 | TFU 3.8 Lessons, News & Views
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Signing Off 2005, Tuning Up 2006
"I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument and an unsuspected yearning to learn to play on it, which are bound to wake up and demand attention some day.
Therefore, you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! for sooner or later your own time will come."
- Mark Twain
Practice smart, play hard and the very best to you and yours for the holidays!
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TFU 3.8 - Major Blues
TFU students will be receiving TFU CD 3.8 within the week.
Major Blues - Most blues players have a grip on the basic I-IV-V twelve-bar blues progression and also have a few turnarounds under their belt. Part of what makes the blues so much fun to play and jam over, is its relatively simple format.
But what separates the men from the boys and makes the blues fun to "listen" to are the endless variations of turnarounds, progressions and rhythmic patterns that great players have a handle on.
In our Turnarounds series, we covered many blues turnaround variations and more importantly, showed you how to construct your own. In this series, we'll cover 29 twelve-bar major blues progressions and also show you how to construct your own variations on the fly.
Michael Bloomfield, Robben Ford, Larry Carlton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and hundreds of other top blues players mix up their blues progressions with substitutions, alternate voicings and interesting turnarounds.
The thought of memorizing all of these variations may seem daunting at first, but once you start working through the lessons with the charts we've prepared, you'll appreciate just how easy it is to mix up your blues progressions.
>> GPs January '06 Lessons
Chordal Kung Fu - Fatten Up Your Lead Licks by Learning the Lost Art of Soloing With Chords
EZ Street: Exploring Moveable Arpeggios
Blues Guitar 101: Deep-Pocket Shuffles
Metal Guru - Rusty Cooley: Machine Gun Harmonics
Jazz Guru - Larry Carlton: A Chordal Approach to Altered Blues Lines
Hot Guitarist Alert! Adam Rogers
>>Chop Suey
Pat Kirtley is a gifted performer who combines a rich musical heritage with masterful contemporary technique on the acoustic guitar. This National Fingerstyle Champion’s musical roots are from the southern country and bluegrass tradition, but it is his original material that places him on the cutting edge of new acoustic music.
His repertoire is one that defies categorization, weaving tunes into a tapestry of folk, pop, Celtic, and down-home country, translated to the guitar with honesty, humor and depth. Here's one of our favorite performances from his performance at the Chet Atkins Convention.
>> Not yet enrolled in TFU?!
Jump on the bus and have some fun in the woodshed!
>> learn more about TFU ...
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Rockin’ Sleigh Ride for Christmas
 Well it’s that time of year again. When you dust off that old Christmas favorites songbook and you try to remember that easy guitar version of "We Three Kings" that you learned years ago. But don't let this season go by without a bit of rock in your egg nog!
I am going to show you how to play my version of "Sleigh Ride" from my CD "Christmas...at last" – rock solid style. One of the cool things about doing covers of great melodies is that you can experiment with trying to make it your own, all the while trying to retain the melody that makes it so good to start with.
This one has some sweep picking and several slightly weird fingerings that will be a bit of a challenge to most guitarists. So download this one and get it cranking for Christmas morning at Grandma’s! I have given you the lesson, and also the mp3 of the entire song to groove on - Merry Christmas.
>> Download a little Christmas rock...
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Handling Fast Tempos
 Guitar players have been hung up on technique and hand speed. However, my philosophy has always been that it's not how many notes you play, but what you play that matters. Regardless of song tempo, every single note should count for something, a trait that all of my blues and jazz mentors share in common. Of course, this blues-based attitude sounds great on paper, but there are times when you simply have to possess the horsepower to handle faster tempos or double-timed passages.
What guitarists frequently discover is that what works at slower tempos falls apart at higher speeds, because the most economical left-hand fingering and flat-picking approach wasn't taken into consideration at the slower tempo. The solution is to take a deeper look at your language and how you can adjust your technique to reacher higher ground.
Let's look at four II-V jazz licks that I transcribed from "Counter Clockwise," a bebop blues solo that I recently recorded. The band tempo was in excess of 300 bpm, but you'll hear and see how it's not just a matter of playing a bunch of notes, but the choice of solid phrasing and how good licks are approached technically that adds up to making something difficult much easier to play.
