Kirk's Weekly Guitar Lesson: Tiptoe Through The Blues

Hi fellow guitar picker. I hope all is well with you and yours, especially if you live in Southern California. May the worst be over.

Kirk's Weekly Lessons

I've got a new finger style lesson for you, one for beginners. When I say 'beginners', I don't mean those who started playing last week, I mean those who have got the basics happening, whose fingers have limbered up a bit and who have built up some callouses on their finger tips. For those who have just started, you need to get those basic open chord shapes memorized and mastered, practice moving between them and teach your hands and fingers to obey. There are many lessons at the site to help you along with this process. Go to http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/fo...lessons-forum/ and have a look around.

Tiptoe Through The Blues: Tiptoe Through The Blues

This one is great for those just getting started with finger style. I used a classic chord progression, the same one used in the old tunes 'Tiptoe through the Tulips' and 'The birth of the Blues'. I kept it to a bass line and melody line, both working together in a nice simple pattern that will be very beneficial for you finger independence. When it all boils down, that's what playing an instrument is all about: making your finger work independently of each other. That takes conscious effort at first and this lesson will definitely help.

Finger-Style Lessons on CD

You can also now buy all my fingerstyle lessons on CD, all in the nice PDF format. It's cheaper and of course you don't need to download and have files scattered all over your hard drive. Check it out here: http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/fo...p?pg=cdlessons

Other Lessons

For those delving into the art of improvisation, I though I'd remind you of these two lessons. I do that for two reasons: 1) to enlighten you on where melody comes from when dealing with chord progressions that are more than just two or three chords from the key, and 2) to plug my book/DVD PlaneTalk which teaches you how to literally 'see' all the possibilities right there on the fretboard. The fretboard, as it turns out, is a great natural stretch of graph paper upon which you can see how music works.

The Power of Chord Tones 1: The power of chord tones 1

The Power of Chord Tones 2: The power of chord tones 2

Here's a movie of me playing a proper piece of music using mostly chord tones: YouTube - Jazzy Improvisation

Member Solidwalnut has also added to his great list a new finger picking pattern video lesson:

Fingerpicking Patterns Part 2 [Beginner & Intermediate/Folk & Country/Technique]

Interesting threads

We're so lucky at GfB&B to have some very knowledgeable 'theorists' on board. Between contributing member 'Fretsource' and new arrival 'Monk' and several other members, there isn't a question about theory out there that can't be cleared up definitively. One of the questions that comes up time and time again is the 'Modes' can of worms. What are modes ... exactly? ... how and when can they be used? Are they a 'must learn' aspect of music, or just a curiosity? There's a very interesting thread on that subject here. You may surprised at the final conclusion: is major scale enough ??

There are, of course, hundreds of other interesting threads at the discussion forum, discussions about gear, recording, theory, improvisation, bands, technique, collaboration projects, song writing, the music industry, copyright, music news from around the world ... you name it, we discuss it! If you're not a regular reader of the board, may I suggest you drop in and have a look around. You don't need to add your 2 cents, although we'd love to meet you, but with 15,671 discussions, 167,456 replies and 47,205 members (as of today), you can imagine what a goldmine of guitar information the site has become.

PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book > PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book

If you're beyond the beginner stage and you're still wondering what the trick is to seeing the whole fretboard as familiar, friendly territory and being able to improvise freely and invent guitar parts on the fly, then you should drop into the PlaneTalk site and read about the book/DVD. As you probably know by now, I gave up on scales and modes decades ago. They never did much to help me in the art of soloing, nor are they any help when improvising chordally. I discovered many moons ago that the kind of improvisation I like, which is based around melody, is easier to access via chords rather than scales, and that the whole fretboard is the playground. The book comes with The Guitar Slide Rule (a folded-sleeve-with-insert invention of mine) that crystallizes the simple but powerful visualization technique and the hour long DVD demonstrates in real time how it all works. Guaranteed to change the way you look at your fretboard forever more. Visit PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book for the full story.

Make sure you watch the two movies on the home page which are good examples of melodic improvisation without once thinking of a scale or mode. The fact is, I have no idea how to make melody from scales or box patterns or anything other than the chords themselves.

Here is how one recent customer, who teaches guitar, put it to me in an email:

"I am absolutely having a ball rethinking 20 years of hard labour .... So happy to be Off The Scale treadmill ... I am beginning to feel like a Pilgrim who has finally been gifted with The Holy Grail."

There are dozens more similar testimonials here: http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/fo...-testimonials/

Once you buy the book/DVD, you can also join the private forum where we discuss the simple technique on a daily basis and where any questions you may have are quickly answered and cleared up. The technique really is so simple in concept that many newcomers need to be reassured that they're not missing something. Of course, simple in concept doesn't mean you won't need to practice for ever more ... but at least you'll know what to practice.

Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D tunings

Slide guitar is my favorite, has been since I first heard it back in about 1967 when I heard Duane Allman and George Harrison's great playing. I did spend a few years in open tunings -- the traditional way of playing slide -- but found it impossible NOT to sound like everyone else and so went back to standard tuning. What I found was a very rich environment for playing slide, a tuning that is in fact a bunch of mini open tunings all living side by side. All chord flavors are there for the twanging ... all you need is to know here to find them. I show you everything I know about the art in my 70 minute DVD, so there's no need for you to spend the years it took me to refine it all.

Visit Slide Guitar Web Ring - Bottleneck Guitar for more info and to order. You can also buy one of my beautiful custom brass slides.

That's it for this week, enjoy the lessons, enjoy the site!

Kirk Lorange

http://www.guitarforbeginners.com

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Back 31.10.2007