SORRY ABOUT THE CONNECTION ISSUES – I WILL SORT IT OUT FOR NEXT TIME.
This free Irish guitar lesson from Folk Friend covers how to modify your strumming to reflect the rhythm of a melody. This will lend your backing guitar playing some unique variations and prevent anyone from leveling you with that age old criticism of folk music; “it all sounds the same”!
In this week’s Folky Fridays live streamed Celtic guitar lesson I’ll be teaching you how to play a popular Irish session tune! It’s a jig in the D ionian mode called “Connaughtman’s Rambles”. It is unusual in that the B part is in B aeolian. I’ll be showing you how you can use your knowledge of the mode shapes to quickly work out a tune by ear, discussing some of the theory behind backing an Irish dance tune like this on the guitar, and finally showing you a few different sets of chords we could use for this tune!
You can find free resources (including guitar tablature and fretboard diagrams) to accompany this lesson here.
And free guitar fretboard diagrams for the mode shapes here.
In the 6th episode of the Folky Fridays Celtic guitar tutorial live stream from Folk Friend, I’ll be discussing some of the best ways to practice Celtic backing guitar. I’ll be looking at ways to develop your ear, quickly memorise which chords go together, understand music theory and streamline your practice time in order to get quick results on a limited time budget! You will, as ever, be able to put your questions to me directly and hopefully we can all learn from each other!
The Folk Friend Practice Diary is now available! This ultra useful tool will help you define your goals, use regular reviews to focus on them and make your practice time much more efficient, leading to quick gains in your playing ability even if you haven’t got much time to practice! Get yours here.
I’ve posted some free fretboard diagrams, so you can learn all the mode shapes on your guitar! You’ll find them on my blog, here.
You can also read my top 10 tips to make your practice more effective on the blog here.
In this Folky Fridays free Irish guitar lesson I covered an unusual approach to modal folk tunes: using two modes at once! This combinatorial technique can yield some very interesting chromatic chord progressions using simple shapes which you probably already know.
In Folky Fridays #3 I’ll be covering my favourite easy strumming patterns for all the main rhythms used in Irish music! We’ll be looking at jigs, reels, hornpipes and slip jigs.
In this week’s Folky Fridays I will be doing a bit of a Q and A around picking chords for Celtic tunes by ear. This free Celtic guitar lesson will cover everything you need to know to pick out interesting chords sequences to fit with Irish, Scottish and Welsh tunes (and potentially other types of folk music too!). I will also be showing you a few new chord shapes for tunes in the key of G major. Irish tunes belt along pretty fast so hopefully these easy chord shapes will make your lives easier!
You will find all my top tips from this lesson in the blog on my website after we finish. It’s already got some diagrams for shapes mentioned, but I’ll be updating it tomorrow to include anything else we cover. Check it out here: https://finaleguitar.co.uk/resources-for-folky-fridays2-how-to-pick-chords-free-irish-guitar-lesson/
I’m sorry that I was cut off by a technical difficulty so didn’t have time to look at the other two modes I had planned to cover. Next time I’ll be finishing this topic off going through a few classic Irish and Scottish tunes in the mixolydian and aeolian modes and showing you, first how to pick out simple chords and second how to use substitutions to make them more interesting.
The fourth Folky Fridays livestream Irish guitar lesson covered how to pick chords by ear for Irish, Scottish or Celtic tuned in the dorian mode. I was working with the jig Slieve / Sliabh Russell, which is in the mode of A dorian. You can find it played slowly here:
And faster here:
As ever I’d love to hear any questions you have! Leave me a comment in the box and I’ll do my best to help however I can :).
I have a special guest in this week’s Folky Fridays free Celtic guitar lesson from Folk Friend! My mum Alexa, from whom my love of Irish music stems, will be joining me to play some classic session tunes. I’ll also be showing you lots of ways to vary standard chord and strumming patterns and covering all the shapes I use for each set.
Here is a list of all the tunes we played (they are under the names my mum knows them by- some of them have several others!):
The Lonesome Jig – D ionian
The Roaring Barmaid – G ionian
The Mushroom Treatment – A mixolydian
Taylor’s Rambles – A mixolydian / A dorian (possibly not the standard version you would hear)
Reaping the Rye – E aeolian
The Butterfly – E aeolian
Light and Airy – A mixolydian
Christy Barry’s (?) – G ionian
The Donegal Lass – A mixolydian
The Old Flail – G ionian
Porthole of the Kelp – E aeolian
Unknown (recorded by Carty & Tully) – A dorian
The Old Bush – D mixolydian (starts on an Am chord)
O’Gallagher’s Frolics – E aeolian
Sean Ryan’s (widely known as The Castle- this is arranged in my Fingerstyle book available on the shop page) – E aeolian
This week’s Folky Fridays free Celtic guitar lesson live stream will be on a topic which I absolutely love: borrowing chord progressions from Latin jazz music and using them to come up with unusual but cool sounding accompaniments for Celtic tunes! I’ll be talking about the 69, dominant 13 and altered dominant chord voicings (amongst others) which are in lots of south American music, particularly in bossa nova, and showing you some simple ways to integrate these peppery chords into you Celtic backing guitar!
In this week’s episode of Folky Fridays from Folk Friend, I’ll be giving you a first glance at partial capoing techniques you can use to get ethereal, tinkly chords with big ringing bass notes! These techniques all use a standard capo and can really enhance the range of cool chords you can get using standard chord shapes which you will already have used for Celtic guitar backing. I will be expanding on the topics covered in this free Celtic guitar lesson live stream in the forthcoming partial capo-ing video which will be up on the Folk Friend channel in about three weeks.
This video only requires a standard six-string capo. If you would like to buy one then please support the channel by buying one directly from my guitar shop, here.
I also used the 7th fret partial capo technique in my arrangement of The Castle Jig, also commonly called Sean Ryan’s (E dorian). It appears in my book of fingerstyle arrangements of Irish tunes, Irish Tunes For Fingerstyle Guitar, available on the shop page of this site!
