Homepage Forums Guitar News Weekly Guitar News Weekly Archive Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson: Silent Night

  • Creator
    Topic
  • #23899
    Guitar Expert
    Keymaster

    Hi, fellow twanger, I’m back!

    Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson

    20 days until Christmas, 20 days to practice up your finger style Christmas carols! This week I did two different versions of Silent Night: a very stripped back version for those just starting out, and a trickier version for those who have been playing for longer.

    Silent Night – easy version
    Silent night – trickier version

    and let’s not forget the other two carols I did last year:

    Jingle Bells
    White Christmas

    There … that should keep you busy! Merry Practice and a Happy After Dinner Performance.

    PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book/DVD

    Scales, scales, scales … ugh! It wasn’t until the Internet came along that I realized how many players struggle with all those scales when trying to improvise. It came as a shock to me because I gave up on using scales decades ago. Scales are building blocks, and certainly we should all know what they are, how they differ and how they fit into the grand scheme of music theory. But, to try and turn them into meaningful melody/solos/improv is another story.

    Many moons ago I started to analyze all those great memorable melodies and discovered that they are not based directly on scales, but rather consist almost totally of chord tones. So I started building my improvisations on chord tones instead of scales … I never looked back. The trick, of course, is being able to identify, locate and use all those chord tones in real time in order to string them together into melody. That trick is the subject of my book PlaneTalk, which has been selling from my site for well over seven years now. It teaches an extremely simple way of turning the entire fretboard into familiar, recognizable, friendly territory no matter what the music is doing, no matter what the chord structure is, and it teaches you how to instantly see the infinite melodic possibilities that apply at any given moment. The best part is that you never have to wonder “What scale do I use?” … Read all about it here. You can read a heap of testimonials here, and once you order, you can join the private PlaneTalkers’ Forum where I hang out on a daily basis to discuss music, twanging and answer questions.

    Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped-D Tunings DVD

    My favorite way of playing guitar is to slip a heavy brass slide over my pinkie, drop the bass string down to D and combine both normal and slide techniques into a very spicy hybrid style. You can listen to a bunch of my tracks on the ‘Slide à Lorange’ Radio on the home page of my other other site Bottleneck Guitar dot Com … if you like what you hear, you can learn all about on the 70 minute DVD I recently finished off. You’ll find the order instructions on that site.

    That’s it, that’s all for this week,

    Kirk Lorange

  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.