Hi again, fellow guitar enthusiast. I’m back … If you live in a country that celebrates Halloween, may you have a scary one.

Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson

This week I’ve done a revamp of a lesson I posted a couple of years ago. I called it ‘Only a Hobo’ at the time because I knew Bob Dylan had turned this traditional piece into a song by that name. Ry Cooder does it as ‘Great gift from Heaven’ and it seems that Joseph Spence, a great picker form the Bahamas, did it as ‘There Will Be A Happy Meeting’. Whatever it’s called, it’s a great piece to play. It’s in my favorite tuning: Dropped-D.

You’ll find that in the Lessons Forum at GfB&B

We’re about to pass the 21,000 members mark at Guitar for Beginners and Beyond, not bad considering it’s only been a year. There certainly are some fantastic players joining up and posting their music there, well worth a listen. It’s also the friendliest, most civilized bunch of twangers you’ll find anywhere on the www, so if you have any questions about anything at all … music, gear, recording, software, hardware, books, methods … you’re bound to get an answer. All you have to do is ask. Join up (for free, of course) at Guitar for Beginners and Beyond Forum.

PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book

Still wondering what the trick is to using the whole fretboard? To improvising over any chord progression, not just a 12 bar blues? To harmonize any line on the fly? To literally see lines, riffs, licks, solos, rhythm parts, double stops … all in the context of the moment? It’s a very simple ‘trick’ as it turns out, one that uses something you learned in the first few days of playing guitar. Scales and modes and pentatonic boxes are all useful tools and should be learned and practiced, but music loves melody and melody is something more than scales/modes. PlaneTalk teaches that way of thinking and looking at the fretboard and does so in the most user friendly format out there. It comes with the Guitar Slide Rule and a 60 minute DVD. The package teaches the most powerful guitar lesson you will ever learn, and I do realize how superlative that sounds. My customers will back me up on that score … read some of their testimonials here. Find out more and how to order it here …

How to play Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D tunings

Ever wished you could incorporate that great sound of slide guitar into your normal style of playing? Well, you can! Most players associate slide with open tunings, which implies re-learning the fretboard layout, re-tuning your guitar or needing a special guitar just for playing slide. You can in fact slip a slide onto your pinkie, stay in standard tuning and combine the two styles into one very spicy hybrid way of extracting music from a guitar. Have a listen to some of my tracks on the ‘Slide A Lorange Radio’ at my other site Bottleneckguitar.com … if you like it, you’ll be pleased to know I have a 70 minute DVD in which I reveal exactly how I do it.

That’s it for this week, see you next week.
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Kirk
http://www.kirklorange.com