Double Stops.

Hi all. The Christmas / New Years dust has finally settled. I hope you had a good one.

I've been busy over the holidays revamping GuitarForBeginners dot Com. The site has been growing over the years and some of the coding had become outdated. I took the plunge and redesigned the entire site. I do a weekly Quicktime mini movie lesson there now so if you haven't already, drop in for a visit. The lessons are supported by tablature and lengthy written commentary on the musical details. Go to http://www.guitarforbeginners.com. It's much more than a beginner's site, by the way. Don't let the domain name fool you.

I've been creating the same kind of Quicktime movie lessons for my other site too, there are quite a few already, mostly dropped D slide lessons. They can be found at http://www.lorange.kirk.net Go to the Lessons page.

Double stops.

What's a double stop? A double stop is simply two notes played together. Once you get to three notes played together, you're looking at chords, but two notes are double stops. Chords get all the attention when it comes to teaching, and rightly so. They really are the most important thing to concentrate on, for all the reasons I've written about in this column over the years. Chords set the rules. Double stops are less definite entities than chords in that the same double stop can be found in several different chords. For example, the two notes E and A are found in A, A minor, F major 7th, E sus4, F#min7, D/E... only by adding the third note to E and A do we get those chords. So double stops can be versatile little beasts once you see how they fit.

The simplest and easiest to use double stops are harmony lines. Thirds are the most common way of harmonizing a melody. That means that you look for the note three away from the one you want harmonized, and by three away I mean three scale notes, not frets or semitones. That means of course that no regular pattern can be used for locating these notes, as the scale itself is irregular. So thinking "two frets up on the next string" won't work. You really have to be familiar with keys and chords to be able to easily use them effectively.

The other common double stop is the 6th, which is two 3rd's added together. 3rd's are usually on adjacent strings, 6th's are two strings apart and both are very "right" sounding and familiar to the ear. They are mostly played parallel to each other, with notes rising and falling in pitch together... just like two singers singing harmony.

Double stops can be much more complex however, and much more interesting to play and listen to. I've created a mini Quicktime lesson as an example. It's a bluesy kind of piece which uses double stops the whole way through the progression, and uses a very specific interval, the tritone. Check it out at http://www.lorange.kirk.net/lessons.html -- top of the list.

If you're wondering what the best way is to track all of these bits and pieces of the musical puzzle, read up on my book PlaneTalk. It reveals the "trick" to seeing it all there on the fretboard, whether it's chords, scales, intervals, double-stops, harmony, tritones, 5ths, minor, major -- whatever. There IS a master template to which everything else refers. It took me a couple of decades of playing to zero in on it. Why not save yourself the time and effort. The technique has helped over 7000 guitarists worldwide since I started marketing it on the Internet, all of them satisfied customers. There is an online version of the book too.

If you're a slide guitarist, why not join the forum at http://www.bottleneckguitar.com , another site of mine, and meet some other sliders from all over the World. Of all styles of playing, it's slide I love the most. You can listen to me play and sing Ledbelly's Bourgeois Blues if you're interested in that kind of music. I do a lot of playing behind the slide, a tricky technique which will be the subject of my next video.

All the best, I hope this inspires you to pull the ol' guitar out of its case and have a pluck. Make it your 2003 resolution to play a little bit more that last year... I've made it mine.

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