Marty Schwartz on the Land of A7, Five Blues Licks, and Why He Still Practices the Pentatonic After 30 Years

The Guy Behind Two Billion Views

There are guitar education companies with entire faculties, production teams and content libraries built by dozens of instructors. And then there is Marty Schwartz, one guy with a camera, roughly 6,000 videos on Marty Music (counting shorts), and somewhere around two billion views across every channel he has ever appeared on. When you have taught that many people their first E minor chord, you develop a pretty clear picture of what actually helps players improve and what quietly kills their progress.

In this Playback Sessions conversation filmed at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville, Marty covered everything from beginner blind spots to a harmonic concept he calls the "land of A7" to the five blues licks he has taught more than any others. Here is the useful stuff, organized so you can actually apply it.

The Biggest Beginner Mistake Is Not Lack of Talent

Marty's diagnosis of the modern beginner problem is refreshingly unglamorous: there is simply too much information available, and students skip steps because of it.

Someone's been playing for like three days and then they type in how to play Pride and Joy by Stevie Ray Vaughan and they start watching that video.

He compares it to walking into a music store in the 90s and finding a book with 10,000 chords in it. The sheer volume guarantees you learn none of them. Today the bookstore is infinite and it is in your pocket.

His framing is worth stealing: learning guitar is like a video game. You do not fight the final boss first. You learn a single riff on a single string. Then E minor. Then E minor to G. Then D. Each step makes the next one dramatically easier, and by the time you get to Pride and Joy in a year or two, it is not a wall anymore.

The practical takeaway

• Audit your practice material. If a piece has been on your list for months with zero progress, it is probably three steps ahead of where you are.
• Choose material where you can hear improvement inside a week. Momentum is a teaching tool.
• Sequence matters more than volume. Ten well-ordered concepts beat a hundred random ones.

The 5 Minutes a Day Rule

Marty admits this mantra is not literally true, and that is exactly the point.

Five minutes a day is all you need. Because what that really means is: pick the guitar up.

The genius of the number is psychological. Fifteen minutes is a commitment. Five minutes is nothing, and nobody can convincingly argue they do not have five minutes. Once the guitar is in your hands and you are working on one specific thing, one of two outcomes happens. Either you are frustrated after five minutes and you stop guilt-free, or you get a small breakthrough and suddenly you have been playing for 45 minutes.

The failure mode for most students is not bad practice. It is not picking the instrument up at all. Lower the barrier to entry and the consistency problem starts solving itself.

On motivation, an honest answer

Marty gets messages constantly from players saying they have lost motivation. His response is unusually blunt and probably healthy: maybe you just do not dig it that much, and that is okay. Nobody is forcing you. This is supposed to be fun.

His own experience was the opposite. Once he learned the open cowboy chords and realized he could play Sweet Home Alabama, Wish You Were Here, a Beatles song, a Neil Young song, he could not put the thing down. The lesson buried in there is that early wins create motivation. If you are stuck grinding on material that produces no music, the motivation problem may actually be a repertoire problem.

The Land of A7: Stop Thinking of Chords as Single Shapes

This was the standout teaching concept of the conversation, and it is one of those ideas that permanently changes how you look at a chart.

Marty remembers being a student with a rigid, black-and-white view of harmony. That shape is A7. That other shape is E7. Done. Then a teacher showed him that A7 is not a shape at all. It is a world.

If you see A7 on a piece of paper, that actually means the land of A7, meaning all these extensions, substitutions, voicings.

How it works in a 12 bar blues

Take a standard blues in A. Instead of parking on one A7 grip for four bars, Marty uses a series of simple two-finger shapes moving up the neck, all of which keep the root (A) and the dominant seventh (G) in play, usually with an open string doing the heavy lifting. As the shapes move, you naturally cycle through sus4 sounds, the third, and back again. Everything stays inside the harmony because the two defining tones of a dominant chord never leave.

Beyond the moveable shapes, the same logic applies to the full vocabulary of dominant harmony: A9, A13, A7sus4. All of these can substitute for or combine with A7. That is the land.

Why this matters for your playing

• It kills the static rhythm part. Instead of strumming one shape for four bars, you have movement, tension and release inside a single chord.
• It works with only two fingers, which means beginners and intermediate players can use it immediately.
• The same concept transfers to E7 and, with some adjustment, D7 (Marty notes the D7 version gets more thirds-oriented and behaves a little differently because of the open string layout).
• It trains you to read a chart as harmony rather than as a set of fixed shapes, which is the doorway to real comping.

Try this: play a slow 12 bar blues in A over a backing track and force yourself to never play the same voicing twice on the I chord. You will find the land faster than you expect.

Marty's Five Blues Licks (And Why the Pentatonic Never Gets Old)

Before touching a single lick, Marty makes the prerequisite clear: know the A minor pentatonic in position five, ascending and descending, cold. And then he drops the line that sums up three decades of playing.

I had that whole phase of like, if I just learn the modes, I'll get better. If I just learn the jazz scales. I learned all that stuff. And now 30 years later, I'm still always going back to the pentatonic.

The pentatonic is not the beginner scale you graduate from. It is the framework every other note hangs on, particularly in blues, rock and classic rock.

Lick 1: Breaking out of step-by-step motion

Every student who learns the scale immediately complains that it sounds like a scale, not a solo. Marty's first lick solves that by introducing non-adjacent movement, skipping scale steps rather than walking through them in order. It feels awkward at first, which is exactly why it is valuable. It teaches your hands that phrases do not have to move one note at a time.

