Hi, fellow picker, it sure has been a long time since I've posted here. I'm all caught up in fatherhood, running my sites, gigging, writing, traveling. Anyway, I'm back to give you a list of all the fingerstyle lessons I've created since my last post. There are quite a few.
Finger Style Lessons
Take me out to the Ballgame
A good one for helping to gain finger independence, this lesson has a bit of everything. Nor for complete beginners but not too difficult either.
A series of three lessons, all in the key of E, varying in difficulty. Once you learn them all, you can string them together into one piece, use bits and pieces of all of them and come up with your own arrangements.
A Close look at Finger Picking
This is break down of a very commonly used pattern, very straight forward.
Pickin' A la Country Road
A look at how to apply the previous lesson to a chord progression. I used the well-known progression from Country Roads for this.
The Dawning – a study for the right hand
An original tune. A good one for getting those picking fingers to obey as there are some counter-intuitive moves in amongst it all.
PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book/DVD
The book-sliderule-DVD package continues to fly out the door, heading off to all corners of the World. It's been selling from my site since 1997 and has revealed to thousands of players a very neat way to 'see' the fretboard — the whole fretboard — as one big, long, friendly, familiar playground … no matter what's going on musically. I spent many many years looking for some kind of permanent fretbaord landmark, something I could refer everything to at any time to help decipher the maze of strings, notes, frets, scales, modes, double stops … something really, really easy … a constant. It was in fact poking around the fretboard in standard tuning one day in about 1970, with a slide on my pinkie, looking for positions I could use, that I saw it. Eureka! I wondered what had taken me so long to see it: it's so simple. I haven't thought 'scale' or 'mode' since that day. I changed my mindset altogether and did a lot of practice. Now I simply think 'melody' and the rest takes care of itself.
Read the testimonials — there are lots.
Hear and watch some examples of improvisation a la PlaneTalk. This a YouTube playlist.
Slide guitar in Standard & Dropped D Tunings
I fell in love with slide guitar the moment I heard it … must have been 1965 or so. I played for many many year in the traditional open tunings but after a while got a little tired of hearing those same inversions and licks that open tunings almost force you to play. I reverted to standard tuning and, to my delight, found that I could pretty much voice any chord, that I didn't have to have two or three guitars each in its own tuning or –worse– change tunings every tune, but best of all, my fretboard was laid out in nice familiar standard and I could play normally, throw in a slide lick here and there, then go back to normal playing. I eventually developed an intersting hybrid style that's still with me. A couple of years ago I took the time to put everything I know about it into a DVD.
Read more about it and hear some examples here.
I also sell the beautiful slides I use, machined from solid brass, with extra thickness at the finger tip end to make them even heavier (that's the secret!).
My YouTube Channel
My Channel … I've posted many guitar related videos at YouTube — 2.7 millions view so far! If you're into slide guitar, electric and resonator, there are plenty to choose from.
That's about it for this time. My little daughter Georgia is almost two now, and it's getting a whole lot easier to put my lessons together so expect to see me back here more regularly.
All the best,
Kirk Lorange