I’m back … hope you has a nice Canada Day and Independence Day up there in the Northern Hemisphere!

Weekly Guitar Lesson

This week I finished off the Fire and Rain lesson. This is the chorus section, a fairly challenging bit of picking. You’re going to see in the video that I break a big rule with this one: I use my thumb to fret a bass note! This is considered a no-no in many circles, but I watched my old pal Tommy Emmanuel CPG the other day in a little video lesson describing how his thumb has become a huge part of his technique, so what the heck? What are rules for if not for breaking from time to time, and if it’s good enough for TE, who are we to argue?

http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4727 is where you’ll find it.

I recorded a quick overdubbed melody line on my resonator so you can hear how it all slots together.

The GfB&B Community – http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/forum/

The GfB&B Radio certainly is a neat addition to the site. It’s still in test mode, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a permanent feature. I sure do enjoy listening to it. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do! It features original tunes from our most musical members and a bunch of mine.

We’re well on our way to 16,000 members! Who would have though last October when we revamped the forum that it would grow so quickly? If you’re new to the forum and haven’t yet posted, why not say hi in our Introduce Yourself forum – http://www.guitarforbeginners.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=22, no need to be shy, we’re a friendly bunch. 🙂

PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book

Remember that if you’re in the ‘Beyond’ stage of your playing, and you’re still wondering how it is that some players seem to have total mastery over their fretboards — from nut to 25th fret — whether they’re paying chords, riffs, licks, solos or improvising … well … there is a bit of a ‘trick’ to it. I spent a couple of decades looking for some way of mapping the fretboard, something I could follow no matter what the music was doing, a constant that I could bank on at all times. One day while plotting out slide positions in standard tuning, it suddenly came to me: that ‘something’ was something I had learned in the first few days of playing, something so simple I couldn’t believe it had taken me such a long time to ‘see’. I describe that simple mindset in my book PlaneTalk and its companion ‘Slide Rule’ and DVD, which together teach a very succinct way of viewing the fretboard and thinking about music in general, and lets you see The Big Picture.

Read the testimonials here: http://www.thatllteachyou.com/testimonial2.php

So, if you’ve ‘hit the wall’ in your playing, let PlaneTalk punch a big hole right through it for you.

http://www.thatllteachyou.com

By the way, this is not for beginners, this is for the ‘beyonds’.

The Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D tunings DVD

I’ve been assured that I can pick up the first run of DVDs this Thursday, so I should be able to announce their availability in the next GNW. Fingers crossed!

OK, then, have fun with the chorus of Fire and Rain!
All the best,

Kirk Lorange
http://guitarforbeginners.com/forum/