Kirk’s Weekly Guitar Lesson: Happy Holidays 2008

Happy Holidays! Hi, fellow picker, I trust you're well and that the twangin' is good. If you hail from the US, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving break and that you managed to get some playing in.

Kirk's Finger Style Christmas Lessons I've got some new lessons for you. A post on the forum suggesting some new Christmas Carols jogged me into action. I wish I could say I arranged them from memory but I can't. I dialed up iTunes, had a listen to few versions and came up with four for you. There's plenty of time to practice them up so that you can perk up an ear or two when the day comes. They are:

Jingle Bells revisited – Easy

Little Star of Bethlehem – Pretty easy

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing – A little trickier

It came Upon a Midnight Clear – Kinda tricky

The levels of difficulty, of course, depend on how long you've been playing.


PlaneTalk – The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book/DVD

I won't bore you with another blurb about the way the mindset that my book/DVD PlaneTalk teaches turns your whole fretboard into one long, friendly, familiar playground; the way it enables you to improvise melodically over any chord progression without even thinking about modes and scales; about the slide-rule that shows you how to map out the fingerboard at a glance … always; about the DVD that demonstrates it all in real time, to real music; about the stand-alone CD lesson showing how to apply the mindset to 12 bar blues or about the PlaneTalkers' Forum where you can find the author (me) on a daily basis.

Oops … did it again! Find out all about it here ; testimonials here.


Slide Guitar in Standard and Dropped D tunings

As I'm sure you know by now, I love slide guitar and I especially like being able to play it in good old standard tuning. I love to combine both normal and slide playing into one hybrid style … it's fun. Have a look and listen to an example here

I put a lot of time last year into putting together a 70 minute DVD that shows you everything I could think of that I know about the art. It goes through basic technique, the art of muting, vibrato, single note lines, double stops, chord flavors (they're all there). I made good use of the 'overlay' function of the video editing software to show you exactly what's happening on the fretboard. Check it all out here if you really want to have some fun playing guitar.

I also sell the beautiful slides, machined from solid brass to my specs.


Big thanks to all members and mods

A new member at the forum reminded us all in a post the other what a great community GfB&B has become over the years. He commented on what a positive, helpful place it is compared to many other guitar hang-outs, how easy it is here to get feedback. Yes, it certainly is. A big thank you to everyone involved for making it so!

Over and Out

That's it from me and me for this year. I wish you all the best for the coming holiday season and 2009. May it be fruitful and musical.

Happy twanging and enjoy the lessons,

Kirk Lorange
Guitar for Beginners and Beyond

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