Confused about altered and extended guitar chords? Here’s the theory behind them – and how they can supercharge your songwriting

Terms such as ‘altered’ and ‘extended’ chords are relatively simple to explain. Extended chords add other notes from the scale to the existing root-3rd-5th triad (for example, C-E-G), so if we add a 7th, we’d call this a major 7th chord (C-E-G-B). We can extend up to a 13th in this way by progressively adding […] More

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“Like Gretsch’s Duo Jet, it was surely spurred by Gibson’s success with the Les Paul”: The mysterious history of the Guild M-75 Aristocrat, the blue-blooded hollowbody played by John Lee Hooker, John Mayer, St. Vincent and Dan Auerbach

Guild Guitars co-founder Alfred (real name Avram) Dronge was born in Poland in 1911 and emigrated to the US, via a two-year stay in Paris, in 1916, settling in New York City. As an accomplished musician, he was first a guitar teacher and club player, before opening a music store in the mid-1930s in Manhattan’s […] More

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