Rock Chops

TrueFire Foundry courses are independently produced courses presented by a hand-picked selection of top-notch artists and educators from around the world. Filmed in the educator’s own studio, Foundry courses bring fresh educational concepts and very effective teaching methodologies to TrueFire Students. Scott Allen’s Foundry course, Rock Chops will show you soloing techniques, tricks, and creative approaches for the modern rock guitarist.

Hello I'm Scott Allen — welcome to my TrueFire Foundry course, Rock Chops, which I produced in my own studio.

Rock Chops will cover the A-Z of rock guitar soloing. By the end of the course you should have a comprehensive understanding of the basic tools required for rock and metal lead guitar, and a greatly improved vocabulary. You should also have a much better idea on how to develop your technique going forward.

We will start with learning pentatonic scales, licks and sequences. Here we will cover learning all of the pentatonic scales and how to develop speed, coordination and vocabulary by applying sequences. We will then further develop vocabulary with some very cool and easy to use burning licks.

Then we will move on to understanding the diatonic scales and start to work on getting our chops and vocabulary together by applying 16th note, 16th note triplet, legato, horizontal and diagonal sequences. These are concepts made famous by players like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Paul Gilbert, and Randy Rhoads.

Next we will learn our triad arpeggios and begin learning how to sweep pick. We will cover the basic shapes for our arpeggios and learn how to use the metronome to develop speed and synchronization, the most important things that relate to sweep picking.

Along the way we will learn some artist specific arpeggios, which are arpeggios that are favored by some of the great guitar players in rock. Here we will cover arpeggios favored by Randy Rhoads, George Lynch, Paul Gilbert, and Eric Johnson.

After that we will get into extended arpeggios that will cover more of the neck and will get into more modern shredders styles such as Marty Friedman, Jeff Loomis, and Chris Broderick.
Next up will be learning about two handed tapping techniques made famous by the great Eddie Van Halen. Here we will cover the basics of the technique as well as crossing strings and applying some very cool and commonly used tricks.

As soon as the basics of the technique are down it is time to kick it up a notch and apply this concept to diatonic scales and start to use the entire neck as our playground for tapping in the style of greats like Steve Vai, and Reb Beach.

At the end of the course you will have covered everything from your basic pentatonic and diatonic scales, developing synchronization, speed, arpeggios, sweep picking including multi octave sweeps.

You will learn to use the metronome to develop muscle memory, synchronization and speed, as well as basic and more advanced tapping.It is truly as A-Z crash course in rock and metal lead guitar.

Ready to power up your Rock Chops? Grab your guitar and let’s get dig in!

NOTE! Scott Allen organized the course into 8 weekly sections for those students that prefer to have a specified regimen of material across a specified time schedule. However, for those students who prefer to work at their own pace, or even skip around you are certainly encouraged to approach the course in that way as well.