Hi everyone,I'm Randy. I'm 62 and have picked up and set down the guitar more time's than I can remember. I have never had any lessons just picked up a few things from friends. My first guitar was pulled out of a dumpster and required a little work to make it somewhat playable. The action is still high and gets some buzz when not keyed properly but I have heard it sound pretty good by someone who played a lot. Sorry for the long introduction but happy I found this site.

Does anyone know what kind of tattoos Syn has and what they mean?

Hii! I'm pretty new here and been wanting to learn guitar for a long time. I know that the lessons feature is down and I'm excited for it to be up again. While we wait though, I was wondering if anyone knew if I can find any beginner lessons like these either through an app or another website?

Happy October spooky Synners!
The homie @Radu-Cristian Perde and myself will be live today at 3pm PST/6pm EST on SynTV talking spooky shit! We're going to be giving our thoughts on the new 'Hellraiser" film as well as discussing the paranormal, haunted locations, and the origins of Halloween! Super stoked to hang with y'all!
See ya in just a bit!

Hey kids! A long time ago this school use to be hopping with tutorials and lessons taught from our very own students. The lessons haven't been working for well over 2 weeks, and it's starting to cause some agitation among the students. What I wanna do, is have this section for us to drop our own lessons here. That way, we all can still continue to learn something from each other. So if you have taught something on your youtube channel, or a prior video that you've uploaded, or you wanna drop a fun new lesson below go ahead and go for it!

I'll be uploading my own lesson very soon! Let's keep the learning going

Drop your lesson videos or links down in the comments below! They can be on covers, solos, theory, gear, playing live, techniques, anything!

@Hector Trejo @Christian Schulze and @Chris Johnston you guys are notorious teachers. Do you have anything you can drop below?

Hey Y'all !!

It is officially spooky season !

I wanted to get the creative juices flowing in a non musical way.

I'm sure many of us in school participated in a group story telling project in our Literature classes in which one person wrote a sentence, and the then the next, and so on, to create a full story.

That's what we are doing here, except it is not limited to just one sentence!

Write as much as, or as little, as you feel to keep the story going.

The imagination is limitless. Let's see how far ours can take us.

I'll start below in the comments. Help me complete this story.

Hi, videos do not play for me. I tried on 3 different browser but nothing helps. Is there any fix for it?

Hi, my question is if I want to put a cover of "Unholy Confessions" on my album, how does that work?
Is it not allowed, do I need permission, pay a fee or what?

I was just wondering cause on some albums I've listened to, there's sometimes a cover song from another band.
Thanks!

Hello everyone. Just curious how some of you guys get your tones. Weather it is tones from the 80s hair metal, Blues or your favorite guitar player. Just thought maybe it would be interesting to see the different types of setups.

Hi, I haven't been here in awhile. How long has the video player been down and not working? Is this site abandoned by Syn?

Hi everyone!

Hope that this fall season is treating you well so far! As you know we had to skip last month's PG show but we are back in force so mark your calendar for Tuesday October 25th at 9h PST/12h EST/18h CET!


See y'all very soon!

- Rad

Hey everyone, it's already that time of year again! I'll be reaching out to all annual legend+ members to collect your address so that we can send you a care package at the end of the year. Also, if you're not an annual legend+ member and would like to be, there's still plenty of time and you can become one here https://synner.com/account/upgrades/

Excited to be sending these out again and hope you love them!

Sup SYNNERS!
It's my first time changing strings on my beautiful Syn custom S.
And I wanted to ask if I need to remove this piece while changing the strings (It's called a locking nut?)

Thanks for everyone in advance

I have the app but I can’t use it because it says it’s not available in my region I live in the (us) anyone have any ideas of what I could do

I just bought this brand new jackson js-32 and for some reason whenever i pluck the low E string it keeps buzzing although i'm not plucking it that hard. Keep in mind its brand new so should i contact jackson guitars and have it returned? Or is there an easy solution to that?

Hi, I'm new here. My name is Antto, and I started playing guitar around February of 2021. I was nearly finished with JustinGuitar's beginner course grade 3 (last one), but he's still in the middle of uploading videos for the modules which I don't see being done until around the beginning of next year. However, the more I listen to music that I like, the harder it gets to wait!

I believe I'm proficient enough to progress to the 'intermediate level' of guitar playing, but would I be ready to start the Synner course once it gets back up? I'm sure it's a different learning flow than I'm used to, but is there anyone else in my shoes? Any advice? Thanks in advance!

