Hi! It’s me again …

Kirk’s weekly Guitar Lesson

One of the more frequent questions asked at my forum is: ‘What is CAGED?’

This week’s lesson takes a close look at the answer and reveals all. It’s one of the more important lessons you’ll want to learn if you’re at the stage in your playing where you want to make use of the whole fretboard, not just the first few frets.

Click here to go to the lesson.

Our community passed the 20,000 member mark this week … all but a couple of hundred joined since last November, so my partner Clancy and I are quite chuffed about that. She does all the software stuff, I do the lessons. A fine bunch twangers they are too, and we’re very lucky to have attracted several very experienced players who are more than happy to pass on their expertise on a daily basis. Come and over and join in!

PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book

Once you’ve absorbed the CAGED lesson, you’ll no doubt be asking yourself “How?” … “How do I get to be able to see the whole fretboard as one long unit? There are so many chords, so many flavors, so many extensions … how on Earth do you get to the point where you can instantly see the fretboard like that?”

That is the subject of my book/DVD PlaneTalk. Believe it or not, it all comes back to something that you probably learned in the first few days of playing guitar! The principle is simple, putting it into practice is the part that takes time, but trust me when I say that once you’ve absorbed the lesson, you’ll never look at your fretboard as anything but logical, friendly, familiar territory again. One recent customer, Rick, wrote me this morning, here’s what he said:

“What makes PlaneTalk so amazing is that since I purchased this product it is the only singular piece of media that I use when I do my guitar work every night. I used to religiously practice scales (more for technique and tone with a metronome) and then grab a half dozen other books among the hundreds that I have and play other people’s riffs and music. Not any more. I can’t tell you enough how PlaneTalk has changed and enhanced my guitar life. Thanks Kirk!”

So, if you really want to know the ‘trick’ to playing guitar (I know it sounds silly) do yourself the favor. Read all about it at the PlaneTalk Site . The book/DVD leave you in no doubt, but just in case you do have further questions, you can join the PlaneTalkers’ Forum where you can put them me and over 1000 other PlaneTalkers.

My YouTube site

I recently joined YouTube and loaded up a few movies of my playing. There are a couple of fingerstyle jazz tunes, some of the lessons I do. Check it out here if you’re interested !

Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tunings

One of the movies loaded up at YouTube is an excerpt from my “Slide in Standard/Dropped D” DVD. It shows an improvised pass through a neat blues progression … I call it Blue Groove. You’ll see how versatile Dropped D tuning is for slide. Most slide players think that you must tune to open tunings … wrong. That certainly is the traditional way of doing it, and if you want to play Delta Blues exclusively, then Yes, open tunings are the way to go. If, on the other hand, you want to be able to inject the neat sound of slide guitar into your normal playing, then have a look at the video. You’ll see how rich an environment it is, how I sprinkle normal fretted notes among it all and of course the best part is that you don’t need to rethink your fretboard map. Check it all out at my other-other site BottleneckGuitar.com

That’s all I can think of this week, see you next!

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Kirk Lorange
http://www.kirklorange.com