Home Forums Guitar News Weekly Guitar News Weekly Archive Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson: Over the Rainbow – Part 1

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    Hi! I’m back …

    I’ve got a new finger style lesson up and running for you: Over the Rainbow – part 1. I did a lesson for this many moons ago, back before I had my good microphone and second camera and was looking and sounding pretty dated when I last checked it out. It’s such a beautiful piece that I figured it deserved to be done properly, so this week I’ve posted part 1.

    Guitar for Beginners and Beyond is where you’ll find it. If you’re not yet a member, you will have to register to get in to view it. You will also find one of the friendliest, most helpful discussion forums on the net, with over 14000 members.

    The project I’ve been working on for the past year or so is almost complete: the How to play Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tunings DVD. All the needs to be done now is to get the cover art finished and the first batch pressed. What a relief! I’ll let you know here when it’s ready to order. As you probably know, slide guitar is most often played in open tunings, and there’s plenty of instructional material out there on that subject. I also started playing slide in open tunings, but reverted to standard, mainly because my brain couldn’t really accommodate more than one fretboard map. What I discovered after a while is that standard tuning is in fact a bunch of mini open tunings, all living side by side on the fretboard. When I then tried it out in Dropped D ( just the bass string down to D), I knew I’d found the best of both worlds.

    It was in fact exploring the fretboard in search of slide positions in standard tuning that one day, decades ago, I had my Eureka moment. I had been desperately looking for some kind of fretboard ‘constant’, some landmark that I could refer back to for all aspects of guitar playing …. chords, scales, melody, harmony … and it dawned on me one day that I’d been overlooking the obvious. Something that I had learned in the first week of playing guitar all of a sudden became the one and only thing I needed to open up the entire fretboard, no matter what the music was doing. I started teaching that ‘trick’, as I like to call it, and had such a great response that I turned it into my book PlaneTalk. So, if you’re one of the many players still trying to figure out how to open up the whole fretboard, how to instantly create lines and solos and improvisations (without once thinking ‘scale/mode’), how to literally see the possibilities laid out from the nut to the 20th fret, then drop in and read all about it.

    PlaneTalker ‘thor’, when discussing teaching methods in a thread at the private PlaneTalkers forum, put it this way:

    “PlaneTalk is the best solution by far and blows the socks off of *anything* including my 2-3 years of lessons on/off. Since last August, I have come further than I can possibly imagine, thanks to Kirk. I’ve only been playing just 6 years but I feel I have learned “most” of the guitar since last August (when I bought PlaneTalk)”

    There are many more testimonials here.

    If you’re curious as to what kind of music I play, I have many tracks posted at my Soundclick page

    OK … back to work for me. Until next week, all the best, happy twangin’,

    Kirk
    http://www.kirklorange.com

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