Stairway part II

Hello, fellow guitar enthusiast, I trust you're well and getting ready for the holiday season. Next week I'm going to post a couple of familiar carols ... fingerstyle. You'll have a few days to practice up so you can impress everyone after dinner.

This week, though, is the second part of the finger pickin' intro to Stairway to Heaven. I have to admit I just did it my way ... I have no patience when it comes to exact replications of someone else's guitar part. You should also feel free to simplify or complicate the part according to your own taste. A piece of music need not be rigidly locked into any one arrangement. You'll see that I added an extra pass through the verse chords using a very handy three-finger pluck, and played a slide melody against that to demonstrate exactly what I was alluding to above: that even the most familiar piece of music can have a whole new twist if approached from a another angle.

Go to Guitar for Beginners and Beyond and follow the Weekly Lesson link. As usual, I take up a couple of seconds of your time with a little quiz. These free lessons take about five hours to put together, so don't curse me too much for the imposition. PlaneTalk, the book I wrote which reveals the 'trick' to being able to see your entire fretboard as friendly, familiar territory, continues to generate superlative feedback. Anthony from the USA wrote me yesterday saying simply this:

"PlaneTalk is the best guitar instruction book I have seen and I will be using it as the base for all other guitar instruction."

If you still don't know this simple visualization 'trick' (you'll hate yourself for not having 'seen' it yourself), do yourself the favor. That's PlaneTalk - The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book. We're almost 600 strong in the private forum there, where we discuss the technique at length.

Until next week,

Kirk Lorange
http://www.kirklorange.com