Folk FriendThis week’s Folky Fridays free online guitar lesson live stream from Folk Friend will be covering a very simple way that you can write your own fingerstyle arrangements of tunes in G major or E minor. This technique can also be used to incorporate little segments from melodies into your chordal accompaniment.
My full jazzy arrangement of Tell Her I Am can be found in my first collection of fingerstyle guitar pieces, available here:
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.
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.
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.
In this week’s Folky Fridays free online guitar lesson live stream from Folk Friend I will be attempting to write a full DADGAD fingerstyle arrangement of a classic Irish reel called McMahon’s in under an hour!
The completed tab is now available as a free download! Get your copy here.
I also wrote a complete book of 10 DADGAD arrangements of classic Irish tunes, which you can buy as an e-book or paperback by clicking here. It comes with a playing guide for each tune, a short history of its provenance and author if known, chord diagrams, MIDI downloads and lots more!
I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.
This week’s free guitar lesson from Folk Friend is responding to a request from Shane Tully who asked for a guide to John Fahey’s Sligo River Blues. Well it’s a great tune, so I was only too happy to oblige! I have made a free tab which shows you the entire song and in this videos I will be running you through all the chords, picking techniques and general top tips you will need to get this classic tune sounding great on your acoustic guitar!
This will be the last free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend for 2020, but I’ll be back with loads more great content for both DADGAD and standard tuning (and maybe a few others too!) in 2021. I have finally released my first book of DADGAD arrangements of classic Irish tunes, so to celebrate I’ll be giving away a free tab for my arrangement of I Buried My Wife And Danced On Her Grave.
You can download it here.
I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.
It can be difficult to get started learning Celtic backing guitar. There is so much to learn, from ear training, to music theory, to strumming patterns to rhythms to memorising tunes…. So much to practice- so little time! In today’s free Celtic guitar lesson from Folk Friend, I’m going to be telling you my top ten practice tips to make your guitar practice time more efficient.
I’ll also be demonstrating my brand new invention, the Folk Friend Guitar Practice Diary (click the link to buy now)! It uses a targeted system of quarterly, monthly and weekly reviews alongside an events calendar and my revolutionary Tablusic system to help you achieve your goals quickly. It also contains lots of handy tidbits for the budding Celtic guitarist, like chord shapes, mode diagrams, practice techniques and a ready made section for you to write your own tabs and chord diagrams quickly and easily.
The Stephen Guise book I mentioned (Mini Habits) is available here.
I receive a small affiliate commission if you buy it through the above link.
This week Folk Friend is running a competition to celebrate the release of my latest book, Irish Tunes for Fingerstyle Guitar! In this clip I’ll be running you through how to write Celtic fingerstyle arrangements. As an example I’ll be showing you how I began to write my arrangement of Cooley’s Reel.
Please note the competition has now closed.
A few months ago I released a book of fingerstyle arrangements and soon after I ran a competition, in which I encouraged viewers to submit their own. One of the entries was from Jordan Lively, and it was so good that I thought it would be interesting for other Folk Friend viewers to hear him talk about how he writes his Irish fingerstyle arrangements and some of the playing techniques he uses.
Jordan has very kindly provided a free tab for the arrangement of Whelan’s Old Sow: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1q5cyVQYUwurUGJAv_ceX-SGBXmGxir1Y?usp=sharing
If you want to find more of Jordan’s music, then check out his Facebook page: https://facebook.com/jordanlivelymusic
Here you can watch Jordan’s duet with the fantastic harpist Catherine Magee: https://www.facebook.com/167930823860401/posts/600620417258104/?sfnsn=scwspmo&extid=OQP7fmPS0mStOQTn
Jordan has lessons with Tony McManus- I’ve linked some of his recordings below along with Michelle Mulcahy, the harpist whose tunes we talk about later in the clip.
Tony Mc Manus’ album The Makers Mark: https://amzn.to/34Lg7ua 0
Suaimhneas album, by Michelle Mulcahy (source for the two tunes mentioned later in the clip): https://amzn.to/2YEFqdL
In other news, I recently finished writing a complete Beginner’s Guide To Celtic DADGAD Accompaniment! You can find it here.
