Hi, fellow music lover, I’m back with an interesting look at harmony in this week’s lesson, and I’ve used ‘Hotel California’s’ wonderful chord progression as backdrop. The lesson highlights the need to always be aware of what I call ‘chord of the moment’ since the easiest way to keep track of harmony is to see it as being built into chords.

Go to Guitar for Beginners and Beyond, look for the Weekly Lesson link (you can’t miss it) and enjoy it. This is a really fun one to play once you’ve locked all the positions in … I could do it all day!

My book PlaneTalk (The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book) continues to shed blinding light on the way music imposes itself on the fretboard … notice I didn’t say ‘scales’ or ‘modes’ or ‘pentatonics’ … they’re not music, they’re some of the raw ingredients of music. Music is a structure, a context, and it makes much more sense to be tracking that context rather than the raw ingredients. That’s what PlaneTalk teaches, using something so simple you’ll kick yourself for not seeing it yourself. Check it out at the PlaneTalk site.

The private PlaneTalkers’ Forum, which you can join once you’ve ordered, is really hotting up. It was upgraded a couple of months ago to a better program which allows members to easily upload mp3 recordings. We overdub improvisations over backing tracks and discuss them at length. We all agree that there is no better way to view the fretboard than through PlaneTalk colored glasses.

I’m getting very close to finishing the ‘How to play Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D Tunings’ DVD … I work on it every chance I get, making extensive use of the overlay features of Adobe Premiere to make things very clear. It won’t be long before it’s available. Drop into Bottleneck Guitar to have a listen to some mp3s, to join the Slide Guitar Discussion Forum or to join the Slide Guitar Web Ring if you have a related site. You can also drop me a quick email from there asking me to advise you when the DVD is finished.

That’s it, unless you want to listen to my style of music. If so, go to my Soundclick site.

Cheers, all the best,

Kirk
http://www.kirklorange.com