How to Play a Dobro Guitar in the Key of F

Hi and welcome to lessonswithtroy.com! I’m Troy Brenningmeyer. On today’s lesson it’s part two of my take a break series solos for resonator guitar. This one it’s going to be really interesting because I'm choosing the key of F to do this one. And the way that I'm doing it too is I'm giving you actually two different breaks in one video. The first break covers a solo that’s based more on banjo rolls and what I probably consider more of a modern sounding solo. And my other one is more of a classic sounding solo and it doesn’t use the capo. The first one uses capo on your third fret, but the other one you could or could not use a capo or you're not going to be using any open strings. So you could choose whether or not you want to use capo or not. But it’s really interesting and this one comes with several backing tracks that you can practice too, and it also comes with tablature of each break. So we’ve got a lot to learn and let’s go ahead and check what this sounds like. And the first one you're going to hear is the banjo style of break and then it will move on the classic sounding break. [Demonstration] Okay, I want to talk a little bit about playing with a capo before we get going here. And before we start I want to say that I'm in open G tune G-B-D from your 6th through your 1st string. And you need to have a capo for this lesson. If you don’t have one, you know, this one I've got it out in my local music store, it’s a Beard capo. It’s relatively inexpensive and it’s really useful and this particular way we’re going to use it in this break. I have a lot of licks in the key of D that I play using open strings and I have a video out 36 licks in the key of D. Well you can take any of those licks that you're playing with open strings and you can use a capo to start playing in different keys. If you use just your open strings and you play these kinds of licks and these kinds of licks are prevalent in part of this video the first one with the banjo rolls, right? Well if you use your capo and you want to play in different keys you can just put it on your first fret and that would be the key of E flat because you're moving D up with either D sharp, E flat—you normally call it E flat. Well if you move it up to your second fret you can play those same licks and now you're in the key of E. Well what we’re doing in this video is we’re moving it up to our third fret and we’re going to be in the key of F. So, all these open position D licks that I'm going to show you are perfect and moving in and out of different keys. You can move it up one more and be in a weird key G flat. Now I don’t normally play my capo higher than the fourth fret. It seems like if I'm going to play in the key of C a lot of times I’ll just use my open strings. So let’s move it back here to our third fret, we’re going to get in tune here. I'm going to use my tuner to make sure I'm in tune. That’s pretty accurate there. Now if you look here you can kind of see what I see it looks like the capo is a little bit behind the fret. It’s more of an optical illusion than anything else. If you look straight down on the capo, it’s pretty much right over the fret. So as you put this one it looks like it’s behind it just a little bit. It’s always used for the tuner when you're using the capo. So there we go, let’s go and get started then with this first one with the banjo inspired break. Since we are playing with the capo, I went ahead and shifted my numbers up so that what would be three here is now going to be zero and this will be fret one, fret two, three, four, five, six and so on. I just ended it at fret six because I don’t really go up even higher than fret five with this first break. So let’s go in and tackle measures one, two and three. Measure one is a pickup into the break and it start on the end of beat three. And it sounds like this I'm going to play it all three measures. [Demonstration] Okay, so let’s checkout that little walk up and remember when we’re in the key of F, so F is going to be our one chord and you'll play that like you’d normally play your D chord. B flat is going to be our four-chord and you’d play that like you’d normally play your G chords it’s all open strings. And then C is going to be our five-chord, you'll normally play that like you’d play your A chord which is on your second fret here. Remember all these frets are relative to where the capo is. So this walk up starts on fret four and you're going to draw up that first string on all of these sets. So that’s just four, open third string, first fret on my third string and the whole time you're playing that first string a double stop on top of those. So that walks us right into our one chord there because they're F chord. So in measure two, you started off by doing this quick slide that’s just sliding from fret one to fret two while drowning out these first string. Now you're going to do this nice forward banjo rolls and it sounds like this. [Demonstration] Let’s just open first string, fourth string, third string, first string and then repeat—4-3-1, 4 and then you do this little lick. You can either start on fret three and slide down to fret two and pull it off to zero or start in fret two and do a really quick slide just like that drowning this first string too on your first hit. Sliding from fret two, fret three back down to fret two, going up to zero. That’s one way of doing it or you can just start the way I've written which is start on fret three and slide down to fret two and pull up to zero. Let’s play both those measures together, the walk up into it. [Demonstration] So all that is over the F chord and now in measure three we go under our four-chord or B flat chord in the key of F [demonstration].