Hi, fellow picker, I trust the twangin’ is good.

Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson

I’ve done a finger style version of the classic Tambourine Man this week, in Dropped D. It’s going to wrench your left hand right out of its comfort zone and force it to s t r e t c h those tendons and muscles, which is, of course, a good thing … and as Alan Jackson sings: ‘Too much of a good thing … is a good thing’. The arrangement I came up with uses a lot of open strings, adding the jingle-jangle to this great old tune.

You’ll find that at Guitar for Beginners and Beyond, in the Guitar Lessons Forum.

You’ll also find a thriving community of close to 20,000 now, very helpful and friendly, so if you haven’t already, join up and join in!

PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book

Without a doubt, the most fun and challenging aspect to playing any instrument is the art of improvisation. I think most of us aspire to be the kind of player who can listen to a piece of music and instantly hear what’s going on and start to play along, creating a part on the fly that is ‘right’ … I know that’s what I wanted to do right from the start. I’d seen some of my heroes on screen doing just that, and I always marvelled at it … it was like magic to me back then? How could they possibly do that? What’s the trick? I could see and hear they weren’t playing scales; there were chords and lines and phrases and licks and melody coming from their fingers, and I already knew all my scales and modes and pentatonic boxes.

I never did find out exactly what they were doing, but I did discover a ‘trick’ … a very neat and succinct way of looking at the fretboard and literally seeing all those elements at any given moment of any given tune. Not only that, but the trick is simple beyond belief, making use of something we all learned in the first few days of playing guitar. Applying it, of course, takes time, practice and hard work, but once you learn it, you’ll never look at your fretboard nor think about music in the same way.

I could go on … check it out at the PlaneTalk site. Read some of the testimonials, many come from the PlaneTalkers’ Forum which you can join once you’ve read the book.

Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tunings

Want to spice up your sound? Why not slip a slide over your pinkie, stay in standard tuning and add some slide licks and riffs and chords to to your bag of tricks. Believe it or not, standard tuning is a rich environment for slide … you don’t have to tune to open tunings. You can play all flavors of chords and, of course, all your licks and riffs that you already know won’t need to be re-mapped since you’re not in a new tuning … you can play them with a slide.

Check out my other other site Bottle Neck Guitar dot Com, have a listen to some of the tracks there. They’re all in standard or dropped D (just the bass string). If you like what you hear and want to learn more, order the 70 minute DVD in which I give it all away. I leave no stone unturned!

That’s all from me, until next week, all the best,

Kirk Lorange