Hi again, fellow picker. I hope all is well and the twanging is good.

Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson

I’ve got an interesting one for you this week, an original piece that I came up with a couple of weeks ago which uses open string notes intermingled with normal fretted notes throughout. It’s in Dropped-D tuning, and once you convince your fingers to do what they must do, it’s a really fun piece to play. I call it ‘Open Air’. You’ll find that here:

Open Air

There are well over 120 lessons there now, consisting of a movie, tab, commentary, mp3, midi and GuitarPro files, enough to keep you busy for years! Not only that, you’ll find the community of 30,000 players at Guitar for Beginners and Beyond the friendliest on the www and with the many experienced players there able and willing to pass on their expertise, the most helpful also. We pride ourselves on being civilized, polite and positive, so if you haven’t already, join up and join in.

PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book/DVD

I think I’ll let my customers speak for me this week. There’s a whole forum set up here for PlaneTalkers to leave comments, and pages of testimonials here also. The PlaneTalk Site is here.

Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped-D Tunings

I’ve been sliding away since 1969 or so, ever since I hear Duane Allman. Like most sliders, I started out in open tunings … it seemed to be the way to go, but I soon tired of sounding like everyone else, being forced to play those same inversions and licks that open tunings throw up, so I reverted to Standard and then settled on Dropped-D. I only tune the bass string down to D, so it’s pretty much Standard. To my delight, way back when, I discovered that standard is in fact a very rich environment for playing slide … you just need to think more compact … and all chord flavors are there for the plucking. I recently produced a 70 minute DVD revealing everything I’ve learned about the art in the past 35 years. Read all about it here. You can have a listen to the ‘Slide à Lorange’ Radio while you’re there to hear what a neat hybrid style of playing this is.

OK, it’s back to work for me! Cheers, see you next week with more!

Kirk
http://www.guitar.name