>> Chop City - Two-Fives...
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Jivin' with the Jester of Fingerstyle
 Contemporary Fingerstyle is a bit of a jester. It wears all manner of sonorous masks - Blues, Classical, Jazz, Ethnic, Celtic, Country and Rock - to complete its purposes. This blurring of styles and techniques is really the crux of what Contemporary Fingerstyle, as played by the likes of Tommy Emmanuel, Tim Sparks, Michael Hedges, Woody Mann etc, is all about.
I thought I'd illustrate this point by giving you a sneak preview of one of the easy fingerstyle pieces from a new AGW tuition video course that we're currently working on. The tune I want to show you is called, "Jivin' With The Jester". It's a cross between an old lute tune and something Big Bill Broonzy might have written. A close look at the bassline will reveal its acoustic blues and ragtime influences with its driving monotonic and occasionally alternating bass which occurs on the beat. You can also detect flavors of the famous Blues shuffle beat in the top line, although the melody has a distinctly Elizabethan feel. Kind of Big Bill meets Henry Purcell!
>> Download Jivin' with the Jester...
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"Mood for a Day" Part Two
by Jamie Andreas
Again, in this section of the fingerstyle classic "Mood For A Day" by Steve Howe, we will see the absolute importance of fingering; well planned, written in, fingering. We will also see the usefulness of applying a principle in our fingering that is of the utmost importance in doing something all great guitarists learn to do, something I describe as "optimizing the movement process."
>> Get moody, part 2...
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Pick of the Month: The Hellecasters' Future Country
Those futuristic twang-meisters known as the Hellecasters - Will Ray, John Jorgenson and Jerry Donahue - present a two-part, valuable, living room-style session that introduces you to B-bender and mini-slide techniques, crying chord suspensions, fast country and blues licks, banjo and pedal steel effects and a dash of Django. Including very specific finger-position instructions, the threesome lay out an essential array of material for any forward-thinking country player.
>> Download Part 1
>> Download Part 2
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Tip Jar! Roger McGuinn's Folk Den
Who comes to mind when you think of a 12-string Rickenbacker? Whose songs virtually defined the folk-rock movement in the 60's? Roger Mcguinn is and always has been the real deal - singer, songwriter, producer, historian, killer guitar player and one of the sweetest and most sincere beings walking the planet.
Tens of thousands of people stay tuned to McGuinn happenings by plugging in to www.McGuinn.com and www.FolkDen.com, where McGuinn has recorded and published hundreds of folk songs to preserve the medium for generations to come. McGuinn shares the love by allowing anyone to download the tunes in MP3 format.
We just picked up the brand new Folk Den Project 4-CD collection, which features 100 of McGuinn's favorite songs, all re-recorded in 24-bit 44.1 KHz stereo, and produced by McGuinn himself in his own studios. Whatever generation you hail from, this is a must-have for your music collection. Turn, turn, turn.
>> Tune in McGuinn ...
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Get Free Jazz Improv w/CD + Free Poster of Wes Montgomery
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We're proud to announce that TrueFire will be contributing free jazz guitar video lessons for the brand new guitar section of Jazz Improv magazine edited by guitar guru, Wolf Marshall. To welcome TrueFire members, our friends at Jazz Improv just rigged the following special deal ...
Subscribe with the code below and they'll give you your choice of the three back issues pictured here (all of them 250+ pages with enhanced CDs) plus a pretty cool poster of Wes Montgomery for the shed.
New to Jazz Improv? Each issue is jam-packed with ear-opening interviews, dozens of record and book reviews, annual directories and buyer's guides, how-to articles by leading artists, and for all of us pickers - the new issues now feature The Guitar Pages (a 20+ page section devoted just to guitar, with contributors like Wolf Marshall, Jimmy Bruno, Henry Johnson, and others) and a 150-page music e-book (on the enhanced CD) that includes full-length tracks by leading and emerging artists, solo transcriptions, exercises and more. As NPR says, "hands down the best" in its class.
To get your free TrueFire goodies ... click on the link below, subscribe, and paste the following code into the comments section of the order form: TRU-0106 along with your free issue selection.
Or, just call 1-888-472-0670 and they'll take care of business over the phone.
>> Subscribe and get free issue and poster ...
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