The bonus: you can climb into the lick or climb out of it using the plain ascending or descending scale. That "boring" scale run suddenly has a job.

Lick 2: The top two strings power zone

A beginner can get an enormous amount of mileage out of just the top two strings in the pentatonic box. Start simple, then add attitude with slides, hammer-ons and bends. The same shape evolves from a basic pattern into legitimate vocabulary as your phrasing matures.

Lick 3: The extended pentatonic and the rockstar bend

Not a lick so much as a map expansion. By adding the pattern two frets below the standard box, you connect the same five notes across a much larger chunk of the neck.

Living at the top of that region in A is the 10th fret on the high E string, what Marty calls the rockstar bend. Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gilmour, Billy Gibbons: everyone builds to that spot. When Marty was a young player with a limited vocabulary, he structured entire solos to climax there. There is a real lesson in that about solo architecture. Pick a target note and build toward it.

Lick 4: The transition lick and the fingering that makes it work

This one is about mechanics as much as sound. Playing inside the box, you would naturally use your middle finger on the 9th fret of the G string, the classic Dickey Betts move (Marty cites Betts as his number one soloing influence). But when you intend to transition down to the lower position, you switch that note to your third finger instead. That single fingering choice sets your hand up to move.

The takeaway is bigger than the lick: fingering choices should be dictated by where you are going next, not just by what is comfortable right now.

Lick 5: The seventh to root bend

A hard one, and entirely ear-based. Bending the flat seventh up to the root requires you to know the target pitch before you get there. Marty's practice method is to fret and play the destination note first so your ear has a reference, then execute the bend and check yourself against it. A backing track helps enormously because it gives your ear harmonic context for the pitch.

How to practice these

• Learn one lick per week, not five in a day.
• For each lick, find at least two variations of it elsewhere on the neck. Marty demonstrates that one phrase spawns a family of related ideas.
• Always connect licks to scale motion. A lick in isolation is a party trick. A lick you can enter and exit fluidly is vocabulary.
• Record yourself over a slow blues. If it sounds like demonstrating rather than speaking, keep working on phrasing, not on new material.

Building a Career: Debt, Discipline and Staying at the Center

The business side of the conversation is worth reading even if you never plan to teach. About nine or ten years ago Marty had to start over completely, going into debt with a family depending on him, before Marty Music took off roughly two years later. That experience is why he never took the obvious scaling path of licensing his name to a roster of teachers, something Justin Sandercoe has done successfully.

His reasoning was risk assessment. Every additional teacher is a variable he cannot control. He calculated that he could generate more return by putting the energy into his own output, and for the better part of a decade that math held.

The masterclass pivot

What he has built instead is a producer role. Lying in bed one night he inventoried his actual skills: social media, marketing, video production, 30 years of guitar pedagogy. Then he asked what else those skills could do.

The answer arrived when Marcus King came over for an interview. Marty asked why he had never taught his material, and got the response he hears from nearly every elite player: I cannot teach, I would not know how.

We don't want Marcus King teaching us an E minor chord. That's not what Marcus King is on this planet for. Teach what makes you tick. What are your influences? What made you who you are?

That is a genuinely important distinction for anyone consuming lessons online. Foundational technique should come from teachers. Artistry, phrasing philosophy and taste should come from artists. Confusing the two wastes everybody's time.

The production approach mattered too. Rather than the clinical multi-camera studio setup that makes non-teaching artists freeze, Marty ran one camera, mood lighting, and sat just off-lens playing rhythm guitar so the whole thing felt like two friends jamming. There are Marcus King, Jared James Nichols, Quinn Sullivan and Phil X masterclasses live, with Trey Hensley and Frank Hannon of Tesla on the way.

The Carter's Wall

Marty has a signature Epiphone, something that was so far outside his ambitions he never even put it on a bucket list. His actual goal, the thing he tried to manifest early on, was modest: please let me support myself and a family doing something I love.

But the moment that hit hardest was accidental. Killing time before a gig, he wandered into Carter Vintage Guitars, walked down the hallway lined with photos of Bob Weir, Billy Gibbons, Bon Jovi and Jason Isbell, and found his own picture hanging there. Nobody had told him. He just saw it.

Out of all the things in this crazy career, that's probably the most flattering, most amazing feeling that's ever happened. I had nothing to do with it.

The other contender: walking out of a Gibson shoot, opening a door, and finding Slash on the other side, who said "Whoa, Marty" and mentioned he had some of Marty's clips saved on his computer from working on a blues covers record.

The thread connecting both stories is that Marty spends his days alone in a studio looking at view counts. Those numbers are abstract. A photo on a wall and a rock god knowing your name are the moments where the abstraction becomes real people who learned to play because of you.

Four Things to Do This Week

• Set the five minute floor. Every single day, pick up the guitar with one specific target. Permission to stop after five minutes is what makes it stick.
• Explore the land of A7. Play a slow blues in A and refuse to repeat a voicing on the I chord. Then do the same for E7.
• Pick one lick, not five. Learn it, then find two other places on the neck where the same idea lives, and practice entering and exiting it with scale motion.
• Audit your song list. Anything that has sat there for six months with no progress goes on a "later" list. Replace it with something you can play recognizably within a week.

Thirty years in, with more videos than almost anyone alive and a picture on the wall at Carter Vintage, Marty Schwartz is still going back to the pentatonic scale. If that is good enough for him, it is probably good enough for the rest of us.