Kirk Lorange's PlaneTalk Online Contest.
Win membership to PlaneTalk Online and discover the TRICK to keeping track of all music on the guitar, the TRICK to improvising, the simple technique that will forever change the way you look at your fretboard. This members only site is the online version of Kirk Lorange's best selling book PlaneTalk. Simply sign Kirk's guestbook at http://www.lorange.kirk.net and mention the contest. Geoff at Hitsquad will pick a random winner every week.

Hi all. A merry and a happy and all that.

Not much in the way of news. This time of year is always a bit of a dud time for freelance musicians. Apart from the obvious New Years Eve gig, which I did without this year, it's a bit of a wasteland, what with holiday absentees and spent budgets. The trick is, of course, to plan for the down times during the up times and put some money in the bank to tide you over.

Guitar for Beginners is still attracting 800+ visitors a day, despite the fact that I had to make it a members only site with a small fee attached. Not that 800 visitors per day are paying the fee! I'd be a wealthy man already if that were the case, but enough are signing up for the members area to keep the site up and running, and that's the main thing for me. After all that work, it would have been heart breaking to have to close it down, but the expense of running it as a free site was prohibitive in the end. Thanks to those who are signing up.

I'd like to look at a topic I wrote about a long time ago, namely the art of seeing the fretboard as a whole.

Fretscapes.

When we start out playing the guitar, the layout of the fretboard is indeed a mystery, matched only by the seemingly unfathomable structure of Music itself, with its strange terminology and rules. Coming to grips with it all can seem all but impossible to a newcomer, and more often than not, is the reason beginners give up and put it in the 'too hard' category.

When we first start out on the guitar and learn about chords, we get the impression that there is one of each. We learn the 'shape' of a G chord, a C chord, a D7 chord etc., and that once we learn them all, we'll be up and running. The fact is, of course, that any old chord occupies the whole length of the fretboard in several positions, and that in effect, the whole fretboard can be seen as a G chord, or a BbMAJ7, or a C#m7, or whatever. The sooner you can "see" your fretboard laid out that way, the sooner you will be able to attain fluency and be able to invent your own arrangements on the spot; the sooner you will be able to improvise.

Sound impossible? it's actually easier than it seems, once you learn how the different positions interconnect. No matter how complex sounding the chord may be, underlying it is a rigid pattern, which never, and I mean never, lets you down or makes you wonder. There are no doubt many ways of coming to grips with this pattern, many ways of seeing it there on the fretboard, but years ago I realized that because all music is ruled by chords, I'd look for that pattern using chords. For some reason, scales seem to be the favored approach, but they always left me blank. Chords, to me, are crystallized scales, and contain much more information than a series of notes. If you understand that a simple chord consists of 3 scale notes (the first, third and fifth) then it doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that the other 4 scale notes are nearby, and it doesn't take long at all to be able to see them there attached to the chord shapes, and to be able to know them as seconds, fourths, sixths and sevenths. The other 'non scale' notes are there too, of course, slotted in between the scale notes. I guess the reason I've shied away from the scalar approach is that I always find use for those in-between notes, and they're never mentioned when talking about scales.

I once wrote an article called "My twelve guitars". It wasn't about my collection of instruments (which only numbers 5), but about the way I view my fretboard, what I call "fretscapes". If I'm in the key of A, my mental picture of the fretboard is quite different from the one I have in D, or G... I have 12 mental pictures, 12 fretscapes -- one for each key. Some are rarely used, like the Eflat fretscape, but all are specific and totally trustworthy once you firmly establish them in your brain. All are identical to each other once you move away from the nut, identical in everything but position on the fretboard, and each has its own idiosyncrasies down near the nut, where the strings are so rudely cut off. If a guitar existed with an infinite neck, then all fretscapes would be identical, but necks end at the nut, and the details of which notes are which must be filled in. For example, a G fretscape uses three open strings (the D, G and B), an E fretscape doesn't, it uses three different open strings (E, B and E). Once you account for these discrepancies down near the nut, all fretscapes are identical, and the paths through them are identical also. This is the beauty of the guitar, the way the shapes move up and down the neck.

So next time you get frustrated and are ready to throw your guitar out into the traffic, remember that it can all be boiled down to a few simple shapes, some easy to understand rules, and an understanding of the structure of music.

If you're wondering how to put this all together in your brain, and more importantly, what the bottom line is to it all -- what the trick is to tuning your thinking in this fashion, then check out http://www.lorange.kirk.net and read about the book I wrote and illustrated called PlaneTalk -- The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book. It's a comic strip approach to teaching the TRICK to it all, and once digested fully, the technique will ensure that you will never get lost again, and that the notes you hear in your head you will be able to see there on the fretboard. This book goes out all over the World everyday now, thanks to this amazing Internet, and the video has also become a best seller. I am pleased to say that I've never, ever, received anything but great feedback from guitarists who have bought the package, so if you're bogged down in a rut, wondering what to do next, I guarantee that once you start thinking the PlaneTAlk way, you'll never look at your fretboard the same way again.

The book is now available online by the way. I recently turned the entire contents of the book and the slide rule which comes with it, into a members only site. You can be learning THE TRICK immediately by signing up and logging in. The price is the same as the book.

OK, gotta get back to twanging my new guitar. An incredible craftsman called Kim Hancock, who lives up here on Tamborine Mountain, has made me the most beautiful archtop guitar I've ever seen, and it is so well put together, it almost plays itself. As soon as I have a photo of it, I'll post it at the site. It truly is exquisite.

All the best form a VERY hot Australia.

Kirk
http://www.lorange.kirk.net
http://www.guitarforbeginners.com
http://mp3.com/kirklorange