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As a guitar player you have probably trawled the internet looking for guitar lessons. Whether or not you want to learn to play guitar for free, your vision probably involved learning songs form tabs as well as getting as much theory and technique exercises you can handle.

Ten years ago a guy named Jon Broderick went looking for websites featuring high quality guitar lessons and, the legend goes, he had so little success, he went and made his own. The outcome was Guitar Tricks, another site that gives you access to their lessons in return for a monthly subscription. Not unlike Jamplay, but Guitar Tricks has been collecting guitar lessons for ten years, plus they have a collection of twenty-four free guitar lessons that you can try. Your free lessons are of the same quality as the lessons you get with your monthly subscription, taught by the same teachers who conduct the lessons for subscribers to Guitar Tricks.



These days four-hundred thousand guitarists take advantage of Guitar Tricks' lessons each month. And no wonder, because there are lessons in any genre you could name - acoustic, rock, metal, country, classical, jazz . . . and you can take lessons in special areas like chords, sound effects, harmonics, bottleneck, popping and guitar tricks. If you are not clear on whether your favorite guitar style has a name, you can simply request lessons based on the music of particular guitar players like Chet Atkins, Duane Allman, Stanley Jordan, Andres Segovia or Jimmy Page.

Your membership of Guitar Tricks gets you full access to a buttload of tutorials, sheet music, video lessons and backing tracks. Not only do you get the benefit of the Guitar Tricks guys' years of archiving guitar lessons but their content is updated every day.

One resource for beginner guitar players I'm always recommending is the collective expertise that you can find in guitar forums. Guitar Tricks has a forum that holds the records of questions and answers between thousands of guitarists. Would you believe there's over two-hundred thousand posts? And not only that, you can also have feedback from the Guitar Tricks teachers on any nagging question your brain can formulate.

Slack Key Guitar

Posted on | November 13, 2008 |

Slack key guitar is a fingerpicking style noted for being kept well hidden by its most notable exponents. Finding books, records or tutorials on slack key guitar playing is a series of dead ends where recording studios and music publishers have stopped recording and publishing and guitar players who specialize in slack key playing prefer to play for family gatherings rather than look for ways of spreading the word about their art.

We often associate the guitar and the ukulele with Hawaii but they are fairly recent imports into the Hawaiian culture. The way the guitar was introduced into the country is a matter of whose version of the story you like best. One version says that American and Spanish cowboys were invited to work in Hawaii in the mid-1830’s to help with the newly imported cattle population. Another story is that Hawaiians were helping the Argentine navy with something or other in Monterey, California. Whatever the truth is, the Hawaiians took to the stringed instruments and adapted them to their own culture and ways of expressing their feelings.

Anyway, let us shed some light on the unusual name for this guitar style. The name “slack key” refers to the practice of changing the tuning of the guitar by turning the tuning keys so that the strings are loose, or “slack”. The end result of this adjustment is usually an open tuning. But apparently sometimes slack key guitar players play in standard tuning, so apart from the tuning, what distinguishes slack key from other fingerstyle guitar playing? Well, there is the repertoire. Slack key guitar playing usually accompanies songs whose themes are rooted in the Hawaiian country - the mountains, the palm trees, the sea - south sea island stuff.

The G major chord turned out to be a popular open tuning for the Hawaiian guitarists. This is D G D G B D, from lowest to highest, and they called it Taro Patch tuning. Another kind of tuning was called Wahine tuning and included a major seventh, for example D G D F# B D. Another slack key tuning is called “Gabby’s C” and is C G E G A E.

Another aspect that makes slack key special is the unique use of standard finger-picking techniques like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and harmonics. These guitar techniques are used in highly personal ways with the guitar player sometimes using different tunings and techniques for the same song according to how he feels at the moment. Slack key playing has a wide variety of modes of expression. Some players will stick to playing a melody with very little variation, others love to improvise on their basic themes. Other guitar players love the chime effect achieved by the use of harmonics.

If you are interested in listening to some Hawaiian slack key guitar playing, some names to look out for are Sonny Chillingworth, Leonard Kwan, Moses Kahumoku, George Kuo and Ray Kane. These are among some of the most prominent composers and players of slack key guitar. If you look on YouTube for slack key guitar videos you will find a handful uploaded by a few dedicated guitar players who are working on spreading the word about this beautiful art form.


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Category: Acoustic Guitars

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