Hi yet again, fellow guitar fanatic, I’m back! Get that guitar out of its case … I’ve got a good one for you this week.

I’ve done the intro and verse to that great Carole King tune ‘You’ve got a Friend’ that JT made so popular back in the last century. I’ll do the chorus and bridge next week. What a song! It keeps doing all the right things, structured around a chord progression that is as close as they come to ‘perfect’ for this kind of pop ballad. I did it in G, but if you want to play it in the original key, just clamp a capo on the second fret.

Guitar for Beginners and Beyond is where to go. You’ll find close to 70 other lessons there too — all movie/midi/tab/commentary format — and best of all, all free.

If you fall into the ‘beyond’ class of player, no longer a beginner, and you feel you’ve hit the wall, I have good news for you: my book PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book is the the doorway through that wall … into the happy, sunny land of fretboard freedom. (who writes this stuff? Oh, hang on … I do!). But, seriously, the guitar and its cruel tuning (why that B string tuning discrepancy that throws any regular pattern right out the window?) coupled with the asymmetric nature of Music can be confounding, to say the least. I spent the best part of two decades looking for that one constant, ever-reliable, simple ‘trick’ to playing the guitar … the whole guitar, the whole fretboard. I knew it was there because I’d watched many great players get around the fretboard as if they knew it like the back of their hand, playing riffs and lines and chords and double stops and solos any which way, all off the top of their heads. I could see it wasn’t based around scales or modes … they were doing something else. PlaneTalk teaches that something else. The book comes with a nifty little ‘slide-rule’, a folded sleeve with insert device, which graphically crystallizes the lesson that the book describes. The DVD demonstrates in no uncertain terms how simple it is to have command of the whole fretboard, at all times, no matter what the music is doing. The private PlaneTalkers Forum, which you can join once you’ve bought the book, is full of very happy twangers, who, with me, are there to answer any questions you may have about this simple but all-powerful visualization technique.

Find out all about it here.

I’m still plugging away at my ‘Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tunings’ DVD … big job. I’ll keep you posted on its status, but I’m getting near the end. There are several free lessons at BottleNeckGuitar.com, where you will also find the Slide Guitar Forum.

Have a listen to some of my slide playing at my Soundclick page. Help yourself to the free downloads.

OK, I’m outta here, back to ‘work’ for me.

Kirk
kirklorange.com