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While using a metronome, Dennis covers essential techniques and exercises to obtain great rhythm and timing.
Taught by Dennis Hodges in Metal with Dennis seriesLength: 35:00Difficulty: 2.0 of 5
Get ready to rock in this metal lesson series with Dennis Hodges. From 80's Metal to modern Dennis loves it all.
Lesson 1
Dennis covers important guitar basics such as note names and technical exercises.
Length: 33:00 Difficulty: 1.0 Members OnlyLesson 2
Dennis introduces power chords and basic rhythm concepts. Both subjects are very important to the metal genre.
Length: 22:00 Difficulty: 1.5 Members OnlyLesson 3
Learn a variety of essential techniques commonly used in the metal genre, including palm muting, string slides, and chord slides.
Length: 36:52 Difficulty: 2.0 FREELesson 4
Metal lesson 4 brings you some info on hammer-ons, pull-offs, trills, bending, and the infamous pinch harmonics.
Length: 45:25 Difficulty: 2.0 Members OnlyLesson 5
Dennis delivers left hand techniques and exercises, with topics including spider walking / riffing, octaves, stretching and 4 practice riffs.
Length: 62:36 Difficulty: 3.0 Members OnlyLesson 6
While using a metronome, Dennis covers essential techniques and exercises to obtain great rhythm and timing.
Length: 35:00 Difficulty: 2.0 Members OnlyLesson 7
Written just for JamPlay and his Metal series, this song will allow you to put all your techniques to use in a musical manner.
Length: 28:54 Difficulty: 3.0 Members OnlyLesson 8
In this lesson Dennis teaches the following common time signatures: 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8. Dennis explains each signature and provides a short example for illustration.
Length: 33:12 Difficulty: 1.5 Members OnlyLesson 9
This time around Dennis explains odd time signatures. Similar to Part 1, he uses a musical example to illustrate each new signature.
Length: 45:07 Difficulty: 2.5 Members OnlyLesson 10
Dennis continues his metal series with part two of his look at rhythm and timing.
Length: 56:24 Difficulty: 2.5 Members OnlyLesson 11
This lesson is the long lost sibling to "Left Hand Overload."
Length: 52:11 Difficulty: 3.0 Members Only
About Dennis Hodges
View Full Biography
For better or worse, Dennis Hodges cannot stop playing music, and (he hopes) will never stop playing music.
Growing up in Flint, Michigan, Dennis had a tremendous passion for drawing. He couldn't stop copying moves from bands he saw on MTV, though, and it didn't help that his parents filled the house with Santana, Stevie Ray, and Allman Bros. (on real records, no less!) so it wasn't long till he got his first guitar. It was junk. Within a few weeks his parents traded in a poor acoustic for a less junky 3/4-size electric.
Dennis started lessons right away at the age of 8. He still remembers hating it for awhile, and not taking it seriously until he was 12. He is thankful his parents forced him to practice early on and kept paying for lessons,
even though rational thinking should have stopped them after a year.
Around this time drawing became less important, and guitar consumed all his attention. After 6 years of lessons he parted ways with his teacher and, after trying out two others with no results, decided to continue alone.
His nerdistic tendencies paid off, as he put in hours working on picking and left hand exercises and learned as many Randy Rhoads and Kirk Hammett solos as he could.
Luckily, there were playing opportunities at school talent shows and church. Dennis was playing bass at his church when he was 13, helping to hone his performance skills in a group setting.
In high school, Dennis joined the marching band on sousaphone for all 4 years. It was as awesome as you could expect. He was also fortunate enough to be in several different metal bands, still play at church, and get the
incredible opportunity to play guitar for many local community theaters. This kept his sight-reading in shape and gave him an appreciation for different styles of music (and paid pretty well, from a high
schooler's perspective).
In 2001, Dennis came to Bexley, Ohio to study guitar at Capital University with Stan Smith. His studies emphasized jazz and classical guitar. Here his metal past merged with a deeper understanding of the instrument and
music in general, and the basis for most of his teaching style was set in motion.
Dennis now plays guitar for Upper Arlington Lutheran Church every Sunday, for St. Christopher in Grandview, Ohio, with the youth group, and also plays for touring Broadway shows that stop in Columbus. Occasionally,
he plays weddings and private parties, and he is starting a new cover band with some friends, called Dr. Awkward. He is blessed to have his understanding and supportive wife Kate, and is glad to be at JamPlay!
Our acoustic guitar lessons are taught by qualified instructors with various backgrounds with the instrument.
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Member Comments about this Lesson
Discussions with our instructors are just one of the many benefits of becoming a member of JamPlay.why isn t there pro6 file
great lesson ! but the last chapter on 16th notes is missing????? whats up with that ? very help full lesson gimme some 16th note video get on that . thanks
Yes your are correct it is there , thanks , must of been temporary glitch. thanks this is an awesome lesson set you have provided, looking forward to continuing on as well as checking out the DOKKEN lesson very SWEET!
not sure what you mean, I just checked and Scene 6 works fine.
This one is def going to take some practice for me. Sixteenth notes mostly.
im all alone
So I printed all 8 pages of the supplemental exercises only to find out the ends of each bar are cut short.
Can you explain it better on ties. I'm not sure I quite understand it. If 2 notes are tied together you only play the first note and count the second right? So what is the porpose of the 2nd note to begin with? Why not just change the value of the 1st?
cmp1969, the tie does not need to change its value, as you are technicaly tieing notes across measures. like, in a 4/4 signature, if you had 3 quarters, and wanted your next to be a half note, you would tie the 4th quarter, with the first quarter of the next measure. or if you wanted a 3 beat note in the same measure, you would tie a half with a quarter. you tie them because there is no 2/3rds notation. i know its a late reply but i hope that helps.
From what I understand of a tie, it can be used anywhere (not just over two measures) and basically just means that you play the first note and hold that note (let ring) for the duration of the tied note(s).
Hey guys, is there any special secret to train your pinky to play well? =p or is it just practice, practice, practice? Becuase at the moment, mine always curls up and it's very hard to use it when playing
I know guitar hero gets a bad rap but playing that before I got into playing guitar made me use my pinky alot. It really helped me!!!!!!! Yes practice practice practice aside from that is the best :)
i have the same problem. it doesn't feel quite natural. i've gotten out of the habit of curling my pinky behind the neck, though. i guess just keep using it until it feels right. it gets easier the more you do it.
A good way I found to train my pinky was running major scales up and down with one finger per fret and it really trained my pinky to stop from curling underneath and now it sits comfortably above the fretboard.
scratch my last question.great lesson
Hi Dennis, on the reverse gallop, are you using the down,down up strum pattern,or using down up down?Great lesson,
Great lesson, and you are a beast at galloping
Nice Lesson for any type of music you like.
Nice Schecter!
Thanx dennis. this lesson is really helping out.
Eighth note rests are a bit tricky. Especially resting on the down stroke. Any suggestions?
I'm not really a metal player. But this lesson on timing is a big help. Thanx
I love your attitude mate! "Try and be better than me" lol I wish I had a 20th of your talent!!
Hey Dennis, this is a killer lesson. I wish I had this lesson when I first started learning guitar, but now is better than never.