In the last 2 years I have fallen in love with acoustic guitar. I had always listened to acoustic artists, but playing acoustic had never appealed to me until I discovered Tony Rice and Darrell Scott. Specifically these two videos;

and

Although I love their chordal work, it’s their integration of riffs and licks with rhythm parts that really blew me away. This actually made me realise that there was a huge gap in my fretboard knowledge; Open Positions.

When I was mapping out the fretboard, I realised that shapes that don’t use open strings are transposable. This made me think that open position scales were less useful and not worth knowing… Doh!

Open positions have a unique sound, allow you to intertwine licks with and embbellish open chords , and create bluegrass style licks (sometimes called banjo licks) that climb the fretboard whilst using open strings. This allows you to have certain notes ring out through the licks. You can hear these kinds of licks in Danny Gatton’s, Jonny Hiland’s, Brad Paisley’s and Brent Mason’s playing.

In this course I’m going to present the fingerings to you, but its up to you to ingtegrate them into your music. Treat them just like you would any other scale. Learn where the roots are, explore the chord voicings in the scale, practice sequences and patterns, etc etc.

These fingerings can create some really ear-catching and unique sounding lines, so have fun!

let’s get into exploring open keys and open positions…