So, I got to know a few of the people here but I realized that I know nothing about you and vice versa. This post is to tell you a bit about myself, and my journey with Avenged Sevenfold and hopefully you guys can share a bit about your life so we can get closer and know each other better (even a few sentences).
This is a bit long, I don’t expect you to read it, but I just wanted to share it with you.
I’m Kfir, 27 years old, from Israel, Married to Bosmat. I’m a software developer in CheckPoint (Cyber Security company), and a Gamer.
I started playing at my school at age 15. The school was a religious boarding school (Jewish), so I’ve spent most of my time as a teenager out of home. We were not allowed to have smartphones/computers/MP4 and stuff like that. This is where the music came. I got my first guitar, spending most of my time after classes jamming to metalcore music (bfmv, escape the fate). In the last year of school I started to walk in my own path, got long hair (which was prohibited) and did w/e I felt was right. After school, there was military. At the age 18 we have 3 years of military duty to serve. I couldn’t play that much anymore, but jumped on every chance that I had. 3 years passed by and I’m out of the army. A month later I started to chase other passion I have (Gaming/Computers/Science) and started my Computer Science and Math degree. My journey with Avenged Sevenfold begins there. One day, I met my wife at a tribute show for Slipknot. After few days she introduced me to a weird band called A7X. God forgive me, I hated them SO MUCH. Every time she played it at home I was laughing and telling her it’s bad. From here and there, after 2 months of relationship, we booked our first-ever live show of Avenged in London 2013, exactly for our 6 months together.


A dream comes true – her favorite band for a decade. Oh the thrills, excitement, laughter and cry. Zacky broke his guitar, fiction live on stage, Johnny throwing us a pick. We couldn’t ask for more, indeed a dream come true.
After we returned home, I got my first SG custom S guitar. I was a rock star. I sucked so much and I was the happiest.

3 Years passed till our next show. This one was the most important one. There were 2 goals for that show. Get recognized by Avenged to come to Israel, and to propose on that one. This was Vienna 2017. We were a group of 50+ people from Israel flying with Israeli deathbat flags to win the heart of Synyster and the band, singing and jumping from the VIP on-stage. I’ve spent the half year before the show trying to make the proposal on stage, sending messages to the management – what is the best way to propose on our favorite band’s show. Unfortunately, even though they did want to do help me, due to a tragedy happened few days earlier at a show, I couldn’t make the proposal the way I wanted. Regardless, the show was breathtaking from the stage perspective.

We got to talk and laugh with them and the funniest thing – my wife asking for Zacky’s pick and he was like, But I’M PLAYING.

He did give it to her at the end of the show. When the show was over, they jumped to our stage area and got pictures with all of us, even though they were in a huge rush. Johnny can’t stop drinking.

Best day. I couldn’t propose there either. I did it when we were out of the arena, with picks and drum sticks in my hands.

We got married a year later, dancing to warmness on the soul and at that time, it was announced Avenged Sevenfold is coming to a show in Israel. Fuck, we did it.
We already booked tickets to Graspop 2018, because fuck, why not spend our honeymoon in a fucking metal festival, front row in an A7X concert. The festival was 4 days before the show in Israel. We landed the night before.
The show in Israel, there were such emotions, they are finally here. I cried for third of the show screaming my heart out. After hearing about the Israel show, we had to show some appreciation, so we came with a big Thank You flag.



Syn – Thank you for noticing and sending thank you back at us. This was the greatest show of them all. Really no words can describe how we felt that night, there was something different in the air. The journey we went through, from complete strangers to unseparable.
Few months ago Syn released his Black Moon. I already had a guitar. We JUST bought Syns acoustic because god it is beautiful. But I knew in my heart I can’t let this one go. I had the need to give back a bit, for my last 6 years of music, family, happiness, sadness, madness and love.

And then I came here, starting my journey as a student and a better guitar player, learning from my Idols everything I ca. At the end of the day it always felt like a big family, a part of something bigger.
I Hope I didn’t bore you

What’s up everyone! I’ve been playing on and off for about years. It’s something that I’ve never really taken super seriously until now; trying to refine my technique because im self taught and have lots of bad habits. Can someone give tips on cleaner power chords? I tend to do octaves with 1 and 3 which I know is awkward as hell as it is. If you could also give tips to strengthen the pinky that would be helpful! I attached a song today that I learned fairly quickly so it’s not super clean but I’d really appreciate the help as im trying to improve!

