The Steel Guitar Forum

I've been playing about a year and a half I'm considering getting some more instructional material, and I'd like some opinions on the following items, all for sale on the forum store:

Dewitt Scott's "Back up behind the Singer"
- One of the things I have having the most trouble with is playing "licks" instead of just chords. I was hoping this would help with that.

Jim Lossenberg's "15 ways to get from the I to the IV"

Buddy Emmons "E9 Chord Vocab"

Thanks for your input

If you want to play licks I would suggest you start with Joe Wright's Secrets of the Wright/Left Hand. He has 28 or 32 exercises for the fingers. If you can't pick the strings you can't play a lick.

I can't comment on the others because I haven't used them.

Darren, I'm a course junkie and I confess to having all three. For licks the Dewitt Scott course is pretty good if you haven't been playing long. You may be interested to know you can download it as PDF from Mel Bay for $10.50 HERE and even better, you can download all the tracks free from HERE. Having said that, if you like the licks, get the hardcopy course from b0b. Great value for money either way.

Jim Lossenberg's course is good too although I found at least half the licks too fancy for my taste and the audio CD I got with it needed speeding up to concert pitch.

Personally I didn't get too much out of Buddy's CD and chart as a beginner. It tells you how to get all the chords but in the beginning you only need a few.

Brian's suggestion is a good one but it's worth emphasising that those two Joe Wright courses contain no licks whatsoever, only finger exercises to improve your pick blocking (which they will).

Have fun!

"just play the melody" from Jeff Newman can't be beat in my opinion

Frenches also has some good courses on different licks,DYKBC.

Thanks for the input. Of the 3, the one that sounded the least appealing was the '15 ways from I to IV.' The DeWitt Scott book would probably suffice with ways to get from chord to chord.

Darren,the only way you quit learning is the day you die, the learning process is a continual thing such the information you were given by those other helpful folks. Everyday when I go to my "day job", I learn something new,everytime I sit behind my steel and pick a few notes, I learn something new. Everytime I talk to people, I learn something and so on. Never Give up Darren on learning to play this beautiful instrument called the steel guitar
Tommy Shown