Hi and happy Easter! I’m back with a new lesson. This one is definitely for the ‘Beyond’ part of ‘Guitar For Beginners and Beyond’ — if you’re just starting out, you may find it beyond you — but remember that it’s here waiting for you, once you get those fingers nimbled up.

It’s the famous intro to Romeo and Juliet, that wonderful Dire Straits tune. I can’t be certain what tuning Marc Knopfler played it in, but he did it on a resonator guitar, which are tuned to open tunings more often than not, so I’m assuming it was in open tuning. The key is F, so I suspect Marc did as I did and played it in D with a capo on the third fret.

The version I did is fairly faithful to the original. Dropped D is a good tuning for the piece, which is basically all arpeggios. I’ve said it often: great melody consists mainly of chord tones, and this example proves the point. The arrangement I came up makes use of some open strings in an unusual fashion, so it’s an interesting one.

Go to Guitar for Beginners and Beyond (follow the Weekly Lesson link) and have fun with this one. It’s a challenge, that’s for sure, it was for me, so don’t feel discouraged if you come unstuck. Take it as slowly as you need to. I’ve included a half-speed movie for you so you can watch the picking hand easier.

I’ll be heading back to Australia in May and I’ve got a bunch of VHS versions of the PlaneTalk video I’m trying to get rid of before I leave, so there’s a special on: The PDF of the book and the VHS for just 5. You’ll get to download the book and immediately start learning the famous ‘trick’ to seeing the entire fretboard as familiar, friendly territory, and I’ll post the VHS out to you. This simple visualization technique has helped thousands of guitarists ‘see the light’ since I opened my first website 8 years ago. Here is some feedback I got last week form a recent customer:

“I’m something of a geek for instruction material. Got the big stack o books. So anyway, I recently ordered this product and I think it is one of the best products out there … I think Einstein said something like ” a theory should be as simple as possible, but not too simple.” And that’s what I think Kirk has going here. There’s a great deal of thought going into what needs to be included, stressed, mentioned. The “method” itself, and the materials (book and DVD) explaining it, are both admirable exercises in cognitive economy…or something like that.”

‘moonhead’, from a current Harmony Central Forum thread

Come to my PlaneTalk site to read all about it.

Drop into Bottle Neck Guitar dot Com, my other other site, if you like slide guitar. Join the forum!

That’s it, that’s all!

Kirk
http://www.kirklorange.com