Author: Folk_Friend

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Fingerstyle Folky Fridays

Folky Fridays #43 – Comparing arrangement options in DADGAD and EADGBE

In this week’s Folky Fridays free online guitar lesson live stream from Folk Friend I will be responding to a request from channel regular Brian who wanted to have a look at the slip jig Fig For A Kiss and examine how arrangement options would differ between standard EADGBE tuning and DADGAD.

Fig For A Kiss is included in my collection of 10 arrangements of classic Irish tunes for fingerstyle guitar in standard tuning, which you can buy as an e-book or paperback at the link below. It comes with a playing guide for each tune, a short history of its provenance and author if known, chord diagrams, MIDI downloads, audio demonstrations and lots more! Get it here.

I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.

Categories
Strumming patterns

How to strum polkas on guitar for complete beginners!

In this week’s free guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you two easy strumming patterns you can use to play along with polkas! One is the “hup-two” pattern which you see a lot in Irish sessions and the other is a more motion-efficient variant which I have borrowed from the great guitarist and music educator Steve Cooney.

Get your hands on the Folk Friend Playalongs Pack in order to practice along with 20 tunes at 3 speeds each, with on screen guitar chords, diagrams, a write up of why the chords work and loads more.

Categories
DADGAD Fingerstyle

Beautiful and easy Irish polka arrangement in DADGAD tuning – Ger The Rigger with free tab

This week I’ll be teaching you to play an easy DADGAD fingerstyle arrangement of one of my favourite Irish polkas, Ger The Rigger! I’ve slowed it down to make a nice, bouncy little arrangement that can be played for hours on end leading to a kind of polka trance!

This arrangement and nine others are available in my latest collection of DADGAD tabs. The complete download also comes with MIDI playthroughs, a short history of each tune and its author where relevant, tabs, playing instructions, chord diagrams and loads more! Get it here.

You can download the tab on its own (free) here.

I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.

Categories
DADGAD Fingerstyle

The most useful scale ever – beginner DADGAD fingerstyle guitar lesson

In this week’s free Irish / Celtic guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you the most useful scale ever for beginners learning to play in the DADGAD tuning! This handy scale lets you play an octave of D major without hitting the same string twice in a row, which is handy if you have a slow picking hand and want nice overlapping notes for a cool harp-like ringing effect! It also provides an easy way to add bass notes below a melody and thus start writing your first DADGAD arrangements.

If you would like to learn 10 easy arrangements of Irish tunes for DADGAD guitar then check out my book available here.

The free tablature and scale exercises download mentioned in the video can be found here.

I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.

Categories
Strumming patterns

How to play strummed triplets in slip jigs – Irish guitar accompaniment tutorial

In this free beginner Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you how to incorporate strummed triplets into your slip jig guitar accompaniment. These highly versatile strumming ornaments will make your Irish guitar backing a lot more energetic and they’re not too hard to master so I hope you enjoy this easy Irish guitar lesson.

You can find my free playalong video for The Butterfly here:

The Butterfly slip jig – slow, medium and fast playalong with guitar chords – E aeolian

Categories
Strumming patterns

How to play triplets in jigs – Irish guitar strumming tutorial

In this week’s free beginner Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you how to add strummed triplets to your Irish jig guitar accompaniment! This can be quite a tricky technique for beginner guitarists, but as soon as you get it down you’ll be able to add loads of cool rhythmic variations to your Irish backing guitar!

You can find my previous jig strumming videos here:

Standard jig patterns

“Upside down” strumming

Categories
Artist interviews

Folk Friend Meets Tiffany Schaefer- How to accompany The Castle Jig on harp (duet at the end!)

This year, in honour of St. Patrick’s Day, I got together for a Zoom call with the amazing American harpist Tiffany Schaefer from the Harp and Song Youtube channel (linked below). We came up with a wee duet of a tune called the Castle Jig and discussed different approaches to backing Irish tunes. There are loads of interesting ideas for guitarists to learn from harpists and hopefully lots of good tips for Celtic harp players here too, so enjoy the video and don’t forget to like and subscribe!

FOLLOW TIFFANY:

Website: http://www.tiffanyharpandsong.com​

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/tiffanyschaeferharp

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tiffanyharpandsong

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiffanyharpandsong/

 

There is another part to this video, in which I show how I would pick chords for a reel called Far From Home, played by Tiffany. You can watch it here:

Tiffany also runs a very helpful community Facebook group for Celtic musicians:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/347044529772564

Categories
Styles of great guitarists

A guide to the Shetland guitar style of Tich Richardson from Boys Of The Lough

I had a request recently for a video examining the Shetland guitar style of Tich Richardson who famously played with Boys Of The Lough. Tich tragically died in a car crash in 1984, so his characteristic guitar style is not widely known, but from the few surviving recordings of his playing we can see a hugely creative and versatile player who melded the classic “Shetland” bum-chak style with forrays into fingerstyle, altered tunings and countless creative, jazzy chord voicings.

In this video I examine one fantastic clip of Tich playing with Boys Of The Lough fiddle player Aly Bain. The full clip can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wP68ftFMA0

You can find my previous videos on “Peerie” Willie Johnson here.

And Django Reinhardt here.

Categories
Folky Fridays

Folky Fridays #49 – What makes Irish / Scottish music sound Celtic?!

In today’s Folky Fridays free Celtic guitar lesson livestream, I wanted to discuss my thoughts on what makes Celtic music sound Celtic, and how it’s different from more modern music or folk music from other cultures. I’ll also be relating this to guitar backing as much as possible and doing my best to show you how melodic conventions can influence your guitar accompaniment choices for traditional/ folk music.

Categories
Folky Fridays

Folky Fridays #48 – A complete approach to guitar accompaniment for Swallowtail jig

In this week’s Folky Fridays free online guitar lesson live stream from Folk Friend I will be showing you how you can pick chords for the most popular Irish tune on Youtube, Swallowtail Jig. I’ll show you how to pick simple chords by ear, how to use substitutions to make them more interesting and then loads of cool variants and techniques to make your chords more interesting!

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