Online Guitar Lessons from Totally Guitars

Totally Guitars News Podcast

This time of year things get pretty crazy in most households, and ours seems to have been taken to a new level for some unknown reasons this time around. This morning we were treated to a piano/vocal duet from our girls, Rebecca and Lizzie, which was very heartwarming. I hope everybody has had a chance to brush up on Christmas tunes as I have been working with a few young students on their strumming to accompany a flock of carolers that sings their way through our neighborhood each year.

Today’s News had a little recap of recent lessons and the usual fare of unstructured ramblings and noodling on the guitar. The main new songs released included Joan Osborne’s One Of Us, and a couple Iron & Wine songs from Vanessa: Naked As We Came and Such Great Heights. We also had a couple Fly On The Wall lessons with Sandy working on alternate ways to tackle tiring parts of Rhiannon, and going through Grandfather’s Clock mostly by ear.

I took a little time, after a noisy interruption, to talk a bit about tunings, particularly with comments on the recent Forum thread. The main point is it can be very helpful to know what part of the chord each string is tuned to. So you might think of Open D as 151351, where the numbers represent scale steps. A fun bonus question might be how we might number standard tuning, with respect to multiple keys. Starting with the key of E might be a good plan.

Things will slow down a bit more here over the next week or two but I trust everybody has plenty of songs and lessons to stay busy with for a while.

Happy Holidays!