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Guitar Tricks - The Learning Guitar Player's Resource

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.
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.
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.

Dobro Tunings – the cornerstone of learning to play slide guitar

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If you are attracted to the sound of the resonator guitar you will be learning some Dobro tunings. The resonator guitar, or Dobro, like the electric guitar, is the result of early pioneers of the guitar looking for some way to make their instrument heard above the other instruments in a band. Using metal resonators did not catch on as amplification but the resonator guitar was embraced by slide guitar players for its expressive sound.

The basic advantages of using alternate tunings for Dobro playing are the availability of open string bass notes to accompany your melodies and the variety of combinations of chords you can make use of. Standard tuning is fine for the Dobro – you can still do alot with single note tunes – but why not look at it as a new instrument with new possibilities? You can decide which tuning to use based on the key of the song you are playing.

Bluegrass Dobro players quite often use G B D G B D – Open G tuning. There is a certain advantage for guitarists new to the Dobro in using this tuning in that the second, third and fourth strings are tuned the same as in standard tuning. This makes it a little easier to become comfortable with the new layout of the fretboard.

You cannot get minor chords using the Open G but you can find two notes of the minor triad. The second and third strings played open are two-thirds of your E minor chord – G and B. If you play the open second and third strings with the fourth string barred at the second fret, you will get the sound of the complete E minor chord.

You can also tune the Dobro to D G D G B D. This opens up the range of notes available to you in the lower range and is favored by Bluegrass guitar players. Do not forget that you can use other open tunings like Open E and Open D. If you would like to play blues music tune your Dobro to D B G G B D – gypsy tuning.

Hawaiian slack key is a little appreciated guitar style which also uses alternate and open tunings. Among the slack key tunings are D A D F# A C#, C G E G A E, Open C – C G C E G C, and Open F – C F C F A C. The key to Dobro playing is the sound and how you can bring it out in your own way by using these unusual tunings.

I should mention that you can use the capo on the Dobro, just the same as on the regular guitar. You should have no problem adjusting to the touch of the Dobro. If you are thinking of buying a resonator guitar with a pickup, just bear in mind that you may have some problems with feedback.

Here is a video on using the Open G tuning in Dobro playing:


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