This week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend is for complete beginners who want to learn how to accompany Irish traditional music on the guitar by ear. I’ll be showing you which chords fit with a tune in a major key and how you can train your ears to recognise where those chords should fit. I’ll also be giving you some examples using my free playalong video with on screen guitar chords for a classic Irish reel called Maid Behind The Bar. You can find that video here:
In this week’s Folky Fridays free online guitar lesson live stream from Folk Friend I will be showing you some interesting features of chord inversions, and how to use pedal points to build suspense in your chord progressions. This is not something I touch upon often on the channel but can have some really interesting and unexpected results in all sorts of folk guitar contexts so don’t miss it!
This year I want you to cut out the noodling daydreaming and general twiddlage which seems to afflict all guitarists, and become the very best Celtic guitarist you can be! With this in mind, in today’s free guitar lesson live stream I’ll be running you through my top tips for how to make your guitar practice time more productive. I’ll also be showing you some of my favourite exercises for ear training and quickly memorising music theory and demonstrating the Folk Friend Practice Diary, which will help you to focus in on what you need to do to achieve your guitar goals (along with containing loads of helpful diagrams and advice!).
Happy new year and welcome back to Folky Fridays! In this week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be going over a topic which I have covered many times, but which I still get a lot of questions about- what are the modes and how can I recognise them and pick the right chords on guitar? I’ll be showing you how the ionian, dorian, phrygian and mixolydian modes came into being and several approaches to finding the best chords for each!
In this week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be running you through some of the useful DADGAD chord shapes I have discovered while writing my latest book of DADGAD fingerstyle arrangements!
This episode comes with a free guitar tablature and scale diagrams download! You can get yours here.
I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.
In this week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you some useful scale exercises to practice on acoustic guitar and how you can use them to work out Irish, Scottish and other Celtic style folk melodies on the guitar. I’ll show you how to use the seven “greek” mode shapes to give you a handy map of the “right” notes for the key you’re playing in across the whole of the fretboard. We’ll look at how you can use these shapes in conjunction with the open strings for nice chord/ melody combinations. I’ll also be giving some pointers on how you can merge the exercises with chord shapes you already know in order to add your own accompaniment. By the end of this session you’ll be a one man band!
This episode comes with a free guitar tablature and scale diagrams download! Get yours here.
In this week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you my super simple approach to ear training and learning to pick the right chords for Irish and general Celtic backing guitar. I’ll also be sharing some very exciting news!
In this week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be recapping all the classic Irish strumming patterns (jigs, hornpipes, reels, slip jigs, polkas) and running you through a few of my favourite rhythmic variations for each one. All the techniques covered this week will be applicable to DADGAD, standard (EADGBE) or other tunings. This will also be something of an open session, so please feel free to ask me any questions you have about anything to do with Irish backing guitar!
In this week’s free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’ll be showing you how you can play the melody and the chords at the same time when accompanying Irish music in DADGAD! I’ll be demonstrating ways to practice accentuating individual notes when strumming, ear training exercises to pick out the melody notes relative to your key centre, shapes for easy scale incorporation on top of chords and much much more!
This lesson comes with a free tab download for all the exercises I’ll be showing you- you can get it here
I’ll be demonstrating using two tunes, my old demo favourite the Kerfunken Jig and the four part D mixolydian jig, Humours Of Ballyloughlin.
Here are some clips where the tunes are played slowly so you can get them in your heads:
Kerfunken:
Humours Of Ballyloughlin:
I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.
In today’s Folky Fridays free Celtic guitar lesson livestream, I’ll be showing you how you can use walking basslines, dominant and diminished 7 chords to get cool jazz / swing inspired chord runs to fit with Irish and Scottish tunes! This stream is inspired by the playing of “Peerie” Willie Johnson, an amazing Shetland guitarist who pioneered the integration of gypsy jazz style into traditional Celtic music from the 1920s-2000s.
If you haven’t heard it already I really recommend you check out the “Willie’s World” album, which contains myriad cool chord ideas alongside some fantastic melody players and a fascinating window into history! You can download the album completely for free by signing up for a free trial of Amazon Music (which can be cancelled immediately for 3 months of free music). Trialing or buying through the links below also pays me a small commission which goes towards the costs of maintaining this channel.