Not sure how to upload the actual full video but here is a link: TIA! Login to view embedded media

so i am actually not a new account. in fact i've had this account since "syngatesguitarschool" first started.
i recently got back on and wanted to get back into teaching. Looking through, im loving all of the cool newshit thats here now. but all my old content is gone??

long ago i had a response to another members question about sweep picking under one of papagates lessons. Me and this other member basically sweep the exact opposite than the lesson teaches which i was explaining is also a correct way to sweep pick, i tagged a video clip demonstrating this
and syn had a comment about my clip but its gone.

all of my other comments and responses are shown but not that one? . it was a great moment i only had record of the website.

Hey everyone!

Some of us here like Star Wars and so we decided to create a new show called ''Hello There'' and the first edition will be later today at 19h EST! I will be accompanied by:

- @megalizzie
- @Jamie London
- @Jeremy Healey
- @Ed Seith

Come join us if you want to just talk about multiple star wars stuff! (No Andor spoilers!)


Of course, I also want to take the time to mention that we're still working on getting the lessons back up! It shouldn't be too too long, thank you for your patience!

See you later,
- Rad

Over the years I have been playing guitar I have become very aware of the problems I have when playing guitar but no matter how hard I try or how many hours I put into watching YouTube videos on the issues nothing seems to get better. It's getting to the point where I dont want to play because its just a constant loop of "wake up, try to play something, fumble around because my technique is horse sh*t and then go to sleep feeling like im making no progress and wasting my time"

I do have a personal guitar teacher which has helped a lot but outside of lessons it can be difficult to maintain progress

The issues I find are:

When I get to the E and A strings when trying to pick lead lines my wrist is practically at a 90 degree angle to my arm and there is a lot of tension in my shoulder as there is no support for my arm as the strings are so close to my body. I have had some success with moving my arm instead of relying on my wrist for all the movement as the natural curvature of the wrist motion is what creates the awkward angles on higher strings.

When I am picking, the strings seem to be immovable, with every stroke it feels as though the pick is having to work unnecessarily hard to push through as apposed to a gliding motion that I see people like syn possess.

Following on from the gliding motion, I find with my picking that the motion of picking in general (because of the reason above) is very jerky. Going across strings foes not feel like a smooth movement, instead every string feels like its disconnected from each other and there are large jumps required to get to each string.

I constantly change picking positions and styles based on what strings I am playing due to discomfort and its difficult to find one that works across all strings

Lastly, I find that my fingers tend to uncurl themselves or move about when playing which is less than Ideal

Does anyone have any tips because it feels as though Im wasting my time trying to learn as I have made as I haven't made any more progress in the 10 years I have been playing than the first 3.

Does anyone have a recommend string size they use to keep tension the same to maintain the same setup between different scaled guitars?

its been forever since i've been here god this site has changed.
Anyway so i finally switched over to schector because I i've always wanted a sustainiac so i could cheat dive bombs like syn,

so i upgraded to a banshee mach 7-FRS with the ONE pickup and got it plecked, fucking nasty guitar.

however, being accustom to jackson7, standard didario 10 set (orange pack), love it. found it in a closet. it has a 27 inch scale length.
where as the banshee has a 25.5.
so Using the same strings are impossible for me to play on. Just way too loose like my X...tra guitar and demands a high action.

id like to get my action just as dirt nasty low as my jackson while keeping the same tension.
anyone else ever run into this problem?


i had to sell my children to offord it so I'm hard pressed on not having to keep re setting up the floyd to test strings gauges.

I’ve been recently trying to play with drum tracks and every time it comes out pretty crappy. I’ve asked a few musicians I know and the answer was to play with a metronome and tap my feet when I play. That helped staying on time (of course) but my riffs don’t really work well with the drummer even playing on time. Can I get some ideas or help on how to do this? Thanks.

Hello everyone. I have been playing guitar on and off for a long time. I am almost 50 years old I started when I was about 12 years old. With no lessons only guitar tab books. So I never learned theory. I just learned bad habits. So I can say that I'm lost when it comes to the fretboard and never could play a whole song. Especially solos. I always picked down and every time I try and speed up with alternate picking. It all goes down hill. I unconsciously go back to either all down picking or just mess up. I think my picking hand mechanics are really bad and inconsistent. So to say the least I am really frustrated with myself and I feel a little stupid trying to learn the fretboard. It is just overwhelming at times. I hope this makes sense. I don't know where to start and how to fix this? Thanks. Ron.

What Is the best Halloween songs to play at a gig with a band for the first time