Hi yet again, fellow twanger.

Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson

Feeling a little cramped up? Boxed in? Well, you won’t be for long. This weeks lesson is going to stretch everything: your tendons, fingers, brain, knowledge, imagination. I went to a fair amount of trouble to demonstrate something that was shown to me in about 1975. I was hungry for knowledge then, as I am still, and I remember my jaw dropping when I first saw this demonstrated by a fellow player. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that all music is everywhere at once on a guitar fretboard.

Check it out at The Ultimate Stretching Exercise

Guitar for Beginners and Beyond

The community at GfB&B continues to grow … were heading toward 21,000 members now. I reckon any question you may have about anything to do with guitars has been discussed at length in the forum. Don’t forget that the forum has a ‘Search’ link … it’s a goldmine of information. We have some very experienced players and technicians there, eager to pass on their knowledge, so don’t be shy. Come on over and join up and join in. If you’re at the stage in your playing where you’ve started to record, feel free to upload your mp3. There’s nothing like feedback to help you progress.

PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book

I did a bit of a revamp on my front page yesterday. It’s difficult not to sound like everyone else out there, promising to turn you into a household name guitarist, however, when I say that PlaneTalk teaches one of the simplest but most powerful guitar lessons you’ll ever learn, I do mean it. The structure of Music, the layout of the fretboard and the way guitars are tuned all conspire to make playing them one of the most complicated endeavors on the planet … or seem to be, anyway. PlaneTalk, the book, DVD and Slide-Rule show you that there is a very logical and simple way of keeping track of everything — melody, harmony and chords — over the entire fretboard, at all times, no matter what the music is doing. Here’s what a recent customer who happens to be the ‘Information Marketer of the Year 2005’ wrote me a few days ago:

“Planetalk is superb. One of the best info products I have bought in any field.”

You can read all about it at the PlaneTalk Site

Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D tunings

I see that my old friend and fellow twanger Tommy Emmanuel is back home here in Australia. We used to do gigs and recording sessions together before he headed off for stardom. He would always introduce me on stage as “The best slide player on the Planet”. I wrote him recently asking if I could quote him in the promo for my DVD on the subject … he replied: “Of course you can, it’s true.” Thanks Tommy! Tommy, by the way, is one of the endorsers of my book PlaneTalk.

Slide is my specialty, and I’m a little unusual in that I stay in Standard Tuning when I play, or drop the bass string down to D. I did play in open tunings for many years, but I got tired of sounding like everyone else, but more importantly, I hated the fact that PlaneTalk fretboard landmarks disappeared in open tunings. I really do like to know what I’m playing and where everything is. So I reverted to standard.

Have a look at this excerpt from the DVD. I doctored it a little so that you can’t see everything that’s going on, but I think you’ll be able to see that you really don’t need to play in open tunings. I also sell the short, heavy brass slides …

That’s all I have for this week, until next, all the best!

Kirk Lorange