Kirk's Weekly Guitar Lesson: Finger picking and finger style

Hi, fellow twanger, I trust you had a nice Easter break. I certainly did and I've got a couple of new lessons for you this week.

Kirk's Weekly Guitar Lessons

As you may or may not know, I'm phasing out doing lessons of well known tunes. I still haven't got a definitive answer from anyone in the publishing industry about what can and can't be used in terms of copyright, so I'm just going to do my own original tunes from now on, or at least until I do find out exactly where I stand.

The first finger style lesson is a fairly challenging little ditty I call 'Way Back When', fun to play and a little trickier that it sounds.

Way Back When

The next is a beginners finger picking lesson. Finger picking (as opposed to finger style) uses a set pattern throughout. This is a pretty standard sounding pattern, played over a simple chord progression with a familiar ring to it. I call it Easy Pickin'.

Easy Pickin'

Guitar for Beginners and Beyond Community

You'll see that the site has been revamped with a new color scheme and updated forum software. It's looking pretty good if you ask me, and the new updates seem to have made it all much smoother and faster. My partner Clancy has been working away on it for several weeks now. I don't know what I'd do without her Internet and computer savvy. Membership passed the 35,000 mark this week, and it's still the friendliest guitar forum on the WWW, so if you haven't already, join up and join in. All and any questions about buying guitars, playing guitar, writing songs, recording, playing live, the workings of music, improvisation -- you name it -- will be answered promptly and expertly by the many experienced members who are happy to pass on their knowledge. We also encourage you to upload examples of your playing if you'd like some critiques and advice, or (depending on what level you're on) praise and adulation.

Come and join us!

PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book/DVD

My book/DVD, which reveals the 'trick' to turning the whole fretboard into familiar, well worn territory, continues to get glowing reviews and testimonials. I don't like to use the word 'method', but the simple mind set it teaches has helped well over 15,000 twangers 'see the light'. If you find yourself at a plateau, familiar with the basics but unable to make sense of the upper reaches of the fretboard, unable to turn those scales and modes into real improvisation, unable to create parts on the fly, this is the book/DVD for you. You'll be amazed at how simple it actually is ... perhaps not getting the fingers to comply, but certainly understanding why and where to find those notes you can hear in your head anywhere on the fretboard. I gave up on scales/modes/boxes decades ago. I found a much easier way to make music. PlaneTalk also comes with its own private forum where we can discuss it all at length ... I'm there every day.

Find out more here

Read the testimonials here

Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tunings

Have a listen to some of my tunes on the 'Slide à Lorange Radio' on the homepage of my other site. They're all played in either standard or (my favorite) dropped D tuning. Like most sliders, I started out in open tunings, but after a while of sounding like everyone else, I decided to revert to standard. To my delight, I quickly discovered that it is in fact just as rich an environment for slide and there's no need to have different fretboard maps cluttering up the grey matter. If you'd like to learn all about it, you're in luck. I put together a 70 minute DVD in which I systematically reveal all.

Learn more about the DVD here.

Kirk

www.guitar.name

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Back 17.04.2007