This is your cue to stop doom-scrolling and learn some handy guitar hacks to up your game in just a few minutes
Doom-scrolling – it’s the bane of all our lives, and a crutch none of us can shake. Let's be honest, you can’t even remember why you loaded up Instagram 10 minutes ago, and now you’re watching an old woman wholly underestimate the Coke and Mentos challenge. It’s hilarious, but you can feel your brain rotting while your guitar collects dust in the corner.
Social media has its pitfalls – oh, so many pitfalls! – but it can also be a staggeringly effective platform for getting across information in bite-size chunks very quickly. Here at MMA, we’re launching a new series, lifting the best guitar hacks we can find and putting them here – easily in reach, with no oddball reel distractions.
Five-minute guitar hacks does exactly what it says on the tin…well, headline. You won’t be on this page for long, and that’s a good thing.
Dip in, get inspired, then put your phone down, pick your guitar up, and get playing.
Knowing chords in any key – made simple
Our first hack comes from the excellent Brandon D’Eon, who has devised a quick way to know which major, minor, and diminished chords are in any key without having to do mental maths.
If you didn’t know, every key has seven chords we can play with – three major, three minor, and one lonely diminished.
The key here is one simple pattern, as shown below. Starting on the root note on the sixth string, play the same fret on the fifth string, then move two frets up from that. So there’s a power chord shape in there, with a stepping stone along the way, or a sort of sideways 7.
These three notes are the roots of all the major chords in that key.
To find the minor chords, slide down three frets from the key root note and repeat the same pattern.
For the diminished, simply slide down one fret from the root, as that's where the diminished chord always lives. That’s why playing a diminished chord, then a power chord one fret up always sounds super satisfying. Resolve that mother.
This hack is great for building progressions around a riff you’ve stumbled upon. Chord progressions can give a song movement, and grandiosity, and be a way to build verse, chorus, and bridge sections. They’re way more satisfying to the average listener than just stapling riffs together, so use this hack to your advantage and elevate your songwriting.
The 'Rip off Meshuggah' game
Everyone loves Meshuggah. If someone says they don’t, give them a tab of acid and tell them to listen to Catch Thirty Three
But on a serious note, the Swedish riff-mongers have an iconic and hugely inspirational sound that has helped spawn some of the greatest modern metal bands around. Trying to understand the theory behind their riffs to apply to your own songwriting, though, can break even the nerdiest of brains.
The solution? Don't think – use dice!
Taylor Pace’s Meshuggah hack is a great way to spark inspiration and come up with a fun polymeter riff that requires very little thinking, and it can also be a great exercise to test your rhythm chips.
If you’re a DAW user, map out a very basic 4/4 drum beat, with a cymbal on every beat, and a snare hit on the three count. Loop this beat for four bars.
Then, roll a dice three times. If you don’t have an incomplete Monopoly set lying around to steal one from, just Google ‘roll dice’.
The three numbers you get are you the amount of times you will program in a kick drum before leaving a gap and moving on to the next number. In his example, Pace uses eighth note kick drums with 16th-note rests between groupings, but this can be messed about with to your heart’s content.
Copy and paste that pattern until you’ve gone beyond four bars. Any excess notes can be stuck out. You’ll likely end up with, X number of full loops and a weird shorter version. This is the Meshuggah way of cheating the polymeter.
Finally, chug along to the kick drum pattern, adding in some cheeky extra note changes or bends for added spice.
I played this game, and rolled 6-1-5 – you can check out my results below.
Animals As Leaders vibes with two chord shapes
Another great Instagram account to follow is Rygén. His videos are slick, they have super useful on-screen tabs, and they're a cheat code to feeling inspired.
His two chord shape wonder progression really caught my eye. As the name suggests, he uses only two chord shapes, but keeps moving them around the fretboard to create a really cool vibe.
The first shape is a sus2 chord rooted on the fourth string. Take a normal power chord, then on the next string up follow the same pattern, so you’ll have frets like 4-6-8, or 10-12-14.
The second shape is an inverted minor. So after your root, you are going one string up and two frets lower, then one more string up, and one more fret lower.
And that’s it. Move the shapes around and enjoy some really huge, expansive-sounding chords – try different fret combinations, tie them together with some cheeky runs, and hey presto. You’ve written a banger.
Not every song needs a million chord shapes - the amount of songs written solely with power chords proves that. Embracing minimalism can create wonderful results.
If you’ve come across a guitar hack we should know about, please contact us.
We hope you enjoy this series and it helps you to doom scroll less, and modern metal more.
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