Handouts for Liberty Tuning Workshops

Download these and print them, or read them here and save some paper. They try to explain what Liberty Tuning is, how it works, and guide you through basic songs. These are taken and adapted from the Liberty guitar beginner & method books that are all available from us and from Amazon.com

• Introduction. A welcome page to outline what is going on with our new idea.
• Liberty and Beginners. Kids can just do it and don't need to understand, but adults might want to think about what this new idea means to a beginner.
• The Problem. For 400 years, beginning guitar chords have been the same, and it's helpful to look over the "Basic 15" chords to understand why the Liberty Tuning chords are so much easier and better. The common ways of simplifying guitar chords help a little, but have massive limitations also.
• About Liberty Tuning. An overview of what it is, how it works and why it its important for beginning guitar.
• Music Theory For Beginning Troubadours. We don't "read music" or use quarter notes & rests, but we need some language, terminology and concepts to discuss what we are doing. Here is a quick guide to the terms we often use.
• Why Two Versions. The Liberty FLIP capo has 2 sides, and sometimes we use one and sometimes we use the other. This is tricky, and depends on the song. It's the master key to the whole thing.
• Choosing A Guitar. You can use Liberty Tuning on any guitar, but it works better on certain types. If you have a guitar you can use it, but if you need to get one, you'll want to understand the issues. The ideal guitars are not sold as beginner instruments, and there is a list of features you'll want to look for.
• Into Liberty Tuning. How to tune any guitar to Liberty Tuning in a few seconds.
• How to Learn a Song. This may seem silly, but how troubadour-type musicians learn a song is never discussed, but ultra-important and fundamental.
• Adding A Capo. Liberty Tuning uses a special kind of capo, but it only lets you sing in 2 of the 12 musical keys. You'll want to add a full capo underneath it to raise the pitch of everythig you are playing, and if you do it right, you'll get a song in the best possible key to match your vocal range. This is confusing but very important.
• About the Right Hand. We mostly talk about left hand chords, but of course the strumming hand is involved.
• Finding Your Key. It's really important to try to learn a song in a key you can sing it in. We're often trying to learn from a singer of opposite gender, or a pop star with a very high voice. Men, women and children don't have the same vocal ranges and some of us have high or low voices. So many beginners have felt unmusical because they were trying to learn a song that is pitched much too high or too low. Liberty Tuning gives beginners unprecendented flexibility to sing in more than one key, but it can be confusing for a beginner to figure this out.
• Transposing chart. You'll need to refer to this when you try to fit the song to your voice, so you get the chords in the right key for you to sing.
• Row Row Row (Fun new words) It's the only 1-chord song we all know, and we've made some very fun new words to it so we can all have fun singing on Day One. Another set of easy new words are on page 2= back of this sheet.
• Row Row Row (More new words) New words you can sing on American Idol.
• Aunt Rhody After a 1-chord song (you guessed it) we try 2-chord songs. These are the classic folk song words
• Aunt Rhody (new irreverent words)
• 10 Little Indians Easy-to-follow folk song with 2 easy chords + new words
• Hush Little Baby Another classic folk song with 2 easy chords
• Hush Little Baby Another rewrite, if the cart & bull and dog named Rover words don't move you
• Hey Loddy Our family's favorite improvisational 2-chord folk song. See Levi at age 6 performing it.
• Basic Liberty Tuning 2-Finger Chords There are hundreds of 2-finger chords in this amazing tuning but here are a few dozen of the best and most useful, using both Version 1 and Version 2 of the tuning.