Hey Jared, I just had a look at Jamorama recently, since they upgraded their offering not long ago. They used to sell a guitar lesson ebook which was created over a decade ago, so it was pretty old to say the least. They launched the new site 2 months ago, and are now focusing on video lessons, just like Jamplay and Guitartricks. I had a good look around Jamorama, and to tell you the truth, it’s not looking very good:
In the “classical” world, composers would oftentimes write musical studies called “etudes.” These pieces would generally be musically pleasing, but the sole purpose was to develop an instrumentalist’s playing technique. Examples of these can be seen in classical guitar music, where many pieces have the same right hand arpeggio pattern that remains constant throughout the entire piece.
If you alternate fretted notes with open strings you can create a cascading sound of awesomeness. The video below describes how you can take a scale and substitute as many fretted notes as you want with open strings (E, A, D, G, B, E). The beginning of the lick in the video starts off by descending the G Mixolydian scale (G, A, B, C, D, E, F) from G: G (fretted), F (fretted), E (open), D (fretted), C (fretted), B (open), A (fretted), G (fretted). The video below shows the rest of the lick. This second video demonstrates descending and ascending scales while using open strings!