Hey fellow fan of the twang.

I have a new lesson for you. This time it’s more of a look at a style of playing rather than a specific tune … a way of thinking and playing that will come in handy for ever more. It’s especially good if you ever perform solo, or plan to. Accompanying yourself on guitar is usually seen as a strumming thing, or a regular finger-picking thing, but this week, let’s look at another approach: Mixing it all up. This example uses the usual chord / bass line / melody blend of elements, but as a sequence rather than all together at once. It makes for an interesting, well rounded accompaniment part. I chose a simple I – IV – V chord progression, in the key of A … so if you’ve been reading these and other music lessons, you should know from that that the chords will be A, D and E7. That’s the beauty of the roman numeral system: it tells you so much in such little space. It’s not essential knowledge, but it sure helps.

Guitar for Beginners and Beyond is the site, The Weekly Lesson is the link to follow.

If, when you’ve digested this lesson, you’re wondering how it is I know where all the bits and pieces are that make up this part, then you should drop into PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book site where you can read up it. I spent many many years exploring the fretboard, looking for the one set of landmarks that would turn the whole fretboard into friendly, recognizable, usable territory. I found it, and I’ve been passing it on through my book for nearly ten years now. Read the testimonials to see what others think of this ‘trick’. I can pretty well guarantee that it will be the cheapest yet most powerful guitar lesson you will ever learn.

Slide guitar is my forte, but I’m unusual in that I play it in standard or dropped D tuning. I’m well into production of the DVD that will show you exactly how I do what I do. If you’d like to listen to some of my slide playing, go to my SoundClick.com site where you can stream away. One of the tunes (at the time of writing) still sits at # 1 on the Jazz General charts (even if it’s not really ‘jazz’). If you’d like to drop me a line asking me to notify you when the DVD is ready, go to BottleNeckGuitar.com where you’ll find a link to do so. While you’re there, join the Slide Guitar Forum and participate in the very enlightening discussions that go on there.

Until next week,

Kirk
http://www.kirklorange.com