notes out of the Tab line now, and the count line has to be read to see how many times to play each note. This should help any of you who need to improve their counting, as its important to be able to count say, five notes like "(1) 2 + 3 4 +", as this tells you not just that it's five notes, but what their duration is.