Hi again, I hope all is well and that the twangin’ is easy.

I’ve been plugging away at my ‘How To Play Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tuning’ DVD … big job, lemme tellya … so I figured this week I’d do a quick lesson on that very subject. Slide guitar has always been seen as an open tuning style of playing, where you tune your open strings to a chord, so that when you use a slide on the strings, you’re still playing that same chord in a new pitch. Open tunings are great, but I reverted many decades ago to playing slide in standard tuning, mainly because (as you know) I really do insist on knowing exactly what I’m playing and in open tunings, I found my landmarks had disappeared and I was in no man’s land most of the time. What I discovered was that standard tuning is just as rich an environment for the slide as open tunings, although the usable units are a little more compact.

This week’s lesson is a sort of default 12 bar boogie feel in the key of A. You’ll recognize the form as soon as you hear it. Being 12 bar, of course, it’s based around the I-IV-V chords, but some extra bits have been thrown in there as well.

Go to Guitar for Beginners and Beyond and follow the Weekly Lesson link … same as always.

Other big news for me: The new print run of my book PlaneTalk will be delivered next week. I’ve been selling it as a PDF file since I ran out of books during my year stay in Canada. If you’re one of the many who have written asking about the real book, it will be just a few more days. PlaneTalk, of course, is the book that reveals the neat visualization ‘trick’ that allows you to see the whole fretboard as usable, familiar, friendly territory. I received a superlative review of it the other day from Justin, a New York City twanger who said, amongst other things, this:

“… now, for the first time, I UNDERSTAND what is going on … it’s like sitting in maths class and having some remote concept “click” in an instant, turning in a flash from all nonsense into simplicity itself. My playing has made a quantum leap … you deserve a Nobel prize for guitar teaching, if there were such a thing … honestly, no one had ever put it to me in the words that you did, words that unified a foreign and almost hostile landscape into simple purity … Your system can change the world, and should be the standard by which all students are taught … if it worked for me, it will work for ANYONE…quote me on all this”

So, there you go, another happy customer! Read more at the PlaneTalk site. Once you have bought the package, you can join the PlaneTalkers’ Forum where you can discuss at length the simple technique with me and close to a thousand members.

Another forum you can join immediately is the Slide Guitar Forum at my other site, BottleNeckGuitar.com. It gets busier by the week and boasts many fine sliders, all more that happy to help out.

Have a listen to my music at my SoundClick.com site …

OK, until next week, it’s me signing off,

Kirk
http://www.kirklorange.com