Welcome to the site of the Headless Guitar Player.
What Do I Do?
I regularly upload videos that aim to help you to learn the parts and riffs created by the guitar heroes of my youth, including Johnny Marr, John Squire and others.
Go to the Guitar Players page and select your favourite to see the latest list of videos. I’m also working on a mini-project to capture & transcribe the Johnny Marr guitar parts from an entire gig from 1985 and you can find out more on my Marr Live ’85 page.
All videos and tabs are freely available to view via this site. However, if you would like to support and see me continue to publish videos and provide accurate tabs then please visit the Support The Site page for more details.
Latest Videos
Guitar cover with tab for Little America by R.E.M.
The Videos
The videos are usually a combination of a play-along plus animated tab, although I do also post straight up covers too. More recently I’ve added some complete lessons. In most examples, I’ll focus on the way the tunes are played live, given that some artists often used lots of overdubs and intricate parts on the original recordings.
Occasionally I’ll also create a backing track with drums & bass to play over. More recently I’ve started to re-create the performance with my own guitar substitued for the original. This is pretty unique approach I think, so you see and hear the parts in the context of the original live or studio recording.
Using the magic of the ‘Playback Speed’ feature in YouTube you can slow down videos to whatever speed you desire whilst retaining the correct pitch. Of course, I’m not the only person to have uploaded cover videos to YouTube. What makes mine different are the behind-the-scenes effort that you don’t see; the detective work that goes into getting the parts down so that they can be played/transcribed as accurately as possible.
The Tab
I also upload the tab to Ultimate Guitar which anyone can access. You’ll find the link on the relevant video page or they are handily all collected on the Tablature page.
Blog
Sometimes I also create a blog post for the video, to provide some insight into the song and my approach to covering it.
Who Am I?
I’m Adam and I play the guitar in my spare time. I started out during the 1980’s and my initial influences were the UK alt-guitar heroes from that era.
HGP 